The Perfect House: A Journey with Renaissance Master Andrea Palladio (26 page)

Palladio’s strict interpretation of the
all’antica
style was a novelty in Venice. While Vasari, a sophisticated Florentine, found the convent “marvelous” and “the most notable” of Palladio’s
projects in the city, the plain, almost ascetic style did not appeal to the average Venetian, judging from a piece of popular doggerel that has survived from this period.
¹³

Non va il Palladio per male a puttane;

Che se tal volta pur gli suol andare

Lo fa, perchè le esorta a fabbricare

Un atrio antico in mezzo Carampane.
¹⁴

Palladio does not go to whores for iniquity;

But even if at times he plays the rake,

’Tis but to encourage them to make

In mid-Carampane, an atrium of antiquity.

What is striking about the verse, which attests to Palladio’s celebrity, is that though it lewdly ridicules his obsession with ancient architecture—the Carampane was Venice’s brothel district—it does so with affection. “A nature so amiable and gentle, that it renders him well-beloved with everyone,” observed Vasari.
¹⁵

Palladio’s next major commission came from yet another of Venice’s many religious orders. San Francesco della Vigna was a Franciscan church in the eastern district that had been built by Sansovino thirty-five years earlier, but whose front façade remained unfinished due to disagreements between the various sponsors of the church. Finally, the responsibility for completing the work fell on the patriarch of Aquiléia, Giovanni Grimani. Undoubtedly influenced by Daniele Barbaro, his appointed successor, and perhaps also encouraged by his young cousin Cornalia Grimani (soon to be Emo), he dismissed Sansovino and gave the job to Palladio.

The imposing façade of Istrian stone facing the
campo
has
nothing to do with Sansovino’s church—it is all Palladio. This was his opportunity to shine, and he made the most of it. He set out to solve a problem that had bedeviled Renaissance architects for a hundred years: how to adapt ancient Roman temple architecture to a Christian church. Architectural propriety required that there be a relationship between the façade and what lay behind it, yet it was unclear how a classical temple front could be successfully combined with a tall nave flanked by lower side aisles. Using his knowledge of antiquity and his extensive experience designing villa porticoes, Palladio resolved the apparent contradiction. He juxtaposed two overlapping temple fronts of different sizes and scales. A pediment supported on four giant Corinthian columns signified the tall nave, and a lower pediment, carried by shorter columns, signified the aisles (which in this case were actually chapels). The columns of San Francesco are engaged—that is, they are three-quarters round and their connection to the wall is concealed behind the inward curve of their shaft, which makes them appear freestanding. The result is a modulated façade of great sculptural richness but one that is also classically correct, with the large and small orders skillfully combined atop a tall base. While architects since Alberti had been adapting ancient Roman architecture to church façades, no one had ever done it with such authority and aplomb.

Construction started immediately, and when Vasari visited Venice the base was already finished. San Francesco was an important project for Palladio, but it was only a façade. His real breakthrough came when the Benedictines, obviously pleased with their refectory and perhaps galvanized by the boldness of his design for San Francesco, asked him to build an entirely new monastic church to replace the old one at San Giorgio Maggiore. A large church, with grand interior spaces—and an immense
building budget—was a true test of a Renaissance architect’s powers. Vasari saw the model and predicted, correctly, that the new church “will prove a stupendous and most lovely work.”
¹⁶
The church combined Palladio’s interest in antiquity—the nave resembles a Roman basilica—with a richness and magnificence, inside and out, that all Venetians could admire.

San Giorgio catapulted Palladio into the first rank. As his religious work in Venice increased, he accepted fewer and fewer villa commissions; while he designed fourteen country houses in the 1550s, there were only four in the 1560s. The munificent Leonardo Mocenigo commissioned a second villa, and Palladio produced a similar two-story design for Count Annibale Sarego of Verona, Marc’antonio’s brother. For some reason, neither house was built. There was a third two-story house, this one with curious
castello
towers, designed for Count Giovanni Valmarana, for whose brother Palladio was building a palazzo in Vicenza.
^III
All three of these villa designs are rather stodgy, with imposing two-story porticoes but unrefined plans. I have the impression that Palladio accepted these commissions more out of a sense of obligation to faithful clients, or their brothers. His attention was elsewhere. I cannot imagine that, approaching sixty, he was unhappy to give up the hard travel associated with building houses in remote rural locations in exchange for a more settled life in the city. Yet during that eventful and busy decade he found time for one final country-house commission—his last villa.

^I
Frank Lloyd Wright used a house-planning grid—usually two feet by four feet—that was inscribed in the concrete floor-slab; R. M. Schindler, who practiced in California in the 1930s, used a four-foot house module laid out on the building site and keyed to the drawings.

^II
Leonardo Emo’s request was honored for more than four hundred years. In 2001, in what must have been a wrenching decision for the Emo descendants, the villa was put up for sale.

