MADAMA

In the years Raphael worked under Pope Leo X, his architecture embraced a bigger scale. In many ways, Villa Madama, whose construction started in 1519, is his own Belvedere, in both scale and ambition. Built on the outskirts of Rome, it was to be an accumulation of any possible Roman trope in one gigantic building complex, a contemporary Hadrian's Villa. Ironically, and perhaps as the immediate consequence of such a grand ambition, construction stopped with Raphael's death, and became a fata morgana of impossible-to-attain Romanness.