The Perfect House: A Journey with Renaissance Master Andrea Palladio (18 page)

The simple exterior of the Villa Cornaro masks six or seven different floor levels. Since this was a two-story house, Palladio provided two grand stone staircases, oval in plan and brightly lit by windows on three sides; smaller wooden spiral stairs in each wing were for the use of the servants. The Villa Cornaro has no fewer than twelve rooms and two
salas,
not including the service rooms in the two wings, and the
amezati
over the smallest rooms, which accommodated the large household staff. It is likely that the Cornaro family lived on the upper floor, whose high-ceilinged rooms caught the cooling summer breezes and were more private; the downstairs was probably reserved for occasions of state. The cavernous upper
sala,
which extends up into the roof space, does not have columns, which made it useful for dancing and dramatics. If it was occasionally crowded with people, that also explains the structural function of the four supporting Ionic columns below.
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The Villa Cornaro was hardly a “machine for living in,” as Le Corbusier once described a modern house; it was an elegant stage on which Giorgio and his family could lead their privileged lives. There was finery, but comfort was rudimentary by modern standards. The small and large rooms had fireplaces, but the medium-sized rooms and the
salas
were unheated. The elegant oval stairs were only accessible from the loggia, which meant that to go upstairs, one had to go outside. There was no plumbing. Servants carried hot water for bathing up to the rooms from the kitchen. Palladio provided the villa with indoor privies, in alcoves behind the main stair. In the house that he was building at the same time in Montagnana, he also incorporated indoor privies—two-holers. He assured the reader of
Quattro libri
that the privies “do not smell much because they were put in a place away
from the sunlight and have some vents, leading from the bottom of the pit through the thickness of the walls, that let out at the top of the house.”
⁴
The vents may not have worked as intended, for these are the only indoor privies recorded in
Quattro libri
.

 • • • 

“You can stay in the garden as long as you like,” my guide tells me as he locks up the house. “Just shut the front gate when you leave.”

I take some photographs of the portico, then go to the back garden, where I sit on the bridge parapet, writing up my notes. The utter simplicity of the house is charming. The basement is unplastered brick, with a stepped brick band separating it from the plastered walls above. Whereas the front façade has arched windows—rare in Palladio villas—the ones in the back are square as well as arched, with arches in the scribed masonry pattern. Such a transparently scenographic device only makes the majestic porticoes more substantial.

It’s after one o’clock and time to go. The carnival ride is silent, the children have gone home for lunch. I cross the street to the Caffè Palladio to get a bite to eat. The young man has left and the place is empty. Ordering a ham and cheese sandwich and a glass of beer, I take a table by the window. The sandwich arrives—it is grilled, provolone and prosciutto—and I munch contentedly, staring absentmindedly out of the window at the villa, which is plainly visible across the street. Piombino must have been only a hamlet when the house was built, yet the surroundings already were less than pastoral. Perhaps that’s why the villa does not really look out of place; it is, as it was always intended to be, the finest house in town.
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From a distance the double portico looks very familiar, actually very American. There are similar two-story pedimented porches all across the United States, particularly in the South, where a columned porch in front of a mansion is synonymous with “plantation house.” Drayton Hall is a famous plantation house outside Charleston with several Palladian features: a symmetrical plan, a regular window arrangement, pronounced moldings, blocky modillions supporting a cornice under the eaves, and prominent double porticoes. It was built almost two hundred years after the Villa Cornaro. A series of unusual individuals and fortuitous events leads from Piombino Dese in the hinterland of the Venetian Republic, to the backwoods of a remote British colony on the Atlantic seaboard of the New World.

