Detail of Vault in Villa Madama—Stucchi by Giovanni da Udine
The imagination is intoxicated as by some heady wine as one gazes outward upon the dazzling panorama which originally determined the site of the loggia; and when, fatigued by the flashing sunlight, our eyes turn to the interior they are soothed by the subtler beauties of the half-effaced frescoes, the floral arabesques which Giovanni da Udine lavished upon the spandrils, the pouting putti in Giulio Romano's frieze of cherub faces, carrying out a scheme of decoration which could have been designed by no other than Raphael. We are certain as we recognise in a more delicate line, or exquisite touch recalling the arabesques of the Vatican loggia, that just here the great impresario must have caught palette and brushes from the hand of his pupil with, "Me perdone Giovanino mio, let me frolic a while with these fairy creatures and show them to you as I saw them in my childhood dancing in the swaying vines that garlanded the pergolas of Urbino." And so they revel here, myths of the childhood of the race, monstrous creatures, half beast, half human; centaurs, fauns, tritons, mermaids, sphinxes, lamias, their grotesquerie no longer repulsive, for it is a foil to the utmost elegance and sumptuousness of Renaissance art, their multiplicity never wearying, because they are marshalled by the greatest master in decorative design that the world has known. They lurk in the convolutions of exquisite rinceaux, uncoiling themselves from the scrolls of acanthus foliage, where sport also more delicate hybrid flowers;—women, whose beautiful bodies rise like anthers from the calices of impossible blossoms, whose arms are coiling tendrils and whose limbs melt into the curves of exuberant leafage unknown to the botanist.
But the charm which holds the visitor who penetrates this delicious solitude is due not alone to the sense of sight. A haunting suggestiveness breathes from these surroundings, like the perfume exhaled when one unlocks a long-closed sandal-wood casket, once the depository of dainty feminine trifles. It needs not the name of the villa to tell us that a lady, sitting in this loggia, once duplicated Da Udine's traceries in her embroidery, gathered roses in the garden, and looked longingly toward Rome while awaiting the coming of her princely lover, and many a visitor has been piqued by the ignorance of the custodian of the villa to search history for this mysterious Madama.
Margaret of Austria, Duchess of Parma, 1586
From an old engraving
Margaret of Austria, daughter of an Emperor, wife of the reputed son of one Pope and of the grandson of another, Grand Duchess of Tuscany, and Duchess of Parma, quartered the imperial eagle upon the balls of the Medici and the lilies of the Farnese. That the bar sinister was conspicuous upon her escutcheon mattered little in the age in which she lived, for the Emperor Charles V. acknowledged and advanced the interests of his illegitimate daughter with the same lack of embarrassment shown by the popes in the favouritism of their "nephews."
A doubtful advantage this, but one with far-reaching consequences, for when Margaret was twelve years of age, Charles conquered Rome and the child's connection with Italy and the Villa Madama had its beginning.