Aerial view

Following three decades of diversified and mainly collaborative artistic activity, Vignola emerged in the 1550s as the leading architect in Rome after Michelangelo and was in papal service for over three decades. His masterpieces (notably the Villa Farnese at Caprarola and the church of Il Gesù in Rome) were produced as house architect to the wealthy and powerful Farnese family.

The Villa Farnese at Caprarola is Vignola’s greatest achievement, testifying to the full range of his talent as an urban planner, engineer, architect and painter. From the start he conceived the villa in scenic and symbolic terms. For visibility and traffic a long straight street on axis with the main entrance was cut through the medieval town. From the street the approach continues by way of semicircular ramps to a trapezoidal piazza and then by flights of stairs, ending with a drawbridge before a rusticated Doric portal.

On the exterior, however, motifs of fortification were made to serve the image of neo-feudal princely power: the arrowhead bastions remained in place, their tops converted into open-air piano nobile terraces, on which stand the three upper floors of the pentagonal palazzo, its corner bays projecting slightly to embrace an austere grid of pilasters, Ionic for the piano nobile where they enclose the arches of a formerly open gallery, and Composite for two short upper floors reserved for servants and retainers.

The most extraordinary feature of the Villa Farnese is the perfectly round interior courtyard. This form had been considered for Caprarola by Sangallo and it had been used by Vignola himself in his Villa Cervini project, but such examples fail to anticipate the consummate power of this solution. The absolute geometry of the circle is in stark contrast to the shifting, ambiguous prospects of the pentagonal exterior. Keyed to the five wings and corners by ten bays of superimposed arches, the cylindrical elevation has rusticated piers on the ground floor and paired Ionic half columns on the piano nobile. The scheme characteristically draws on and deftly conjoins two authoritative designs in Rome by Bramante - the Palazzo Caprini (House of Raphael; destroyed) and the upper Belvedere court fa�ades in the Vatican.

View the ground plan of Villa Farnese, Caprarola.