Raffaello in Villa Farnesina: Galatea e Psiche

The exhibition is part of the celebrations for the fifth centenary of Raphael's death, and is organized by the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, in the Villa built and decorated by Agostino Chigi, the wealthy banker and Raphael’s friend.

The exhibition presents the unexpected results of the investigations conducted on the materials of the splendid fresco by Raphael the Triumph of Galatea. Thanks to these, in fact, a pigment of non-natural origin known as Egyptian blue has been identified, with which the sky, the sea and even the eyes of Galatea are painted.

The wide use that Raphael makes of it, shows the artist's will to use the pictorial materials of the ancients, to portray a mythological subject.

The use of this pigment is tangible proof of the passion that the great Renaissance artist has for antiquity and for the materials used at that time, so much so that he decides to recreate them, to restore the palette of the ancient Romans.

Together with the exhibition, we also find the drawings discovered in the 1970s, on the plaster of the lower part of the walls, with Polyphemus by Sebastiano del Piombo and the Triumph of Galatea by Raphael, normally hidden by fake nineteenth-century curtains.

The section dedicated to the Loggia of Cupid and Psyche, on the other hand, illustrates the phases of the realization of the frescoed vault, through the study of the days and the preparatory drawings of the currently visible scenes, called celestial, and of those never realized, called earthly.

Furthermore, on the first floor of the Villa Farnesina there is the exhibition "The Fable of Cupid and Psyche in the graphic translation of the Royal Chalcography. Drawings, photographs, matrices " which summarizes the last phase of the historical path of classic Italian engraving which, since its origins, draws from the work of Raphael.

An interactive system also, allows to navigate freely inside the "digital lodge” and to observe the pergola of the Cupid and Psyche’s lodge at close range. In this way it is possible to distinguish the 170 plant species in the festoons and the 50 animal figures represented in the vault sails, and admire all the pictorial details of Apuleius' fable difficult to observe from the normal distance (8 meters).