The Perfect House: A Journey with Renaissance Master Andrea Palladio (2 page)

As the architectural historian James S. Ackerman pointed out, there are really two Palladios.
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One was the author of
I quattro libri dell’architettura
(The four books on architecture). Published in 1570, this renowned architectural treatise influenced architects as different as Inigo Jones and Thomas Jefferson. While it included much information about the architecture of ancient Rome, and was written in a spare, dry prose, Palladio’s treatise was not academic. “In all these books I shall avoid being long-winded and will simply provide the advice that seems essential to me,” he cautioned the reader.
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His practical suggestions take the form of straightforward recipes, such as “Rooms are built with either a vault or a ceiling; if with a ceiling, the height from the pavement to the joists will be the same as the breadth and the rooms above will be a sixth less in height than those below. If they are vaulted . . . the heights of the vaults in square rooms will be a third greater than their breadth.”
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In other words, in a room eighteen feet square, a flat ceiling would be eighteen feet high, and a vaulted ceiling twenty-four feet.
The accompanying woodcuts are simple line drawings. Dimensions abound, which gives the impression of a rationalist who believes that architecture is the result of predetermined recipes and mathematical formulas. This methodical approach to design accounts for his wide influence, particularly on gentleman amateurs.

The other Palladio was a builder, not a theorist. He might bend his own rules and make eighteen-foot-wide rooms with ceilings that were seventeen feet high, or twenty. An accomplished practitioner who sized up the situation—and the client—and sought inspiration from his surroundings, he sensitively balanced his humanist concerns with the practical requirements of each project. “He gave the most intense pleasure to the Gentlemen and Lords with whom he dealt,” wrote a contemporary.
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A consummate student of ancient Rome, he was at one and the same time an inventive designer and a conservative professional. This is the Palladio I hope to find.

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Seven of the villas were either destroyed or drastically altered, four were not finished and exist only as fragments, one was never built, and the fate of one is unknown, as its location has never been determined.

orty miles northwest of Venice, the flat plain that starts on the shore of the Adriatic runs abruptly into the base of the Dolomitic Alps. The foothills village of Lugo Vicentino overlooks the Astico River, whose broad valley must have been pretty once but is now an unsettled quilt of cultivated fields and large manufacturing sheds. The mixture of agriculture and industry is apparent in the La Casara restaurant, where I’m surrounded by a noisy crowd of farmers and factory workers enjoying their lunch hour.

After an excessive meal, which raises again the puzzle of how Italians get anything done in the afternoon, I take a stroll. The restaurant is on the outskirts of the village. The houses here are too new to be picturesque, but the neat buildings and well-kept gardens attest to the prosperity of the region. The suburban landscape is dotted with agricultural remnants: a renovated farmhouse, a stone barn, a fenced piece of pasture. At the edge of the built-up area the ground rises steeply and I can see the bare branches of an orchard. Farther up the hill, behind a forsythia hedge that is already blooming, a large rectangular building with a red-tile roof commands the scene. This is what I’ve come to see—Palladio’s Villa Godi. Although Renaissance country houses are commonly referred to as villas, this use of the term is modern. In the sixteenth century,
la villa
referred to the entire estate; the house itself was
la casa padronale
(the master’s house), or more simply
la casa di villa.

I drive my rented car up the winding road. “Placed on a hill with a wonderful view and beside a river” is how Palladio described the house, and despite its industrial excrescence the Astico valley still presents a spectacular vista.
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The house sits on a man-made podium circumscribed by an imposing stone retaining wall. The curving, battered wall resembles a medieval bastion; the sturdy building, with its compact mass and severe symmetry, likewise has a military bearing. At first glance it could be an armory or a garrison post. As one gets closer, two features soften its severity: the plastered walls, which are painted a faded but cheerful buttery yellow and resemble old parchment, and an arcaded loggia, which is recessed into the center of the building and creates a shaded and welcoming entrance.

The caretaker lets me in through a large wrought-iron gate and I follow a path across the podium. The gravel crunches agreeably underfoot. The lawn is planted with conifers clipped into spheres and pyramids. A fountain, whose centerpiece is a statue of a nymph surrounded by cavorting cherubs, sprays water into a pool. I give her a sideward glance and hurry through the garden to the house.

V
ILLA
G
ODI

The villa, which did not look large from a distance, turns out to be immense, almost as tall as a modern five-story building. The plain plastered walls are relieved by a regular pattern of windows with stone frames and slightly different details: a heavy bracketed sill for the lowest floor; a delicately modeled sill for the main level; and a plain surround for the attic. Square windows are pushed up against an elegant cornice just under the shallow eaves. The cornice is supported by a row of little repetitive blocks, a detail adapted from ancient Roman temple eaves decorations called modillions. These are the only classical references in this otherwise undecorated and austere façade.

