The Perfect House: A Journey with Renaissance Master Andrea Palladio (15 page)

To get to the villa I have to walk a short distance back along the canal’s edge until I find a bridge. A track leads to a gate where a dour old woman dressed in black collects the entrance fee. “The villa is a private residence; inside it is forbidden to touch or use the furnishings, to take photographs and to smoke,” reads a baleful warning in Italian, English, French, and Japanese. “During your visit, please be careful on the staircase outside since there is no handrail and on the waxed pavement inside.”

L
A
M
ALCONTENTA

A curving path leads to the front of the house. Close-up, the podium is even more impressive—it must be all of fifteen feet high. I have to crane my neck to see the tops of the Ionic columns. I climb the staircase carefully, for as the ticket warns, there are no handrails. Above the generous portico, heavy rustic beams support clay roof tiles whose underside is plainly visible, the rude construction emphasizing the heavy load that is carried by the burly columns. There are no railings between the columns, merely a stone parapet just the right height for sitting. Now the architectural reason for the podium is clear—it’s the ideal vantage point from which to greet visitors arriving by boat. From up here, the Brenta looks almost picturesque.

The front entrance is immense—fourteen feet high, twice as tall as a conventional door. Above is a cartouche commemorating the 1574 visit of Henri de Valois, who stopped in Venice on the way to Paris to accede to the throne. The doors must have been opened wide for the future king, but I enter through a low aperture cut out of one of the panels. The spectacular
sala
is cruciform in plan, similar to the Villa Pisani but even taller, with a soaring, barrel-vaulted ceiling. The surfaces of the walls and ceilings are frescoed with allegorical and mythological subjects within a trompe l’oeil architectural frame of giant Ionic columns that mimic those of the portico. It is likely that Palladio designed the architectural décor, for the frescoes are painted by the same Giambattista Zelotti with whom he had recently decorated the Villa Godi. As at the Villa Godi, Zelotti replaced a painter who died on the job, Battista Franco. The dramatic vaults offered Zelotti greater scope for his talents, and
above the orderly framework of columns, niches, and door frames, nymphs, gods, and goddesses run riot. The frescoes are faded and somewhat damaged, evidence of the hard treatment that La Malcontenta has received over the years. In 1848, the house was occupied by Austrian troops besieging Venice; during the First World War it was a field hospital; and in the years following it was used for storing grain and for the cultivation of silkworms. A subsequent restoration has not entirely erased the marks of a century of abuse. The frescoes are easy to see since the
sala
is exceptionally bright—the south-facing wall opposite the door is almost entirely windows, rectangular openings below and the large semicircle of a thermal window immediately beneath the vault. Palladio always provided plenty of fenestration but here he outdid himself.

La Malcontenta is currently owned by descendents of the Foscari brothers. Easy chairs and divans line the walls of the
sala,
but the effect is distinctly undomestic, more like the waiting room of a railway station than a salon; the great space would best have been left empty. The
sala
is flanked by suites composed of the usual small, medium, and large rooms. The rooms have varied décor and different types of domed and vaulted ceilings. The smallest rooms are decorated in the so-called Pompeiian style, walls and ceiling vaults frescoed with satyrs and winged cherubs. Zelotti painted one of the square rooms—today used as a bedroom—to resemble a vine-entwined arbor; the other room is beautifully decorated by Franco with ruined columns and giant, contorted Michelangelesque figures.

The floor plan of La Malcontenta is a virtual duplicate of an early version of the Villa Chiericati, which had a complicated vaulted cruciform
sala.
¹⁴
Apparently, Giovanni Chiericati had balked at the expense and demanded something simpler. Palladio complied, but in his usual persistent way he did not give up
on the idea, and when the Foscari brothers approached him, he must have shown them the earlier plan.

A young woman serves as a docent at La Malcontenta. It turns out that she is an architecture student for whom this is a part-time job. I ask her if I can see the attic, and she tells me that it’s not open to the public but shows me a book about the villa that contains plans of all the floors. The attic appears to be an exact duplicate of the main floor, with two suites of rooms and a cruciform central space directly above the
sala.
¹⁵
The upper
sala
is lit from each end by dormer windows.

Clearly, in a suburban villa there was no need for a granary. In fact, Palladio specifically referred to the upper rooms of La Malcontenta not as
granari
but as
camere,
or rooms. “The upper
camere
are like mezzanines,” he wrote, “because of their lack of height, which is only eight feet.”
¹⁶
The villa was originally designed for two bachelors, but Alvise Foscari became betrothed while the house was under construction, and it is likely that Palladio altered the upper rooms, adding the unusual dormer windows, in order to provide more space for the expanded household.
¹⁷
Thus Palladio subtly modified his design, solving a practical problem, adding a second floor disguised as an attic, and, as usual, creating beauty in the process.

