View of the entrance portego

The Villa Zenobio in Santa Bona Nuova, near Treviso, was built between 1673 and 1689 and was profoundly reworked during the mid-eighteenth century when the garden wing was erected. The small entrance portego was decorated in the early years of the eighteenth century by Gregorio Lazzarini.

The wall surface is punctuated by a series of illusionistic, white Corinthian columns that stand on the low skirting board circling the perimeter of the room. The three white faux-rocaille frames that occupy the spaces between the columns contain scenes of poetic-mythological love stories, narrated in a neo-sixteenth-century pictorial manner, halfway between Titian and Veronese. The scenes depict Angelica and Medorus, Hercules and Omphale, and Rinaldo and Armida. The fresco on the ceiling, Eros Piercing a Young Woman, is now largely repainted.

The frescoes were clumsily whitewashed with lime in the mid-nineteenth century, they were bought to light during a thorough restoration in the early twentieth century.