Renaissance palaces typically faced onto a street and were decorated versions of defensive castles: rectangular blocks with rusticated ground floors and enclosing a courtyard.

This, one of his few purely secular paintings, shows the near-naked nymph on a shell-shaped chariot amid frolicking attendants and is reminiscent of Botticelli's The Birth of Venus.

[2] At first floor level, Peruzzi painted the main salone with trompe-l'œil frescoes of a grand open loggia with an illusory city and countryside view beyond.

Also in the 16th century, Michelangelo proposed linking the Palazzo Farnese on the other side of the River Tiber, where he was working, to the Villa Farnesina with a private bridge.

Until 2007 it also housed the Gabinetto dei Disegni e delle Stampe (Department of Drawings and Prints) of the Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica, Roma.

The most comprehensive study is The Villa Farnesina: Palace of Venus in Renaissance Rome by James Grantham Turner (Cambridge University Press, 2022), which won the PROSE Award for best art history title from the American Association of Publishers, 2023.