General view

The art-historical importance of the Palazzo Farnese in Caprarola, near Viterbo, is the famous pentagonal ground plan and round interior courtyard, and the interior frescoes. The Palazzo was built for Cardinal Alessandro Farnese (1520-1589) who was made cardinal by his grandfather Pope Paul III (1468-1549), and named vice chancellor of the Holy Roman Church a year later, according him the highest position after that of the pope in the ecclesiastical hierarchy. The architect of the construction of the palace was Giacomo da Vignola.

The commission for the interior decoration went to Taddeo Zuccaro, who was to make drawings and cartoons for the painting and stucco work but he had to work there only to review from time to time the work that had been carried out there. He largely assigned the execution to others, in particular his brother Federico. After the death of Taddeo Zuccaro in 1566, his younger brother Federico continued the work until 1569. His successor was Jacopo Bertoia, then Giovanni de’ Vecchi.

The Sala del Mappamondo on the piano nobile was painted by Giovanni de’ Vecchi, assisted by Raffaellino da Reggio. The decoration of this room consists of monumental maps of the entire known world as well as the depiction of the forty-eight Ptolemaic constellations. The program was completed with portraits of the great discoverers Marco Polo, Christopher Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan, and Hernando Cort�s above the doors and windows of the room; personifications of the depicted countries and parts of the earth; and in a frieze, depictions of the celestial legends with which the ancients had explained the creation of the twelve signs of the zodiac.

Although Giovanni de’ Vecchi designed the decorative system and painted the figures and the figurative scenes, assisted by Raffaellino da Reggio, specialists were enlisted for the maps, in particular the cosmographer Orazio Trigini de’ Marii, who supplied the cartoons for the maps, and the painter Giovanni Antonio Vanosino da Varese, who painted the maps.

The maps in the room reflected the most up-to-date scholarship then available.