
To access the Museum located on the piano nobile (main or “noble” floor) of the Villa del Principe, you must walk through the splendid portico, cross the ancient portal and atrium with its beautiful frescoes and walk up the monumental staircase. You will find yourself catapulted into a world full of treasures and art which tells fascinating stories of battles, leaders, princes, emperors and their ladies.
Facade and Portal
The original entrance to the Villa was the one that currently overlooks Via San Benedetto. The portal on the north façade of the building was to be surrounded by frescoed decoration with Stories of Furius Camillus expelling the Gauls from Rome, designed by Perino del Vaga but never executed. This iconography was an evident allusion to the expulsion of the French from Genoa in 1528, which actively involved Andrea Doria.
The portal, designed by Perino, was built by the sculptor Silvio Cosini and has an allegorical pair of figures, Peace and Abundance, flanking the Doria coat of arms. The structure stands out from the wall, with two free-standing lateral columns surmounted by a curved pediment: this architectural type, imported from Rome and distinct from the “flattened” portals used in Genoa in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, became a model that was immediately imitated by local craftsmen.
Entrance Hall
In the central rosette of the ceiling of the atrium Perino del Vaga’s name appears in gold characters with the date 1530, together with the name of Annibale Angelini, who restored the Villa del Principe in 1845. The lunettes, currently very faded, contain stories of the seven kings of Rome while the pendentives show divinities including Mars, Venus, Neptune, Apollo and Juno. In the large central panel of the vault, amid decorations with grotesque motifs, there are four rectangles with Scenes of Triumphs. Three of them depict three moments in the Triumph of Lucius Emilius Paulus, the ancient Roman general who expelled the Gauls from Liguria (an allusion to the sixteenth-century expulsion of the French from Genoa, which had involved Andrea Doria), while the fourth panel represents the Indian Triumph of the god Bacchus. This scene indirectly celebrates Andrea Doria in his role as peacemaker of Genoa.
Six marble reliefs decorate the walls of the atrium with pairs of cherubs holding trophies of antique weapons made by Giovanni Angelo Montorsoli, brought from the Church of San Matteo, the Doria family chapel. The reliefs were moved to their current location in 1613.
Staircase
The vaulting of the first flight of the staircase is decorated with geometric panels and small grotesque figures inspired by the ceilings of the Domus Aurea in Rome. Thanks to complex restoration work carried out in 1999, the original decoration – praised by Vasari in his Lives of the Artists – was partly recovered, having been covered by a new layer of paintings with simple geometric frames in 1805, on the occasion of Napoleon’s stay at the Palazzo.