The Perfect House: A Journey with Renaissance Master Andrea Palladio (20 page)

The central block is two stories high, like the Villa Cornaro, but it does not have a portico; instead, the entire end of the house resembles an ancient temple. The illusion is twofold, for the four giant, white-painted Ionic columns, which from this distance appear to be freestanding, are half-round and attached to the façade. As he did often, Palladio explored a new motif in several houses at once; he built another two-story temple-fronted villa in nearby Bassano for Count Giacomo Angarano, a Vicentine friend. To complete the temple effect, he dispensed with the attic and basement in both houses, and placed the service functions—kitchens, wine-making rooms, granaries—in flanking outbuildings. He put the main rooms on the upper floor, to take advantage of views and cooling breezes.

V
ILLA
B
ARBARO

The clients at Maser were also Palladio’s friends: Daniele Barbaro, whom he had met years before and who had helped him in Venice, and his brother Marc’antonio. Like Giorgio Cornaro, the Barbaros belonged to the upper reaches of the Venetian aristocracy. Their father, Francesco, who had been governor of Verona as well as a senator, had sent both of his sons to the University of Padua. Marc’antonio went into the diplomatic service and subsequently held various important governmental posts. Daniele, the older brother, had a scholarly bent and stayed in Padua studying philosophy, mathematics, and astronomy. This was during the late 1530s, and as an academic humanist he naturally participated in Alvise Cornaro’s intellectual circle, which is where he met Andrea di Pietro, soon to be Palladio.

Daniele remained in Padua for a decade. In 1549, his father died and left his estate at Maser, which had belonged to the family for two hundred years, to his two sons, then both in their thirties. The brothers did not divide their inheritance, and decided to jointly enlarge the medieval house that was on the site. Palladio’s earliest sketches for the villa date from this time, although it wasn’t until almost a decade later that construction began.
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Palladio was a natural choice as architect, since for at least two years previous he had been collaborating with Daniele on a new edition of Vitruvius. Daniele was translating the Latin text into Italian, while Palladio drew the accompanying illustrations. The project was interrupted by Daniele’s departure, three
months after his father’s death, to serve as Venetian ambassador in London. Two years later he was recalled to Venice and appointed patriarch-elect of Aquiléia, an important religious office (he never married but it is unclear if he was ordained). He was not required to live in Aquiléia, at the eastern borders of the Republic, so for the next few years, as the translation of Vitruvius, and the design of the villa, took shape, he and Palladio were often together. Daniele was seven years younger than Palladio, but he seems to have assumed Trissino’s role of patron and intellectual mentor. The pair traveled to Venice, where the Barbaros had a house; in 1552, they went to Trento, where Daniele was the official Venetian delegate to the final session of the great religious council. Two years later they visited Rome.

When Barbaro and Palladio went to Rome they studied the antiquities—with an eye to Vitruvius—but they also toured two modern country houses, collecting ideas for the planned villa at Maser. The Villa Giulia, which Pope Julius III was building on the outskirts of Rome, had supplanted the Villa Madama as the most elaborate and beautiful house in the city, designed by no fewer than three architects: Vasari, Giacomo da Vignola, and Bartolomeo Ammanati. Its most striking feature was an elaborate garden whose centerpiece was a nymphaeum, or fanciful semicircular loggia, replete with stucco sculptures and fountains. The second project, also under construction, was equally spectacular. It was a country retreat at Tivoli, about twenty miles east of Rome, belonging to Cardinal Ippolito d’Este, a friend of Daniele Barbaro (who dedicated his translation of Vitruvius to the cardinal). At Tivoli, Barbaro and Palladio were given a tour of the elaborate water gardens by d’Este’s architect, Pirro Ligorio.

In 1556, Barbaro’s Vitruvius was published in Venice—to
great acclaim. He acknowledged Palladio’s contribution in a high-blown tribute:

For the important illustrations I used the work of Messer Andrea Palladio, architect of Vicenza, who, of all those whom I have known personally or by hearsay, has, according to the judgment of excellent men, best understood the true meaning of architecture and vastly profited from it, having not only grasped its most beautiful and subtle principles but having also put them into practice, both in his beautiful and exquisite drawings of plans, elevations, and sections and in the execution and erection of many and superb buildings, both in his own country [Vicenza] and elsewhere; works which vie with the ancients, which enlighten his contemporaries, and will arouse the admiration of those yet to come.
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The construction of the Barbaro villa began soon after the book appeared.
³
The reasons for the long gestation may have been professional demands on the brothers’ time, or simply lack of building funds, for they were not independently wealthy. The villa’s protracted design was likely also caused by their architectural ambition. Daniele took his avocation seriously. When he commissioned his portrait—now in Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum—he donned his bishop’s robes but had himself portrayed surrounded by his architectural books and sitting at the base of a classical column. Marc’antonio, an amateur sculptor, also had a passion for architecture, so much so that he was later nicknamed “The Builder.”
^I
The Barbaro brothers were connoisseurs and Palladio’s friends, but this did not necessarily make them ideal clients. I can well imagine them bombarding him with suggestions, especially Daniele, who had considerable architectural experience. In Padua, he had laid out the university’s new botanical garden—one of the first in Europe. In Venice, he had planned the iconographic program for the ceiling of the main council chamber in the Doge’s Palace, and personally designed a palazzo on the island of Murano (probably with the help of either Palladio or Sanmicheli).
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He also knew many architects and it has been suggested that he canvassed their advice about his proposed villa.
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Such opinionated clients, no matter how well-intentioned, considerably complicate an architect’s job. Palladio later wrote that architecture was a “profession everyone is convinced they know something about.”
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He must have been thinking of the Barbaro brothers.

