Villa Palagonia in Bagheria: the stone monsters that disturbed Goethe
Dwarfs, dragons, musicians and hybrid creatures on the boundary wall: Villa Palagonia in Bagheria, Prince Gravina and Goethe's visit of 1787.
In April 1787 Johann Wolfgang Goethe, travelling in Sicily, visited a noble villa at Bagheria, not far from Palermo, and came away disconcerted. In his Italian Journey he described it as a place of madness, peopled with monstrous and absurd figures. It was Villa Palagonia, and the statues that had so disturbed him can still be seen today on the boundary wall and along the entrance avenue.
A Baroque villa and its heir
The villa was built from 1715 for Francesco Ferdinando Gravina, Prince of Palagonia, to a design by the Dominican architect Tommaso Maria Napoli, also the author of other villas in the area. The building has an original plan, with a convex central block and two curved wings embracing the courtyard, and an external double-flight staircase. It is a refined example of the Sicilian Baroque country villa.
The statues that made the place famous were added later, from the middle of the eighteenth century, at the wish of the grandson, Ferdinando Francesco Gravina e Alliata. It was he who populated the boundary wall with dozens of figures carved in sandstone tuff: dwarfs, musicians, ladies and knights, dragons, men with animal heads, creatures composed of different parts.
A bestiary in stone
The figures of Villa Palagonia belong to the long tradition of the grotesque, which passed from Roman antiquity through Renaissance decoration and Mannerist gardens such as the Sacred Wood of Bomarzo. They are hybrids, caricatures, distortions of the human and the animal, meant to astonish and amuse, but also to unsettle. Many statues have been damaged or dispersed over time, and those that survive are partly restored.
Inside, the hall of mirrors with its ceiling covered in glass and its walls adorned with coloured marbles added to the effect of estrangement, multiplying and distorting the images of those who entered. Goethe also told of chairs with uneven legs and of other bizarre objects, designed to make guests ill at ease. Part of these furnishings has been lost.
Madness, satire or allegory
Goethe's judgement long shaped the image of the prince, portrayed as a melancholy eccentric. Modern scholars have proposed more nuanced readings. Some see in it a satire of aristocratic society, with its poses and vanities; others a repertoire of apotropaic images, able to ward off the evil eye and misfortune, according to beliefs widespread in Mediterranean popular culture.
Others still have spoken of an allegorical or even esoteric programme, linked to alchemy or to secret doctrines, but documents from the patron are entirely lacking for these interpretations. It is more prudent to recognise in the villa a learned caprice, the child of the taste for the bizarre and the marvellous that ran through eighteenth-century Europe, before the Neoclassical return to order condemned such fantasies as signs of bad taste.
Today Villa Palagonia can be visited and continues to divide those who see it, between amusement and unease. Its monsters, born of a prince's whim, have become one of the symbols of Bagheria and an essential stop for those who seek, in art, the point where reason meets its own reverse. Goethe's bewilderment, more than two centuries later, has itself become part of the fascination of the place.