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The art-historical importance of the Palazzo Farnese in Caprarola, near Viterbo, is the famous pentagonal ground plan and round interior courtyard, and the interior frescoes. The Palazzo was built for Cardinal Alessandro Farnese (1520-1589) who was made cardinal by his grandfather Pope Paul III (1468-1549), and named vice chancellor of the Holy Roman Church a year later, according him the highest position after that of the pope in the ecclesiastical hierarchy.
The architect of the construction, Giacomo da Vignola, found that the form of the ground plan and the site of the building were dictated by an incomplete fortress begun in the 1530s by Antonio da Sangallo the Younger - a project that had not gone further than the exterior walls on the ground floor. Vignola approached the unfinished structure as a challenge and opportunity to create a unique solution. What was built from 1559 onward had the form of a fortress and the function of a villa, but was in its extravagance an urban palace.
The commission for the interior decoration went to Taddeo Zuccaro, who was to make drawings and cartoons for the painting and stucco work but he had to work there only to review from time to time the work that had been carried out there. He largely assigned the execution to others, in particular his brother Federico. After the death of Taddeo Zuccaro in 1566, his younger brother Federico continued the work until 1569. His successor was Jacopo Bertoia, then Giovanni de' Vecchi, assisted by Raffaellino da Reggio.
The principle according to which the walls and ceilings were painted was retained for all apartments: only in public rooms (halls and their antechambers) were frescoes painted on ceilings and walls, while painting in the private rooms was limited to the vaults, with walls covered in silk, brocade, and similar materials. The themes painted in the ground floor apartments, intended for various uses by guests, are all taken from classical mythology. The themes of the apartments situated above these on the piano nobile focus decidedly on the master of the house and the function of the individual rooms.
In the two rooms on the piano nobile suited for a larger public, the Sala dei Fasti Farnesiani and the Sala del Concilio, Taddeo Zuccaro painted a cycle depicting, in a total of twenty-three scenes, the history of the Farnese family.
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