Palazzo Chigi

San Quirico d'Orcia's town hall is a baroque palazzo raised for Cardinal Flavio Chigi to designs by Carlo Fontana. Behind the municipal offices stretch frescoed floors of zodiac signs, seasons and myth, with a salon of Alexander canvases painted for a pope's nephew.

Why it matters

A fief town in the Sienese countryside rarely received architecture of this ambition. Palazzo Chigi exists because the Chigi papal family turned San Quirico d'Orcia into a personal marquisate, and Cardinal Flavio Chigi commissioned the papal capital's go-to architect to give the town a seat worthy of the title. The building remains the town hall, with seventeenth- and eighteenth-century fresco cycles surviving across two floors.

What to notice

Cardinal Chigi's iconographic programme draws on standard themes of the era: the Seasons, Zodiac signs, Elements and Arts. On the noble floor, surviving fragments show zodiac signs, plausibly a compliment to the cardinal himself. A large workshop executed the two floors quickly and collaboratively, and the names attached to it explain the division of labour: Giovan Battista and Michelangelo Ricciolini on figures, Niccolò Stanchi on flora and fauna, François Simonot on wooded landscape scenes. The Salone di Alessandro Magno contains large canvases by Michelangelo Ricciolini depicting episodes from Alexander the Great's life: Alexander and Timoclea, Alexander and Diogenes, the cutting of the Gordian knot, Alexander with his physician Philip, the family of Darius before Alexander, and the lion hunt. The sequence honours the cardinal's uncle, Pope Alexander VII. The canvases were painted in tempera magra, egg tempera straight onto linen without preparatory layers, a fast and cheap method whose matte fragility is still visible; of the eight, only the scene of Darius's family has been restored and returned to its wall.

Context and history

The commission belongs to the second half of the seventeenth century, when Cardinal Flavio Chigi held the town as a fief granted by Grand Duke Cosimo III de' Medici. Carlo Fontana, the Chigi family's trusted architect, supplied the design, and the palace passed from the Chigi to their heirs the Chigi Zondadari, whose name still attaches to the building, before the Comune took it over as its seat. The palace stands beside the Collegiata, at the corner of the historic core between the church and main square. Fresco consolidation and restoration have progressed piecemeal, one canvas at a time. Its second floor also houses the Museo del Barbarossa.