^III
The Villa Valmarana at Lisiera, outside Vicenza, still exists, although in much altered form, having been almost completely rebuilt after suffering damage in the Second World War (yet worth a visit for its evocative setting).

he unpaved lane—a track, really—skirts the flank of Monte Bèrico, part of the Bèrici hills that dominate the southern outskirts of Vicenza. The slopes are largely without buildings, so it feels like countryside, although my destination is “less than a quarter of a mile away from the city,” as Palladio wrote—a short walk from my hotel.
¹
I round a corner and the domed silhouette of a building materializes out of the morning haze. The villa sits on high ground, lightly shrouded by bare tree branches, its architectural details blurred.

The lane joins a paved road and the building disappears from view behind a high stone wall. Halfway down the steep hill a large formal gateway signals the entrance. A caretaker lets me in. The gate is at the bottom of a ramped drive that is cut into the hill like a long slot, defined by two retaining walls, one of which is actually the side of a farm building. The gravel carriageway is edged by cobblestoned walks. The villa looms dramatically at the top of the drive. It has the usual Palladio accouterments: a broad staircase leading to a portico; a tall main floor; an abbreviated attic; statues on the parapet. Its exceptional feature is a squat dome that caps the red-clay-tiled roof.

It is only when I reach the top of the drive that the house exerts its full impact. The portico atop a broad staircase has counterparts on the other two sides and, although I can’t see it
from here, on the back as well. This square house has not one but four temple fronts! Palladio succinctly explained his reasoning:

The site is one of the most pleasing and delightful that one could find because it is on top of a small hill which is easy to ascend; on one side it is bathed by the Bacchiglione, a navigable river, and on the other is surrounded by other pleasant hills which resemble a vast theater and are completely cultivated and abound with wonderful fruit and excellent vines; so, because it enjoys the most beautiful vistas on every side, some of which are restricted, others more extensive, and yet others which end at the horizon, loggias have been built on all four sides; under the floor of these loggias and the hall are the rooms for the convenience and use of the family.
²

V
ILLA
R
OTONDA

Simple enough, yet the effect is extraordinary. The location is a low knoll that has been transformed into a grassy podium by a surrounding retaining wall. The land drops away on all sides. The vistas, while hardly as bucolic as in Palladio’s day, are still impressive. Since the house itself is raised on a tall basement, it looms prominently against the sky, the top of the bulging dome creating the effect of one hill on top of another. Palladio wrote that he provided the house with four loggias to take advantage of the views, but that simple explanation is disingenuous. For one thing, La Rotonda is actually oriented not to the views but to the sun; the house is turned precisely forty-five degrees to the north-south axis, ensuring that even in winter all rooms receive some sun. For another, he could have responded to the views in different ways. He could have made the front more prominent than the other sides, or combined projecting and recessed porticoes, in the manner of the Villa Cornaro, or done a dozen different things. Instead, he made the four sides identical.

Palladio had been thinking of such a house for a long time. Twenty-five years earlier, at the beginning of his career, he had made a drawing of a square villa with a central
sala
rising up into a domed lantern, a roof structure with windows on four sides.
³
Although the façades in the drawing are not identical, the tall lantern is symmetrical, with four pediments above four thermal windows. In a second version, he made the
sala
octagonal, perhaps influenced by a square house with an octagonal
sala
and two loggias that was illustrated in Serlio’s treatise.
⁴

For years, Palladio had no occasion to build a domed house, but the idea stuck. He returned to it in a project begun in the late 1550s, a villa for the Trissino brothers, which has already been mentioned. The site, which Palladio called “stunning,” was a hilltop near the village of Meledo, on the Guà River. “At the top of the hill should be the circular hall, surrounded by rooms,” he wrote, adding that “because each face of the house has wonderful views, there are four Corinthian loggias.”
⁵
The loggias, however, were not identical; two were projecting, and two were recessed. Moreover, the villa had a definite front, facing a huge forecourt defined by curved loggias and
barchesse
that cascaded down the hill. Had it been built, it would have been Palladio’s most spectacular villa; the splendid drawing in
Quattro libri
could be a movie set for
Ben-Hur.
But the ambitious project was abandoned in 1563, with only a part of a
barchessa
completed, when one of the brothers died. Yet another precursor of the domed house on Monte Bèrico was Palladio’s historical reconstruction of an ancient sanctuary at Praeneste, which he drew in the late 1560s. The hilly site outside Rome was covered in ruins, terraces, the remains of colonnaded structures, and traces of a small temple at the very summit. He imagined a sort of wedding cake of colonnades and loggias, surmounted by a circular domed temple with four identical Ionic porticoes.
⁶
Palladio was fascinated by circular temples and illustrated several in
Quattro libri,
including Bramante’s beautiful chapel, called the Tempietto, overlooking Rome from Montoria, the only modern building in his treatise, apart from his own work. Thus in a variety of projects the images of domed circular buildings on hilltop sites simmered in his imagination.