The villa had been built by Raphael for Pope Clement VII., while he was yet only Cardinal Giulio de' Medici, as a pleasure casino to which he could retreat from the cares imposed upon him by his cousin, Pope Leo X. Later when as successor to the tiara he found that not the least burden in the heavy legacy bequeathed him was that of the guardianship of the Medici family, it became the resort of his Florentine relatives on their quieter visits to Rome and the home of a mysterious child, Alessandro, of whom the Pope announced himself the guardian.
When Lorenzo II., (grandson of the Magnificent) died, leaving but one legitimate child, Catherine de' Medici, the future Queen of France, Clement imposed Alessandro upon Florence as the natural son of Duke Lorenzo.
There lacked not shrugging of shoulders at this imputed parentage and Florence revolted against receiving a bastard and a mulatto as its sovereign.
But trouble was brewing both for Florence and the Pope. Charles V. had determined to make himself master of Italy; his forces closed around Rome, and Clement, fleeing through the underground passage from the Vatican, shut himself up in the castle of St. Angelo, and from it beheld the horrors of the sack of the city.
From its parapets, too, he witnessed the occupation of his cherished villa by Bourbon's savage soldiery.
Benvenuto Cellini relates (with his characteristic self-laudation) his prowess in killing the Constable de Bourbon and in defending the castle of St. Angelo, and although his perspective is slightly forced from his habit of placing his own colossal figure in the foreground, no chronicle gives a more vivid account of these stirring events.
Stucchi by Giovanni da Udine
Villa Madama
What a picture he might have painted for us of the meeting of the Pope and the Emperor after the pacification; when Clement crowned his late adversary and Charles, reinstating Duke Alessandro over Florence, betrothed his beautiful daughter Margaret to that base-born reprobate!