Since I can’t go upstairs I borrow the docent’s book on the villa and leaf through its pages. The author is a Swedish professor who visited the Veneto almost forty years ago with a group of architecture students. They toured Palladio’s villas, ending up at Malcontenta, where they spent several days taking precise measurements of the house, particularly the rooms. Their purpose was to compare the villa with the plan in
Quattro libri,
where the room dimensions are prominently noted. It is well known that Palladio favored certain room shapes. “There are seven types of room that are the most beautiful and well-proportioned
and turn out better,” he wrote, and listed them: round, square, and several rectangular shapes of predetermined proportions.
¹⁸
He was directly quoting Vitruvius, who devoted an entire chapter to the subject. In practice, Palladio did not use all seven shapes equally; he most often made rooms square, sometimes a square and a third, and sometimes a square and a half.
^I
According to
Quattro libri,
these are the proportions of the small, medium, and large rooms that flank the
sala
of La Malcontenta.

Palladio did not explain why these room shapes “turn out better” (neither did Vitruvius). Rudolf Wittkower, in an influential book on the architectural principles of the Renaissance, published in 1949, speculated that Palladio based the proportions of his rooms on music.
¹⁹
He quoted a memorandum in which Palladio drew an analogy between architectural proportions and musical harmonies: “The proportions of the voices are harmonies for the ears; those of the measurements are harmonies for the eyes. Such harmonies usually please very much, without anyone knowing why, excepting the student of the causality of things.”
²⁰
According to Wittkower, Palladio’s “measurements” were based on sixteenth-century musical theory that expressed notes as numerical ratios. This complicated explanation is difficult to summarize, but the gist of it is that the dimensions that Palladio used for rooms,
salas,
and porticoes form ratios that
were based on specific musical intervals such as fourths, fifths, major sixths, and so on. For example, according to Wittkower, at La Malcontenta the dimensions of the rooms (twelve by sixteen, sixteen by sixteen, and sixteen by twenty-four Venetian feet) and the width of the
sala
(thirty-two feet) form a series that represents the “keynote” musical theme, also present in the portico and the spacing of the columns.
^II
,
21

Although Wittkower’s theory is fascinating, it suffers two serious shortcomings. First, Palladio made no mention of harmonic proportions in
Quattro libri
whatsoever; surely if musical harmonies had played a role in his designs he would have included a discussion of the subject. Second, Palladio’s use of dimensions that can be fitted into Wittkower’s musical scheme is extremely inconsistent. Two Scottish scholars, Deborah Howard and Malcolm Longair, analyzed all forty-four of the measured plans of palazzos and villas in
Quattro libri
(whereas Wittkower had examined only eight villas) and found that although certain numbers reoccurred, Palladio frequently used odd dimensions, even in those instances when he could have easily adjusted the numbers.
²²
They concluded that “[Palladio’s] dependence on musical harmonic proportion was by no means as great as Wittkower implied . . . his preference for harmonic dimensions probably resulted either from his use of certain favorite room shapes, or from the practical advantages of using simple, easily divisible numbers.”
²³

P
LAN OF
L
A
M
ALCONTENTA, FROM
Q
UATTRO LIBRI

Howard and Longair wisely pointed out that an architect of Palladio’s intelligence and experience would not have suggested that a beautiful building could only be designed by simply following a single proportional theory.
²⁴
The world of building is messy; an architect learns to balance conflicting demands. Vitruvius himself allowed that “when there are other unavoidable obstructions, it will be permissible to make diminutions or additions in the symmetrical relations—with ingenuity and acuteness, however, so that the result may not be unlike the beauty which is due to true symmetry.”
²⁵
Palladio did this all the time. For example, concluding a chapter of
Quattro libri
devoted to room vaults, he wrote, “There are other heights for vaults which do not come under any rule, and the architect will make use of these
according to his judgment and practical circumstances
[emphasis added].”
²⁶
At La Malcontenta, the Swedish professor and his students found a major inconsistency in the room dimensions: the attractive small rooms that were described as twelve Venetian feet wide in
Quattro libri
are actually ten feet wide, hence their proportions are not a square and a third. Whether this was the result of practical circumstances or Palladio’s judgment is not known.

T
HE REAR OF THE
V
ILLA
F
OSCARI, WITH ITS DOMINANT THERMAL WINDOW, IS QUITE DIFFERENT FROM THE FRONT.

 • • • 

The back of La Malcontenta faces a long lawn with double rows of trees on either side. The façade is dominated by a large thermal window and, like the Villa Pisani, the rear of the house bears little resemblance to the front. Or at least that is the first impression. In fact, just as he did at the Villa Poiana, Palladio created a subtle continuity between the front and the back. “The cornice goes all round the house and forms the tympanum above the loggia and on the opposite side of the house,” he wrote. “Under the gutter there is another cornice that runs above the tympanums.”
²⁷
He replicated the tripartite organization of the river façade by pushing the central portion, corresponding to the portico, slightly forward. He repeated the pediment, though with an interrupted horizontal cornice, allowing the arched top of the thermal window to extend up into the tympanum. The window patterns of the basement and attic floor are identical, including the rooftop gable window with its miniature pediment.