Seite - 492 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Band 1

Chapter 9492 Margaret, natural daughter of Emperor Charles v. Known as Madama d’Austria, she gave the name to both this villa and the Medici Palace in Rome, which she brought into the Farnese family through her second marriage to Ottavio Farnese, Duke of Parma, the following year. Though the Villa Madama was nev- er finished and was very heavily damaged in the Sack of Rome, it remains one of the principal and most influential monuments of the High Renaissance, not only for its extraordinary planning, but also for its exquisite decoration all’ an- tica, executed by Raphael’s best pupils, including Giulio Romano and Giovanni da Udine. Both its architecture and its decoration were very well known to Strada, who must have known about it from Giulio even before his first stay in Rome in the 1530s. Doubtless he possessed visual documentation of the build- ing and its decoration, possibly even in original drawings from among the re- mains of Raphael’s estate he had acquired with the graphic material he bought out of the estates of Raphael’s own direct and indirect heirs, Giulio Romano and Perino del Vaga. Maximilian ii would in any case have been aware of the Villa Madama as the property of his first cousin, an important and influential member of his dy- nasty. Certainly a number of aspects indicate its influence on the development of the Neugebäude. The most obvious of these are the fishponds or peschiere in the service court of the Neugebäude and the retaining wall opening up into niched recesses above them [Fig. 9.83–9.84]. They are an obvious and immedi- ate imitation of the peschiere and the contiguous, interconnected niches in the retaining wall of the giardino segreto of Villa Madama [Fig. 9.82]. Raphael derived the motif, huge masonry arches carried on massive piers pierced by niches, from his study of the ruins of the Palatine and the Imperial Baths in Rome. It can be considered as a sober variation of the repeated triumphal arch motif used by Bramante in his Belvedere courtyard (often indicated as serli- ana, because of the repeated use of this motif in Serlio’s treatise), and it was Figures 9.82–9.83 Villa Madama, Rome: the peschiere or fishponds, compared to the relics of the fishponds at the Neugebäude.