From the November 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
Simultaneously chaotic and cacophonous, elegant and erudite, Rome has been a city of contrasts since antiquity. At the Campo de’ Fiori market today fruit and vegetable stalls still, just about, hold their own amid a battery of tat. Bawdily shaped novelty bottles of alarmingly luminous limoncello and lascivious aprons are, it seems, on the up. In the middle of the piazza a statue of Giordano Bruno, burned here as a heretic in 1600, gazes impassively over the scene under a crisp blue sky, as the first early morning chill of autumn sweeps away the torpor of late summer.
Just a square away from the cabbages and novelty aprons, Piazza Farnese is quite a different proposition: aristocratic calm overlooked by the vast Palazzo Farnese, the grandest of Renaissance palaces in Rome. The expansion of the palazzo, in a project first assigned to Antonio da Sangallo the Younger and then inherited by Michelangelo, began when the Farnese were catapulted to the pinnacle of Roman society in 1534, with the election of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese as Pope Paul III.
A decade later Paul III began the Council of Trent and, while publicly addressing the criticisms levied by the Protestant Reformation, demonstrated exactly the sort of nepotism that had so angered Luther. In one particularly brazen move, the papal states were carved up to create the Dukedom of Parma and Piacenza, which he gave to his illegitimate son Pier Luigi; in another, several of his grandsons were created cardinals while they were teenagers. There is a phrase in Rome about throwing caution to the wind – abbiamo fatto trenta, facciamo trentuno (we’ve made 30, let’s make 31) – that is said to have been Paul III’s response when his advisors questioned his creation of an unprecedented number of cardinals on a single day.
All of which sets the scene for the grandeur of the Palazzo Farnese, home to the French Embassy to Italy since 1874. On the cusp of the 17th century, the gallery on the piano nobile, once home to part of the Farnese’s rich collection of ancient statuary, was frescoed with the Loves of the Gods by Annibale Carracci and his studio. Carracci’s masterpiece, which was commissioned by Paul III’s great-great-grandson Cardinal Odoardo Farnese and has drawn comparisons with Giotto’s frescoes at the Scrovegni Chapel and Raphael’s in the Vatican stanze, is the focus of ‘The Carracci Drawings: The Making of the Galleria Farnese’ at the Louvre from 5 November until 2 February 2026. Carracci’s preparatory drawings for the monumental scheme – which here include 25 lent from the British Royal Collection – are arguably as celebrated as the finished work itself, and range from a small study of a left hand (probably the artist’s) to a full-scale cartoon of the whole work. Reflecting Europe’s delight in Carracci’s achievement, Louis XIV commissioned a replica of the Galleria Farnese for the Tuileries Palace; newly restored remnants from this copy will be shown at the exhibition, while an immersive projection will bring the ceiling to a larger audience than can visit the galleria during the highly recommended, though limited, guided visits to the embassy in Rome.
The Farnese family traced its roots back to early medieval Lazio. The name may come from the Castrum Farneti, one of their earliest feudal possessions, named after the abundant farnie, the pedunculate or ‘English’ oaks found in the area close to Viterbo. Slow but inexorable social progress saw the Farnese rewarded for their loyalty to the Church, ultimately rising to the papacy. The final push was facilitated by Giulia ‘la bella’ Farnese, favoured mistress of Pope Alexander VI of the notorious Borgia family. Giulia’s brother Alessandro entered the Roman Curia, it was said, by merit of her persuasive powers.
A century after the ‘petticoat cardinal’ had first entered the Curia, such gossip was a distant memory and the position of the Farnese at the pinnacle of Roman society was well established. Cardinal Odoardo was an enthusiastic custodian of the family’s collection of ancient sculpture, harvested from excavations at the Baths of Caracalla and on the Palatine Hill. Thus the Farnese, with their roots in Latium, emphasised their unwavering romanitas.
This collection was displayed in part beneath the ceiling which Odoardo commissioned Annibale Carracci to paint. Carracci was a Bolognese painter, co-founder with his brother and cousin of the Accademia degli Incamminati (Academy of the Progressives), which, among much else, promoted life drawing in defiance of papal prohibition. Carracci had worked at Parma, where he came into contact with the court of Ranuccio, the fourth Duke and Odoardo’s brother. The cardinal thus summoned an artist previously unknown in the city, a cultural coup. The riotous trompe l’oeil of the vaulted ceiling – a jumble of painted friezes, medallions, and quadri riportati in their gilded frames – is bursting with tales of libidinous deities, all set in an illusionistic architectural framework and dotted with painted statuary. The central panel shows bawdy carousing as Bacchus and Ariadne are led on chariots in the enthusiastic direction of consummation, an ironic allusion to the many triumphant processions of Republican and Imperial Rome. The air of panto is added to by the leering, inebriated Silenus struggling to stay on his donkey on the right of the scene.
Juno and Jupiter, Diana and Endymion, Apollo and Hyacinth, Polyphemus and Galatea: the ceiling is a catalogue of mythological tales of lust and love in varying degrees of success. Above a window looking out towards the Tiber, Anchises – punching well above his weight – seduces Venus. They are framed by monochrome illusionistic statues that belie the conceit by holding decidedly un-statue-like poses, as if a poorly trained regiment were fidgeting on parade. Carracci winks at us: they are pretending to be statues, he says, but they are not trying that hard. Anchises removes Venus’s sandal, looking at her with hungry eyes; below, a stool bears an inscription from the opening lines of the Aeneid: genus unde Latinum (‘from whence the Latin people’). The fruit of their liaison would be Aeneas, ancestor of Romulus. All this apparent frivolity serves to entertain, but also to emphasise the antiquity of Rome, and of the Farnese as a Roman family.
As Carracci carried out his sweated labour for Odoardo he was caught in a spiral of an ever greater and alcoholic melancholy that was at odds with the joyousness of his creation, and which would hasten his early death. Meanwhile, just beyond the palace’s facade, past the fountains gushing in recycled ancient bathtubs carved from Egyptian granite – an Imperial flexing of muscles repurposed to advertise the Farnese’s own empire – Bruno was burned as a heretic in the Campo de’ Fiori. Two Roman squares; two very different aspects of the Roman Counter-Reformation.
From the November 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.