Hall of the Covetta

With its irregular, trapezoidal floor plan, this room features walls entirely covered in frescoes depicting woodland scenes, echoing iconographies and themes found in the adjacent rooms.

Here, the artist gives absolute prominence to the natural element, reflecting the typical 17th-century Baroque taste seen in pleasure villas, where landscape subjects definitively shed their sacred and historicist constraints to take on new, independent allegorical meanings. This modern style established itself particularly in Rome from the mid-17th century onward, where artists began to depict nature in a way that escaped both classical rigor and the meticulous, realistic analysis of Flemish painters, appearing instead to be created spontaneously, invented with speed and ease. It is no coincidence, therefore, that Bartolomeo III Arese chose the Milanese painter Giovanni Ghisolfi (1623-1683) as the artist for these paintings. Ghisolfi trained in Rome within the circle of Salvator Rosa, the inventor of a highly original and expressively charged type of landscape painting that anticipated Romantic sensibilities.
According to a late 17th-century inventory, the “Room called ‘of the Little Owl'” (Stanza della Civetta) was used both as a bedroom and a small music room, though its original function—likely intended as a naturalistic “Wunderkammer” or cabinet of curiosities—was not specified. This seems to be confirmed by the presence, in this wing of the *piano nobile* (noble floor), of a unique sequence of rooms dedicated to the natural sciences and astronomy, which served as an introduction and access point to the observatory tower. This function would also explain the insistent depiction of various animal species, particularly birds, with their diverse colors and multiple symbolic-allegorical meanings. Among these, besides the little owl that gives the room its name, are the secretary bird (interpreted by some critics as a variation of the Borromeo coat of arms), rabbits symbolizing gentleness and fidelity, and the monkey, often associated with wickedness and sin.
At the lower end of the eastern wall, fallen plaster has revealed a fragment of painting completely disconnected from its surroundings, depicting a seated young lady with a white greyhound; critical opinion on its interpretation is divided. Some have suggested it is an explicit reference to the patronage of Bartolomeo III Arese’s father, Giulio I, and that it is a work predating the woodland scenes entirely. Others propose it was a pictorial intervention made after Ghisolfi’s work, deliberately executed in an archaizing style, showing the young woman with a typically 17th-century hairstyle.