Palazzo Farnese, Rome

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Palazzo Farnese.

A mid-18th century engraving of Palazzo Farnese by Giuseppe Vasi.

The Papal Arm of Farnese Pope Paul III

Detail of the Triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne by Annibale Carracci.

For other palaces with this name, see Palazzo Farnese (disambiguation).

Palazzo Farnese is a prominent High Renaissance palace in Rome, which currently houses the French Embassy in Italy.

"The most imposing Italian palace of the sixteenth century", according to Sir Banister Fletcher(1), this palace was designed by Antonio da Sangallo the Younger (1484-1546), one of Bramante's assistants in the design of St. Peter's. Construction began in 1517^[1] , commissioned by Alessandro Farnese, who had been appointed as a Cardinal in 1493 at age 25 (thanks to his sister, who was Pope Alexander VI Borgia's official mistress) and was living a princely lifestyle. Work was interrupted by the Sack of Rome, 1527. When in 1534 Cardinal Alessandro was made pope, as Paul III, he employed Michelangelo to complete the third story with its deep cornice and revise the courtyard, as an emblematic "power house" suitable to the Farnese family. The massive facade dominates a small piazza; the memorable features of its facade are the alternating pediments that cap the windows of the piano nobile, the central rusticated portal and Michelangelo's projecting cornice. The central window Michelangelo revised when the cardinal became pope, adding an architrave to support the largest coat-of-arms with papal tiara Rome had ever seen. When Paul stepped to the balcony, the entire facade became a setting for his person.^[2] The courtyard, initially open arcades, is ringed by an academic exercise in ascending orders (Doric, Corinthian, and Ionic). The piano nobile was garlanded by Michelangelo.

The palazzo was redesigned in 1534 and 1541, modified under Michelangelo after Sangallo's death in 1546 onwards, adjusted for the papal nephew Ranuccio Farnese by Vignola and completed by Giacomo della Porta's porticoed facade towards the Tiber, for the second cardinal Alessandro Farnese, finished in 1589. Several main rooms were frescoed with elaborate allegorical programs including a series of frescoes on Hercules, and The Loves of the Gods by Annibale Carracci and other artists, 1597-1608. For generations the room with Herculean frescoes (Sala d'Ercole) housed the famous sculpture from Greco-Roman antiquity known as the Farnese Hercules. Other works from the family collection of classical sculpture were also housed in the Palazzo.

On the garden side, which faces the Tiber, Michelangelo proposed to give the palazzo's vast bulk some breathing room with a bridge across Via Giulia (completed) to link the center of the garden facade with the Pope's villa, the Villa Farnesina on the Trastevere side.

In piazza Farnese, the "urban" face of the palazzo, two granite basins came in the sixteenth century from the Baths of Caracalla.

In Puccini's opera Tosca (1900), set in Napoleonic Rome, the heroine's confrontation with the malevolent Chief of Police, Scarpia, takes place in Palazzo Farnese. The Palazzo was inherited from the Farnese by the Bourbon kings of Naples, from whom the French government purchased it in 1874. Though the government of Mussolini ransomed it in 1936, the French Embassy remains, under a 99-year lease.

The Palazzo Farnese houses the great scholarly library amassed by the Ecole Française de Rome, concentrating especially on the archeology of Italy and medieval Papal history.

[edit] Notes

^ Murray cites construction beginning in 1513, Giedion in 1514
^ "The incredibly pretentious magnificence of this residence for a single man points to the imminence of Baroque.... This monumental window seems to await the arrival of the great overlord who is about to show himself to the populace", remarked Siegfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture (1941) 1962, pp 56-57.