Architectural Invention in Renaissance Rome: Artists, Humanists, and the Planning of Raphael's Villa Madama

摘要

Standing majestically on Monte Mario just north of Rome overlooking the Tiber and the Milvian Bridge, the unfinished Villa Madama (1518) is one of the most celebrated and innovative buildings of its time. As a locus amoenus for Cardinal Giulio de' Medici and his friends, and as a setting used by Pope Leo Ⅹ to accommodate foreign dignitaries when they visited the city, the villa represented an attempt to create an environment in which visitors could imagine themselves transported back to Roman antiquity. Its spaces were intended to seem ancient in name, form, and function. It was to have had a semicircular theater cut into the hillside; a hippodrome; a set of cold, warm, and hot baths; and a circular courtyard emulating one of Pliny the Younger's villas. The forms, materials, and techniques adopted during the villa's construction were radically antique too. The stucco duro decoration of the garden loggia was created using an ancient technique largely reinvented by Raphael's workshop, and the various brickwork techniques used throughout the complex closely reflected ancient precedents. These features have all been explored exhaustively in the existing literature.