The complicated story begins in Jacobean England with a remarkable architect, Inigo Jones. A portrait by Van Dyck shows Jones in his late sixties, a handsome bearded man with unruly hair flowing from under a silk skullcap, and a deceptively mild look considering a biographer described him as “a personality of alarming force, totally intolerant of the lesser creatures in his environment.”
⁵
In the painting, Jones is holding a sheet of paper that could be a billet-doux, a list of accounts, a costume sketch, or an architectural drawing, for he was a courtier, an art expert, and a theatrical designer, as well as an architect. He overlapped Palladio—just barely—being born in London in 1573 (Palladio died in 1580). The son of a cloth-worker, he apprenticed as a joiner. Yet at thirty he abandoned this trade. “Being naturally inclined in my younger years to study the Arts of Design,” he later recalled, “I passed into foreign parts to converse with the great masters thereof in Italy.”
⁶
After an extended sojourn in southern Italy, where he apparently made high-placed friends, he reemerged in London society described as a “picture-maker”—that is, a painter. It was in this capacity that he joined the court of James I under the personal patronage of the new queen, Anne of Denmark. Jones’s chief occupation was designing the scenery and costumes for masques, or theatrical entertainments, most of them written by Ben Jonson. Jones replaced the Elizabethan arena stage with the Continental proscenium and introduced English audiences to Italian scenery, much of it in the
all’antica
style. For almost thirty years, Jonson and Jones’s spectacular combination of drama, dance, and music was the vogue.

V
ILLA
C
ORNARO

When he was forty, Jones accompanied his patrons and friends, the Earl and Countess of Arundel, on a tour of Italy. They visited Naples, Rome, Florence, and Venice, collecting works of art, buying books, and visiting museums, with Jones (who was fluent in Italian) acting as tour guide and artistic consultant. They also saw the works of famous Renaissance architects, including Palladio. Jones was familiar with Palladio’s treatise, but he was unprepared for the experience of the buildings. It was love at first sight. The Arundel entourage stopped in Vicenza twice. Jones visited at least three Palladio villas, including
the Villa Thiene at Quinto, which he was disappointed to find only partly built. “To this stroke it is finished and nothing more,” he scribbled in the margin of his heavily annotated
Quattro libri.
⁷
He interviewed craftsmen who had worked on Palladio’s buildings and on Arundel’s behalf bought more than two hundred of Palladio’s drawings (Arundel later gave him most of them). Jones seems to have felt a personal bond with Palladio. For example, he practiced copying Palladio’s signature and signed his own name in a similar fashion. The two men had much in common: both were late starters; both came from humble backgrounds; both were avid readers and self-taught scholars.

When Jones returned to England he continued to design masques, but expanded his activities to include architecture. He was appointed Surveyor of the King’s Works, which effectively made him court architect, a role he continued to play under Charles I. It is no exaggeration to say that Inigo Jones single-handedly introduced Italian classicism to England. Although the Renaissance had influenced English scholarship, it had had almost no effect on English architecture. Jacobean buildings were distinctly old-fashioned, a fusty blend of decorative Flemish influences and Elizabethan traditions. Jones’s designs were different: spare, rigorous, geometrically disciplined, and, of course, classical. Although he was working half a century after Palladio’s death, Jones ignored the later generation of Mannerist architects, preferring the simpler styles of the cinquecento. “All thes composed ornaments, the Which proceed out of ye aboundance of dessigners and wear brought in by Michill Angell, and his followers in my oppignion do not well in sollid Architecture,” he complained (in his unique orthography).
⁸

Jones’s “solid Architecture” is often called Palladian, but it is
really Jonesian, for while he was inspired by his predecessor, he had the self-confidence—and the talent—to go his own way. His buildings, constructed of stone, not plaster, have a precision that is absent from Palladio’s domestic work, and despite his theatrical background, Jones—at least on the exterior—was a more severe designer. The house that he built for Queen Anne at Greenwich has an almost austere façade with a rusticated base and a columned loggia in the center, facing a
cortile
flanked by porticoes that recall the Villa Pisani. The Banqueting House at Whitehall Palace, originally designed as a performance hall for masques, is his masterpiece. The restrained pilasters and half-columns of the façade do not prepare one for the spectacular interior with a brilliant ceiling painted by Peter Paul Rubens. “Outwardly every wyse man carrieth a graviti in Publicke places,” Jones wrote, “yet inwardly hath his imaginacy set on fire, and sumtimes licentciously flying out, as nature hirself doeth often times stravagantly.”
⁹
Like Palladio, he combined sober exteriors with rich décor, although he disposed of greater budgets than his predecessor, and his splendid interior architecture is not frescoed but the real thing.

