View of the Palazzo di Caprarola

The Villa Farnese was constructed on the foundations of a fortress begun c. 1521 for Pope Paul III by Antonio da Sangallo the Younger and Baldassare Peruzzi. This accounts for its unusual pentagonal plan with arrowhead bastions. Sangallo’s project had not gone further than the exterior walls on the ground floor. Giacomo da Vignola approached the unfinished structure as a challenge and opportunity to create a unique solution. What was built from 1559 onward had the form of a fortress and the function of a villa, but was in its extravagance an urban palace.

The circular courtyard at the centre of the structure was Vignola’s own design. He also designed the axial, terraced approach to the villa, with a straight road ascending from the village to an oval forecourt with a rusticated loggia facing a fish pond (filled in before 1600). The forecourt is embraced by two symmetrical semicircular horse-ramps rising to a second, larger, trapezoidal court, with staircases leading up to the villa itself. These elements provide a magnificent spatial setting for the drafted masonry fa�ade of the villa, articulated by two orders of pilasters in local volcanic stone. The design drew extensively on architecture at the Vatican in Rome, the seat of the patron’s power: the tripartite, fortified fa�ade with central loggia (originally open) recalls Innocent VIII’s Villa Belvedere (1480s), while the double-ramped staircase in front of the villa and the triumphal-arch motif on the upper portico of the courtyard were derived from Bramante’s Cortile del Belvedere (begun 1505). The contrast between the solid, massive lower storey and the flat, abstract, geometrical upper storeys, however, was characteristic of Vignola’s own classicizing Mannerist style.

The engraving by Giuseppe Vasi shows the Palazzo in the 1740s.