Built on the bank of the Tiber at the beginning of the 16th century for the banker and patron of the arts Agostino Chigi, Villa Farnesina stands as one of the Renaissance’s most impressive and successful combinations of architecture and decoration in a private home. Artists of the calibre of Raphael, Sebastiano del Piombo, Il Sodoma and Baldassarre Peruzzi, working during the uniquely creative period of the High Renaissance, developed an ambitious scheme of decoration in the villa’s loggias and interior rooms to recount the personal life of their patron in a symbolic and mythological key.