Palazzo Barberini site features

Palazzo Barberini is a very large palace, finished in 1633, and its shape is the first thing to take in. Maderno laid it out as an H. A central block crosses the middle, and a wing reaches forward from each end of it. The one facing Piazza Barberini is the older Sforza range, left standing rather than cleared. The ground between the two wings was never built over. For scale: three storeys, with seven window openings across each of them.

The exterior

You go in through a gate on via delle Quattro Fontane that is two centuries younger than the palace behind it. Azzurri designed it in 1848 and it was built in 1865.

The front behind that gate teaches the classical orders to anyone standing on the pavement. Seven bays run across it, repeated up through three levels of arches on columns: Doric at the bottom, Ionic in the middle, Corinthian at the top. Count across and there are seven. Count up and there are three.

Then look at the topmost row of windows, which do not behave like the ones below. Borromini set them in a false perspective that suggests more depth than there is. Each opening reads as a far deeper recess than the wall could hold, so the whole top storey appears to stand back from the rest. Architects were still borrowing the trick in the twentieth century.

The interior

Indoors everything begins in the entrance hall, and the two best things in the building are on opposite sides of it. Bernini's stair is on the left, large and square in plan; Borromini's is on the right, smaller and oval. Both arrive at the piano nobile. The left one climbs in straight flights around a square open shaft. The right one is helicoidal: no flights and no landings, just one continuous turn winding up around an oval well you can look straight down. Go up one side and come down the other.

At the top is the salon, and a single painting covers the whole of its vault. Pietro da Cortona began the Allegory of Divine Providence and Barberini Power in 1633 and finished it in 1639. The painted architecture meant to frame it fails to hold. Beneath the figure of Providence the mock frame breaks apart, and the painting comes through the gap into the room.

It is not the only ceiling worth tipping your head back for. Other rooms on the piano nobile carry frescoed vaults by Giuseppe Passeri and Andrea Camassei, both seventeenth-century.

The garden

What is left of the garden is a remnant of it. It began as a genuine park, reaching along the old via Pia — today via XX Settembre — as far as the salita di San Nicola da Tolentino. Trace that on a map and it takes in several blocks of central Rome.

The planting inside it was formal; the livestock was not. It was laid out as an Italian garden with a giardino segreto within it, and stocked with ostriches and camels. The secret garden is named for what it withholds rather than what it holds. It was screened so that nobody outside could see in.

Raphael, La Fornarina

Painted 1518–1519. A small panel on wood, 85 by 60 centimetres, which is under a metre in either direction. The sitter is nude to the hips. A thin veil is drawn across her lower abdomen, her left breast is half covered, and a heavier red cloth is bunched over her legs. Her dark hair is bound up in a turban, blue and yellow. Her eyes go off to her left, and there is the beginning of a smile. Lean in on her arm: a painted band around it carries the signature Raphael Vrbinas. Behind her is a myrtle bush, the shrub sacred to Venus. An X-ray found a Leonardesque landscape underneath it.

Caravaggio, Judith Beheading Holofernes

Dated c. 1599–1600, though a stylistic reading of the brushwork has also put it at 1602. Wide and near life size: 145 by 195 centimetres, three figures filling it, and nothing behind them but black. The light rakes in from one side onto what amounts to a shallow stage. Holofernes lies face down, neck twisted so that he is looking back at the woman killing him. Judith stands over him with her arm fully extended, holding the blade — and the body — at a distance. Her maid Abra is beside her, to the right. The faces carry the picture, and Judith's most of all: determination and revulsion at the same time.

Hans Holbein, Henry VIII

The king of England, on a wall in a palace built by a pope's family. The Rome picture is given to Holbein's workshop rather than to Holbein's own hand, following the portrait made when Henry was 49. A Tudor face hung among Italian pictures is the whole of why it stops people. Almost nobody expects to find it on this side of the Alps.

Pietro da Cortona's ceiling

Begun in 1633 and finished in 1639, after Cortona came back from Venice and reworked most of it. One fresco across the entire salon vault, organised as a sky with two ends. At one end sits Divine Providence, solar and enthroned. At the other, putti and flying women hold up the papal keys, the tiara and a robe belt above a swarm of bees blown up giant and gilded — the Barberini arms, which are three bees, multiplied. A figure carrying the twelve stars of the Crown of Immortality holds it out towards the swarm while looking back at Providence. Then the frame starts to go. Below Providence the mock architecture crumbles. Time swings a scythe and seems to take off a putto's arm. At one edge, labourers at a forge work so hard they break through the outer frame from inside.

Antonio Corradini's Vestal Virgin Tuccia

Carved in 1743, in marble, 230 centimetres tall — head and shoulders above anyone standing next to her. She holds a sieve against her left hip, weight on one leg, upper body turned. The veil is the point of the thing: Corradini cut the marble so that a sheet of cloth appears to lie transparent across the front of her, with the body and the features legible through it. Tuccia was a Vestal accused of breaking her vow, and she answered the charge by carrying water from the Tiber to the Temple of Vesta in that sieve without spilling a drop. Corradini carved her with no commission behind him, and she went unsold.

The Barberini Mithraeum

Probably second-century AD: a sanctuary to Mithras, found hidden in the cellars. Rome has several mithraea. This is the one with a papal family's state rooms directly above it. It opens by appointment on a separate guided visit, so it is not part of a walk-in ticket.

The bees

Three bees. That is the Barberini coat of arms, and learning the shape at the door changes the rest of the visit. The decoration dates from the reign of the family's pope, Urban VIII, elected in 1623 and dead in 1644. On Cortona's vault the bees are gilded, enlarged and flying in a swarm, with the crossed keys and the papal tiara held up above them.