The Perfect House: A Journey with Renaissance Master Andrea Palladio (17 page)

V
ILLA
C
ORNARO

The reason for the extreme height of the pediment is evident; it sits atop not one but two porticoes—a double-decker. The double portico—Corinthian over Ionic—projects forward like La Malcontenta, but has side walls in place of columns on the sides. These walls have arched openings that echo the arched windows whose prominent keystones are part of the masonry pattern scribed into the stucco walls. The central block of the house is flanked by two side wings. According to Palladio, one wing was used for the kitchen and housekeeping activities, and the other housed rooms for the servants. He did not explain the reason for not locating the kitchen in the basement—it may have had to do with reducing the distance to the upper floor, for he did the same thing in his other two-story houses.

On the rear, instead of a flat façade Palladio built
another
double portico. It is a twin of the first with six Corinthian columns above and six Ionic below, and the same triangular pediment, but instead of projecting out from the house it is recessed. This mirror image combination is an extraordinary architectural one-two punch.

Palladio’s client was Giorgio Cornaro (no relation to Alvise Cornaro), another young Venetian nobleman. The Cornaros—Corner, in Venetian dialect—were a branch of the fabled Contarini, one of the original twelve families that founded the city in the seventh century. They were known as the Cornaro della Regina in recognition of Giorgio’s great-aunt, Caterina
Cornaro, who had been Queen of Cyprus at the end of the fifteenth century. (After surrendering sovereignty of her island realm to the Venetian Republic, she moved to the nearby village of Altivole.) The Piombino lands had belonged to the Cornaro family for generations, and in 1551, when Senator Girolamo Cornaro died, they were divided between his two sons, Andrea and Giorgio. Andrea as firstborn received the bulk of the holdings, which included an impressive house in the village, designed some years earlier by Sanmicheli.
¹
Giorgio, who intended to marry, promptly set about building his own house. He had inherited several hundred acres in scattered parcels, but he chose a site next to his brother’s villa. It is a measure of Palladio’s growing reputation that he received the commission to design a villa that was obviously meant to rival, if not outshine, its illustrious neighbor.
^I

The cramped site made this difficult. It was a narrow rectangle of land extending back from the main street. Palladio was obliged to accommodate a long barn and a working farm court on half the site, which left only about an acre to build on—the equivalent of a large American suburban lot. Except for the Villa Godi, whose ramparted podium was relatively constricted, most of Palladio’s villas had large sites on which he could lay out forecourts. Here he could not create an impression of grandeur by spreading out, so he did the next best thing—he went up.

Palladio responded to the particular demands of his clients—that was part of his success as a residential architect—but he often developed ideas simultaneously in several projects. At the same time he was building the Villa Cornaro, he was working on two other houses. One was a villa for Francesco Pisani (a kinsman of Vettor), just outside the city gates of Montagnana, a walled town south of Vicenza; the other was a house for Signor Floriano Antonini on the outskirts of the city of Udine. Both were two-story houses in suburban locations with double porticoes. Altogether, there are eight double porticoes in
Quattro libri,
five villas and three town houses. The front double portico of the Villa Cornaro is unique, however, since it projects forward, making this one of Palladio’s most impressive frontispieces.

T
HE TWO-STORY PORTICO OF THE
V
ILLA
C
ORNARO WAS
P
ALLADIO’S ANSWER TO A NARROW SITE.

T
HE SOUTH-FACING LOGGIAS OF THE
V
ILLA
C
ORNARO ARE A MIRROR IMAGE OF THE FAÇADE AND PROVIDE A SHELTERED SITTING AREA.

With houses such as the Villa Chiericati, La Malcontenta, and the Villa Cornaro, Palladio at last created the architectural prototype that combined the temple architecture of antiquity with a modern house. The latter was simplicity itself: a plastered brick box with carefully proportioned openings, unifying moldings and fascias, and masonry patterns scribed on plastered walls. The box was adaptable—it could have wings, a lower or taller basement, one floor or two. The interior was conveniently subdivided vertically into service basement, family rooms and
amezati,
and a storage attic. As for the portico, it could front a recessed loggia or a projecting porch, be one level or two, and have more or fewer columns, to suit.

The rear garden of the Villa Cornaro, unlike the front, has room to breathe. The long spread of lawn looks out on farmland, a view that cannot have changed much since the sixteenth century. At the end of the lawn is a curious seven-arched bridge, said to be designed by Palladio, that leads over a fishpond to an imposing set of gates. I’m looking at the bridge when the custodian comes around the corner of the house. He tells me
that a road once led over the bridge, through the gates, and straight across the fields to the edge of the property, about a quarter of a mile away. I’m not sure I agree with him when he says that this was the original front entrance (
Quattro libri
clearly indicates that the villa faced the street). Yet the house’s two-sided character no doubt reflected two different approaches: one from the village street and the other along the country road flanked by orchards, which would have made a more attractive arrival for visitors coming from Venice, about twenty miles away.