“The master’s rooms, which have floors thirteen feet above ground, are provided with ceilings,” Palladio wrote, “above these are the granaries, and in the thirteen-foot-high basement are placed the cellars, the places for making wine, the kitchen, and other similar rooms.”
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This pragmatic stacking of warehouse and domestic uses originated in Venice, where land was scarce.
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The tall Godi “basement” is entirely aboveground, so a long straight stair leads to the loggia. This spacious outdoor room faces west, which must give splendid views of sunsets over the peaks of the
altipiano
but leaves the main façade of the house exposed to the hot afternoon sun. It is unclear why Palladio turned the building this way—the preferred orientation was southern, and that view was equally fine. It may have had to do with how one originally arrived at the villa, since old maps show a long, straight approach road climbing the hill from the west. Or it may be explained by the fact that the villa is believed to incorporate parts of a medieval house that already existed on the site.
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The citizens of the Venetian Republic had a reputation for penny-pinching, if not outright parsimony, and
new houses were frequently built on top of old ones in order to save money by reusing foundations and walls.

The
intonaco,
or plastered stucco, of the walls shows marks where it was once incised to simulate the joints of stone construction. The entry in my old edition of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
claims that Palladio’s buildings were originally “designed to be executed in stone.”
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In fact, none of Palladio’s country houses are built of stone; all are brick covered in plaster, which was the standard method of construction for rural buildings. The jointing pattern, which is faint today but was prominent when the house was built, was not meant to deceive. Like the wooden faux-stonework of George Washington’s Mount Vernon, it produces a sense of scale as well as a pleasing decorative texture.

Not all the masonry is simulated. The most distinctive feature of the house is the three-arch loggia whose square piers, arches, and imposts from which the arches spring are all faced with stone. Two carved stone emblems adorn the wall above the loggia: an armorial shield with imperial eagles, symbols of the owner’s nobility, and a rampant lion, the
stemma,
or coat of arms, of the Godi family. An inscription on the tablet below reads
HIERONYMUS GODUS HENRICI ANTONII FILIUS FECIT ANNO MDXLII
(Built by Girolamo Godi, son of Enrico Antonio, in the year 1542). The Godis, one of the most powerful and wealthy patrician families of Vicenza, owned large estates in the Vicentino. When the patriarch Enrico Antonio died in 1536, he bequeathed the lands in common to his three sons (the fourth was a priest). Girolamo took charge of the Lugo holdings, more than five hundred acres, which included the hilltop of Lonedo, where he started to build a villa the following year.

Small doors lead directly from the loggia to rooms on either side, but the large door in the center is obviously the main
entrance.
PROCUL ESTE PROFANI
is carved into the stone frame. “Keep the unholy far away” may have been intended tongue in cheek, since the Godis were known to have had heretical tendencies.
ET LIBERA NOS A MALO
—“And deliver us from evil”—completes the sentiment on the inside. I read the interior inscription later, for when I open the door my attention is immediately arrested by the grand space—as Palladio, no doubt, intended. The cavernous room rises up to the roof—about twenty-five feet—and extends all the way to the rear of the house. This is the
sala,
or hall. The
sala,
which originated in medieval times, was a common feature of Venetian country houses. Always the largest room in the house, it was neither an entrance vestibule nor a living room, but a formal social space, “designed for parties, banquets, as the sets for acting out comedies, weddings, and similar entertainments,” Palladio wrote.
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The
sala
in the Villa Godi is lit by a large window, a triple opening with a semicircular arch in the center called a
serliana.
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This end of the
sala
extends slightly beyond the rest of the house, and the additional narrow windows on the two sides give the effect of a large bay window, which not only illuminates the room but also affords views of the garden below.

The
sala
is flanked by eight large rooms—four on each side. Six of the rooms are identical, two are slightly smaller to make room for the staircases; the large rooms are each about eighteen by twenty-eight feet. This seems like a lot of space, but the bachelor Girolamo shared the villa with his brothers and their families. There are no corridors; instead, each room opens directly into the next. The doors and windows are exactly
lined up so that standing in one of the rooms with my back to a window, I can look through four sets of open doors and see the corresponding window on the opposite side of the house. The stair, the loggia arcade, the front door, the
sala,
and the
serliana
are likewise carefully aligned. These precise geometrical relationships give the interior a sense of calm and repose. Everything appears in its place.

I walk around the house, or rather slide since I am obliged to wear felt slippers to reduce wear on the floors. These are
battuto,
an early version of terrazzo, made by slathering a mixture of lime, sand, and powdered brick across the floor, pressing milled stone chips into the hardening mixture with heavy rollers, then grinding smooth and oiling the surface. There are no other visitors, and the caretaker has left me alone. I swish from room to room. The doorways are low and the unpretentious doors of simple plank construction have wrought-iron strap hinges. The identical windows incorporate a charming feature: facing stone seats that transform them into little conversation nooks. The flat ceilings are supported by closely spaced wooden beams with ornamental carvings on the underside. The only room
with a plaster ceiling is in the southeast corner of the house, a privileged position that gets the morning sun, summer and winter, and probably belonged to Girolamo.