T
HE
V
ILLA
B
ARBARO IS MASTERFULLY INTEGRATED INTO ITS SITE AT THE FOOTHILLS OF THE
D
OLOMITIC
A
LPS.

The villa at Maser was, in any case, a challenging project. The site, a hill called Castellano (Lord of the manor), contained a medieval fortified house.
⁷
Evidence of old fireplaces in the attic of the
casa del padrone
indicates that Palladio reused the exterior walls of the old structure in their entirety. This meant that he had to find a way to accommodate the space needs of not one but two households within the tight dimensions of the relatively small
castello.

The
castello
was built into the slope, and he took advantage of the situation to open the upper floor of the house to a large rear terrace cut into the hill, a landscape feature no doubt influenced by the stepped gardens of Tivoli. The villa at Maser had water features, too. The terrace was the site of a natural spring that fed a fountain that “forms a little lake that serves as a fishpond,” he wrote. “Having left this spot, the water runs to the kitchen and then, having irrigated the gardens to right and left of the road
which gently ascends and leads to the building, forms two fishponds with their horse troughs on the public road; from there it goes off to water the orchard, which is very large and full of superb fruit and various wild plants.”
⁸
The troughs are gone, but they must have been located in the semicircle where I am parked.

The formal approach road is still here, but is permanently gated. Leaving my car, I walk down the highway and follow the signs to the side entrance. The large parking lot near the house is starting to fill up with cars and a couple of tour buses, and there is already a crowd of people milling about in front of a locked gate. I usually wander through Palladio’s villas alone, but clearly that will not be the case today.

A custodian opens the gate and the crowd swarms into a small courtyard at the eastern end of the house. From this vantage point, it is obvious that the giant curved brackets of the pavilion are nothing more than screens masking a small box-like structure that in a modern building might house an air-conditioning unit. Judging from the rows of small holes, it’s a dovecote. Pigeons were a familiar sight on
terraferma
farms since they provided food, fertilizer, and communications—homing pigeons could reach Venice from Maser in less than an hour. The contrast between the grand architectural gesture in front and the utilitarian pigeon coop behind reminds me of false-fronted buildings of the Old West.

A tall arched opening signals the entrance to the arcaded loggia. People are pushing their way in and lining up to buy tickets, so I walk around to the front of the villa until things settle down. The upper part of the pavilion contains a giant zodiac dial, reflecting Daniele’s interest in astronomy (the corresponding face of the other pavilion has a sundial). His other interest, Roman antiquity, is expressed by the plaster statues that occupy
the niches in the piers. First dour Charon, the god of death, then Flora, the Roman goddess of flowers, next the huntress Diana with her dog, and finally wily Mercury, messenger of the gods and patron of merchants. The antique theme of gods and goddesses is echoed in the
mascheroni,
or masks, that adorn the keystone. It was long thought that the sculptural plasterwork that abounds in this villa was the work of Alessandro Vittoria, an artist who frequently collaborated with Palladio, but many historians now credit Marc’antonio Barbaro.
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That seems likely—some of the modeling is distinctly amateurish.

The irrepressible Marc’antonio (who was in between postings when the villa was being completed) did not miss a chance to practice his art. Probably under his brother’s direction, he crammed the tympanum of the pediment of the
casa del padrone
with symbolic statuary. The composition is dominated by an imperial double eagle adorned with the Barbaro coat of arms and surmounted by a papal tiara. Two smaller crests refer to the families of their mother and of Marc’antonio’s wife. The male figures astride dragonlike dolphins must be the brothers, although they are fondling naked buxom maidens, which seems inappropriate for Daniele the churchman. Yet the fraternal allusion is unavoidable. The frieze, which is broken in two by a garlanded cornucopia, bears a shorthand inscription
DAN. BARBARUS. PA. AQUIL.
(Daniele Barbaro, Patriarch of Aquiléia) under one figure, and
ET.MARCUS.ANT.FR. FRANC. F.
(and his brother Marc’antonio, sons of Francesco) under the other. Each brother grasps one horn of an ox skull that is the centerpiece of this cheerfully pagan composition.

Ox skulls, or bucrania, were a common classical motif, but one that Palladio rarely used in villas. The striking giant brackets that recall the scrolls on the façade of Alberti’s Santa Maria Novella in Florence, which Palladio probably had seen, are likewise unusual. So are the tall arched windows that interrupt the entablature. The window frames are more delicately modeled and the façades are more articulated with moldings than other Palladio villas. Such stylistic anomalies have caused some historians to question whether the Villa Barbaro was entirely Palladio’s creation.
¹⁰
In fact, despite the uniformity of Palladian houses in Britain and America, there is no such thing as a typical Palladio villa. Some of his designs incorporate temple fronts, some do not; some have pedimented windows, some have plain openings; some porticoes are supported by elaborate Corinthian columns, others by unadorned piers. His fertile imagination brimmed with ideas. In a later villa for Count Marc’antonio Sarego of Verona, for example, he struck out in an entirely new direction and dispensed with temple fronts and porticoes entirely, instead planning the two-story house around courtyards. As published in
Quattro libri,
the house consisted of two back-to-back courtyards: one enclosed, for residential functions; the other, U-shaped, for farm use. Only a part of the first courtyard was built, but its colonnade is astonishing. “The columns are Ionic and made of unpolished stone,” Palladio wrote, “as seems appropriate here, since farms seem to require things which are rather plain and simple instead of refined.”
¹¹
The giant stone columns (Sarego owned a quarry), which Palladio had already used once before in the Antonini house in Udine, are composed of rusticated drums of different thicknesses, piled crudely one on top of the other. They look like stacks of huge stone doughnuts.