The Loggia of Galatea
The Loggia takes its name from the fresco of the nymph Galatea by Raphael Sanzio, who depicted her with delicate facial features in contrast to her luxuriant body, borne upon the water in a chariot formed by a shell drawn by dolphins, and surrounded by a festive procession of tritons, putti and nereids.
The Loggia was frescoed by several artists. The first was Baldassarre Peruzzi, who in 1511 painted Agostino Chigi’s horoscope on the vault. In the winter of 1511–1512, Sebastiano del Piombo, one of the leading Venetian painters of the time, executed the mythological scenes in the nine lunettes, with episodes drawn from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, as well as the monumental Head of a Youth.
In 1579, following the annulment of the fideicommissum encumbering the Chigi property, Villa Farnesina was transferred to Cardinal Alessandro Farnese. The first maintenance interventions in the Loggia, however, were most likely sponsored around the mid-seventeenth century by another member of the family, Cardinal Girolamo Farnese, to whom the restoration of the grotesques on the pilasters adjoining the Galatea wall can be attributed (one of which bears the signature of the Modenese painter Giovanni Paolo Marescotti and—although repainted—the date 1650).
By the end of the century, however, the Villa—described as a “den of brigands”—had fallen into a state of total neglect. Farnese agents thus succeeded in convincing the Duke of Parma, Ranuccio II Farnese, of the urgency of a conservation intervention, and, in view of the success achieved by the restorations of the so-called “Carracci Gallery” in the nearby Palazzo Farnese on the opposite bank of the Tiber, they entrusted the work to the same artist, the celebrated painter Carlo Maratti (1625–1713). Maratti’s team began work in 1693.
The interventions in the Loggia focused in particular on the consolidation of Baldassarre Peruzzi’s frescoes on the vault, secured with numerous iron clamps, and to a lesser extent on the panels featuring Raphael’s Galatea and Sebastiano del Piombo’s Polyphemus.
The restoration of the five landscapes on the north and west walls of the Loggia of Galatea was carried out in 2019 thanks to the support of Accademia dei Lincei member Prof. Natalino Irti, under the direction of Giovanna Antonelli, Maria Rosaria Basileo and Giorgia Galanti (Coop. Fabrica Conservazione e Restauro) – ATI.
In 2021, the restoration project funded by MiBACT (the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Tourism) 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.