A villa, a collection

The villa was built around 1540 for Cardinal Ricci da Montepulciano, then completed by Ferdinando de’ Medici, who made it the setting for his antiquities. Its garden façade, encrusted with Roman reliefs — among them casts of the Ara Pacis — is one of the most learned in Rome.

Here the Medici gathered a legendary collection: the group of the Niobids, the marble lions, the Venus, the Arrotino. In the eighteenth century these masterpieces left for Florence, where they now stand in the Uffizi; the villa keeps their casts, white ghosts aligned in the gallery.

The place drew artists long before the residents: in 1630 Velázquez stayed here and painted two small views of the garden, among the first landscapes in Western painting. Two centuries later Ingres would be its director, binding his name to the house, as Balthus would after him.

A loggia doorway and the Cosmatesque inlaid floor