Dome

Court, east façade, entablature, frontal view, detail of a masque and triglyphs; "The greatest of all Mannerist villas was called a palace-the Palazzo del Te in Mantua-and, like the Villa Farnesina, it was a villa suburbana, close to the city and commingling aspects of both palace and villa architecture and function. It was built by Giulio Romano for Federigo Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua and son of Isabelle d'Este, one of the most cultivated and erudite of all Renaissance art patrons... "At work on the Gonzaga villa, and free of the weight of the orthodoxy of both old and new Rome, Giulio's 'manner' took precedence. His strange, chimerical imagination was most dramatically unleashed in his illusionistic fresco paintings for the interior rooms of the Palazzo del Te, but the architecture, too, is filled with complicated and unexpected effects." Source: Marvin Trachtenberg and Isabelle Hyman. Architecture: from Prehistory to Post-Modernism. page 307