Lost architectural models. Digital reconstruction of Raphael's Stables in Villa Farnesina

In 1506, when the first stone was laid for the new residence of the wealthy banker Agostino Chigi near the Vatican, not enough space was found for the Stables. In 1511, after buying some neighboring land, Chigi commissioned Raphael to build a Stables, overlooking the new Via della Lungara. Chigi promised the pope that those Stables would be the most elegant ever seen, and kept his word. In 1514, work began and in 1518 it was complete with the two main floors if the Stables were the site of a sumptuous banquet that saw Pope Leo X as the protagonist; but the work was completed in 1520 after the death of the artist, Agostino Chigi and his widow Francesca Ordeaschi. What was the appearance of the Stables is difficult to establish, and today little remains of them: part of the perimeter wall on Via della Lungara, demolished up to about half of the lower order. The survey carried out with the lidar techniques, between 2018 and 2020, had as its main purpose the documentation of the architectural asset investigating its current conformation. The criteria of this research and survey activity tend to document and analyze what remains of the architectural organism today. This in order to be able to define – in comparison with the data obtained from the instruments and those of the sixteenth-century surveys – the overall conformation of the Stables, through the construction of a digital model that reflects as much as possible the characteristics that the building organism could have had in the past.