Since the back entrance is obstructed by temporary scaffolding, we go around to the front. The outside stair, which extends the full width of the portico, is unusual. Palladio was always experimenting with entrance stairs—semicircular stairs at Piombino, a simple broad sweep at Poiana, double stairs at Malcontenta—in order to create a dignified way to bring people up to the portico. Here he designed a series of three steps interrupted by slightly inclined landings. The result is a sort of ramped stair. Instead of simply climbing, we glide up the stately ascent.

The front door opens into a shallow vaulted vestibule, with doors leading to rooms on either side. Straight ahead is the
sala,
a large squarish room.
^II
Since there is a similar room immediately above, the ceiling is flat rather than vaulted, but drama is provided by four intersecting beams resting on four immense, freestanding Ionic columns, one in each corner of the room. Palladio designed several variations of the square
sala
in his two-story
houses, all inspired by ancient examples. “[Roman halls] were called tetrastyle because they had four columns,” he wrote. “They made these square and built columns there in order to make the breadth proportionate to the height and to make the structure above stable.”
²
Like the
sala
of the Villa Pisani, this has the feeling of an outdoor space, an impression magnified by the giant columns. Unlike that room, however, this is a dynamic, three-dimensional space, the columns creating a central cube of space with a sort of aisle around the edges. Sunlight from a profusion of windows in the south-facing wall creates patterns across the clay-tile floor. The room is particularly bright since the walls are not frescoed but white.

Palladio further responded to Cornaro’s demand for pomp and circumstance by including another feature from antiquity: niches for life-size statues. The stucco figures, added twenty years after Giorgio’s death by his son, represent eminent Cornaro ancestors: the stern paterfamilias Marco, wearing his Doge’s cap; his grandson, Zorzi the Elder, a famous military commander who acquired the Piombino lands; Zorzi’s granddaughter, the beautiful Caterina, wearing a crown; her brother Zorzi, another soldier and Giorgio’s grandfather; Giorgio’s father, Girolamo, who fought for the Republic in Crete and Padua; and Giorgio himself, bearded and heavyset, who died in action commanding a Venetian galley in a war against the Ottoman Turks.

We pass through the other rooms, whose layout follows the same L-configuration as in La Malcontenta—small, medium, and large—each with a different type of ceiling vault. This plan is repeated on the upper floor (which is closed to visitors). My guide scrupulously describes each of the wall and ceiling frescoes. To my eye, the biblical paintings and the blowsy stucco reliefs are an alien presence and do not enhance Palladio’s
architecture. These rococo adornments were commissioned in the eighteenth century by Giorgio Cornaro’s great-great-grandson; he would have done better to leave well enough alone.

The villa remained in the Cornaro family until the beginning of the nineteenth century, when it passed to a succession of private owners. During the 1950s and 1960s the house was a parochial kindergarten, then stood vacant, and was finally bought—by an American—and restored. The house changed hands again in 1989. I remember coming upon the improbable advertisement in the real estate pages of the
New York Times Magazine:
“Palladio Villa for Sale.” The current owners, likewise Americans, have furnished the house attractively with period pieces. My guide refers to bedrooms, living room, and dining room; Palladio did not use such terms. He gave precise names only to utilitarian rooms: wine casks and foodstuffs were stored in the
cantina
; food was prepared in the
cucina
and served from the
dispensa
(pantry); the servants ate in the
tinello,
or servant’s hall. But the important rooms on the main floor, other than the
sala,
were simply called
camere
or
stanze,
anterooms were
anti-camere,
and rooms located beyond the main room were
post-camere.
Palladio did not label such rooms according to their function because in cinquecento villas and palazzos rooms did not have predetermined uses; people slept and dined and socialized all over the house. Although formal banquets were held in the
sala,
everyday meals were taken in one’s room, which was furnished somewhat like a modern hotel room, with beds, wardrobes or chests, tables, chairs, and settees. Most rooms contained several beds, children sharing the room with their parents, guests with one another. Standards of privacy were, of course, different, for sixteenth-century residences did not have corridors—people simply passed through one room to get to the next. Only the master of the house warranted a private room—which Palladio called a
studiolo,
or study—where he kept money, papers, valuables, and books. Such small rooms were also called
stanze piccole
—little rooms—and were often created by subdividing a
stanze
after the house was built.

P
LAN OF
V
ILLA
C
ORNARO, FROM
Q
UATTRO LIBRI

The Italian word for furniture is
mobilia,
and furniture was moved from room to room, which is why Palladio did not draw tables or chairs in his plans (nor, as far as we know, did he ever design any furniture). Rooms were often used seasonally, north-facing rooms in the summer, and south-facing in the winter. Room adornments—tapestries, easel paintings, candlesticks—were likewise portable. Much sixteenth-century furniture is foldable or demountable, for furniture was also moved from house to house. When Cornaro relocated his household from Venice to Piombino, to oversee the harvest, say,
or to avoid an epidemic, he traveled with bedsteads, linens, and table silver.