Jones followed Palladio’s lead in seeking inspiration from antiquity. He modeled St. Paul’s Church in Covent Garden on Vitruvius’s description of a Tuscan temple, and based the design of his most prominent work, the great portico on the west front of Old St. Paul’s Cathedral (which was destroyed some twenty years later in the Fire of London), on Palladio’s reconstruction of an ancient Roman temple. Only eight out of forty-six known works survive, but they show Jones to be a true successor of Palladio, applying his principles without copying his designs.

The English Civil War effectively ended Jones’s professional life. He served in Charles I’s army as a military engineer, was
captured, briefly imprisoned, then fined, and died in 1652, three years after his royal patron’s execution. Jones’s assistant, the talented John Webb, who inherited his master’s practice (as well as his collection of Palladio drawings), carried on his brand of austere classicism. However, after Charles II’s accession to the throne, tastes changed, and Jones’s architecture was out of fashion. Nevertheless, Palladio remained a touchstone for British architects. When John Vanbrugh, a successful dramatist, turned his hand to architecture at the age of forty, having been appointed Comptroller of the Royal Works under Christopher Wren, he ordered a copy of
Quattro libri
from his bookseller. Vanbrugh, who would build such extravagant country houses as Castle Howard and Blenheim Palace, took English architecture in a theatrical and flamboyant direction, yet the springboard for his fertile imagination was Palladio.

Vanbrugh and Wren were not, strictly speaking, Palladians, but Palladianism did eventually return to Britain. It emerged first in Scotland with James Smith, an obscure Edinburgh stonemason turned architect who had spent five years in Italy. Starting in 1685 with his own house, Whitehill, Smith built a number of Palladian country houses in Scotland. His influence spread through Colen Campbell, another Scot, who built what is generally considered the first eighteenth-century Palladian house in England, Wilbury House. In 1715, Campbell published
Vitruvius Britannicus,
a compendium of architectural works in which he championed a stricter classicism based on the “Famous Inigo Jones,” and “above all, the great Palladio, who has exceeded all that has gone before him, and surpass’d his Contemporaries.”
¹⁰
That same year Giacomo Leoni, a Venetian émigré, published the first complete English translation of
Quattro libri.
Leoni’s patron was the young Richard Boyle, third Earl of Burlington. Soon after, Burlington engaged Campbell
to design a Palladian entrance court and colonnade for Burlington House, the family’s London residence.

Campbell encouraged the young earl’s interest in architecture. A few years later, Burlington went to Italy to see Palladio’s work for himself, retracing Inigo Jones’s journey to Venice and Vicenza. He returned to England with an unalloyed devotion to Palladio, and about sixty of the master’s drawings (he later acquired most of Webb’s Palladian collection, and this entire treasure trove is now at the Royal Institute of British Architects in London, where I saw it). Burlington, who was fabulously wealthy, became a great patron—Horace Walpole called him the “Apollo of Arts.” He underwrote a young architect, Isaac Ware, to translate
Quattro libri
(Leoni’s version, though also backed by Burlington, was notoriously unreliable), published a collection of Palladio’s reconstructions of ancient buildings, and engaged his lifelong friend William Kent, a painter, landscape gardener, and architect, to edit
Designs of Inigo Jones.
The “Architect Earl” was also a practitioner, designing and building a number of notable Palladian houses, some in collaboration with Kent, some on his own.