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The decoration of large halls with the deeds of the nobility and their ancestors was intended to inspire the viewer's admiration. The depiction of such events from the recent past has a long tradition. Most such cycles in the first half of the sixteenth century, however, are dedicated to a single person or event, as for example, in the Villa Imperiale. By contrast, from the middle of the century onward this genre was increasingly devoted to the representation of dynasties.
Pragmatic reasons were behind the success of the idea, derived from Raphael and his workshop, of making mural painting that simulated tapestries. Sometimes the possibility of pulling the tapestries aside was used to integrate doors or windows into the decoration. In other cases a tapestry was quite consciously used to introduce a second narrative level into the depiction. Around 1530 Eleonora Gonzaga commissioned a decorative scheme for the Villa Imperiale, which would be unique in formal and thematic terms, that focused primarily on the classical themes of the villa as a place of leisure and its associated activities. This can be seen in the many vegetal motifs and landscapes, the implements of hunting and music depicted in the vault of the Sala delle Cariatidi, and the personifications of the arts in the Sala dei Semibusti. By contrast, the deeds of her husband, Francesco Maria della Rovere, the duke of Urbino, are all presented as simulated tapestries, that is as paintings within the painting, twice removed from reality. This contrast immediately conveys the distance between the life of recreation in the villa and the political and martial actions of Eleonora's husband.
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