The Loggia of Galatea

The Loggia takes its name from the fresco of the nymph Galatea by Raffaello Sanzio, who painted her with delicate facial features, contrasting with her voluptuous body, carried on the water in a shell-shaped carriage pulled by dolphins and surrounded by a feast of tritons, cherubs and naiads.
The Loggia was frescoed by several artists. The first was Baldassarre Peruzzi, who frescoed Agostino Chigi’s horoscope on the vault in 1511.
In the winter of 1511-1512, Sebastiano del Piombo, one of the greatest Venetian painters, depicted the mythological scenes of the nine lunettes with various scenes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the gigantic Head of a Young Man.
In 1579, after the annulment of the fideicommissum encumbering the Chigi property, the Villa Farnesina was ceded to Cardinal Alessandro Farnese. However, the first maintenance work on the Loggia was most likely sponsored, around the mid-17th century, by another cardinal of the family, Girolamo, who was responsible for the restoration of the grotesques on the pilasters leaning against the wall of Galatea (one of which bears the signature of the Modena painter Giovanni Paolo Marescotti and – although repainted – the date 1650) .
At the end of the century, however, the Villa, described as a “den of thieves”, was in a state of total abandonment. The Farnese agents thus managed to convince the Duke of Parma, Ranuccio II Farnese, of the urgent need for conservation work. Given the success of the restoration of the so-called “Galleria dei Carracci” in the nearby Palazzo Farnese, located on the opposite bank of the Tiber, they entrusted the work to the same artist, the famous painter Carlo Maratti (1625-1713).
Maratti’s team began work in 1693. The work in the Loggia focused in particular on consolidating Baldassarre Peruzzi’s frescoes on the vault, which were secured with numerous iron clamps, and to a lesser extent on the panels depicting Raphael’s Galatea and Sebastiano del Piombo’s Polyphemus.
The restoration of the five landscapes on the north and west walls of the Loggia di Galatea was carried out in 2019 thanks to the support of Linceo member Prof. Natalino Irti, curated by Giovanna Antonelli, Maria Rosaria Basileo, Giorgia Galanti (Coop. Fabrica Conservazione e Restauro) – ATI.
In 2021, the restoration project financed by Mibact (Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo) was completed thanks to the “Central Government Investment Fund for National Development”..

The project, supervised by the Villa Farnesina Commission and Virginia Lapenta (Curator of Villa Farnesina), was coordinated by ICR architect Giorgio Sobrà and is part of the educational activities of the ICR School of Advanced Training and Study in Rome, directed by Francesca Capanna, with the teaching of restorers Barbara Provinciali, Carla Giovannone and Maria Carolina Gaetani dell’Aquila d’Aragona, with the assistance of Simona Nobili.