The Perfect House: A Journey with Renaissance Master Andrea Palladio (30 page)

A
PAGE FROM
Q
UATTRO LIBRI,
V
ILLA
S
ARACENO

The Villa Saraceno has a checkered history. Biagio died in 1562 and left the house to Leonardo, the younger of his two sons. When Leonardo died without an heir, the property passed to his brother Pietro, clearly his father’s second choice. Something of a ne’er-do-well, Pietro fathered several illegitimate sons, but since Biagio’s will specified that only lawful offspring could own the villa, the house was inherited by Pietro’s daughter Euriemma. Thus the villa passed to her husband’s family, the Caldognos (whose ancestor had also built a Palladio villa). A later Caldogno widow, Lucietta, who ran the estate for thirty years
(1650–80), altered the east wing to provide rooms for her two sons. Lucietta’s descendants rented the house and fields to tenant farmers, and finally sold the property at auction in 1838. After changing hands several more times, the estate became a dairy farm, ceasing operation at the end of the Second World War. Housing was in short supply in postwar Italy, and the villa and its adjoining farm buildings were crudely subdivided and turned into a tenement, housing as many as thirty people. Thirty-five years later, abused and run into the ground, the villa was finally abandoned, and for fifteen years stood empty, at the mercy of the elements. The Landmark Trust bought the property and spent five years restoring the building. Since 1994, the Villa Saraceno has been occupied by scores of delighted visitors, judging from the comments in the guest book.

I read this potted history in a scrapbook I found in the living room. The villa has a small library that includes several guidebooks, the inevitable Penguin edition of
Death in Venice,
and a beat-up paperback facsimile edition of Isaac Ware’s translation of
Quattro libri.
I set Thomas Mann aside for evening reading, and turn to the familiar pages of the famous treatise. It feels strange to be looking at a floor plan of the Villa Saraceno—as I sit inside the villa. Palladio listed Saraceno first among the villas belonging to “some gentlemen of the
terraferma,
” perhaps because it was the smallest and simplest of his published designs. The house is about seventy-five feet long and fifty feet wide, half the size of the Villa Pisani, which Palladio had completed a few years earlier. The straightforward plan is simple but practical: a south-facing loggia leading to a
sala
with two rooms on each side, a small one in the front and a larger one in the rear. The two larger rooms—today the living room and dining room—are accessible directly from the
sala,
and lead to the smaller rooms. The smaller rooms are at the front of the house, but
unlike the Villa Emo, they do not have doors leading to the loggia, which makes them both more private and warmer in the winter. The woodcut in
Quattro libri
shows the house facing a
cortile
formed by two impressive L-shaped
barchesse
with round dovecote towers at the corners, gay pennants at their peaks. “On each side there are all the necessary places for the use of a villa,” Palladio wrote. But that was wishful thinking—the noble
cortile
was never built. In the nineteenth century, influenced by a neoclassical revival, an owner added a
barchessa
approximating Palladio’s design, but since it was built only on the east side, it has left the house with an endearingly lopsided appearance. The
barchessa
connects the villa to several smaller outbuildings of medieval vintage that were part of the original farmyard.

The room in which I’m working, on the east side of the
sala,
is the dining room. The first time we ate here was magical. It was the evening that we arrived, and we’d asked the custodian, Lorella Graham, to arrange to have dinner ready after we got in from the airport. We were still unpacking when a young couple showed up carrying boxes of groceries and started working in the kitchen. The food was simple, and delicious: a radicchio risotto, sautéed turkey breasts in a lemony sauce, a salad, and cooked pears. We ate at the long table by the flickering light of candles and the glow of the fire. Outside, the winter wind drove the rain against the closed window shutters. We felt like magnificent
signori.

This room is not exactly as Palladio designed it. Lucietta Caldogno made changes in the mid-seventeenth century, and a hundred years later the ceiling was lowered slightly and a stone stair added to reach a new upstairs bedroom. Since there was no trace of the original rooms, the modern restoration preserved these alterations. The large raised fireplace is thought to be original, however, signaling the longtime use of this room as a
kitchen (the modern kitchen is next door in the
barchessa
). The kitchen was inside the house because, despite Palladio’s claim that “the cellars are underneath,” the Villa Saraceno never had a usable basement. As he did in most of his early villas, Palladio buried the basement about four feet below ground level, but when the first portion (under the room in which I’m sitting) was built, it flooded—he had underestimated the height of the groundwater. Reluctant to raise the basement, which would have increased the cost and altered the external appearance, he continued with the construction but filled the remaining spaces inside the foundation walls with rubble. Thus most of the main floor rests on solid earth. I examined the small section of the basement that was finished, accessible only by an external door. It has long stone cribs, perhaps used for growing mushrooms. Although today the vaulted space is dry, before electric sump pumps it must have been damp for much of the year.

It is not yet noon but I’m hungry—I’ve still not adjusted to the transatlantic time change. The kitchen is next door, a room about twenty feet square, with large windows overlooking the covered arcade of the
barchessa.
This was probably the original location of the kitchen, before it was moved into the house proper. Of course, in 1550 it would have had merely a large fireplace and worktables. Today, a long U-shaped counter lines the walls on one side of the room, opposite a wooden table with cane-seated chairs. The kitchen is fully equipped with a hooded gas range, ovens, and two dishwashers (although the villa itself sleeps five, the renovated outbuildings can accommodate a dozen people). No attempt has been made to hide the modern appliances, or to historicize the cabinetwork; the countertops and a backsplash are plain white ceramic tile. Dishes and glassware are stored in a sideboard instead of in overhead cupboards. The walls, as elsewhere in the house, are white-painted plaster;
the ceilings, wooden beams; the floor is rough brick. The overall effect is rustic and informal, sympathetic to Palladio without actually being Palladian.

I take my sandwich and a glass of beer back to the refectory table, throw another log on the fire, and return to
Quattro libri.
The short text describing the Villa Saraceno is Palladio’s usual no-nonsense boilerplate:

At a place in the Vicentine, called Finale, is the following building belonging to Signor BIAGIO SARRACENO [
sic
]. The floor of the rooms is raised five foot above the ground; the larger rooms are one square and five eighths in length, and in height equal to their breadth, and with flat ceilings. This height also continues to the hall. The small rooms, near the loggia, are vaulted; the height of the vaults is equal to that of the rooms. The cellars are underneath, and the granaries above, which take up the whole body of the house. The kitchens are without the house, but so joined that they are convenient. On each side there are all the necessary places for the use of a villa.
⁴

The illustrations in Isaac Ware’s translation were copied from the original woodcuts and include the dimensions of the main rooms. Here is an opportunity to confirm if the actual sizes correspond to the numbers in
Quattro libri.
I fetch my tape measure and start in the small room next to the dining room, which is our bedroom. The commodious room, dominated by a tall hooded fireplace, easily accommodates a bedstead, an immense wardrobe, a chest of drawers, and a couple of armchairs. According to
Quattro libri,
the dimensions should be 12 Vicentine feet wide and 16 feet long (one of Palladio’s favorite proportions, a square and a third). Measuring and converting into Vicentine feet, I confirm that these are almost exactly the
dimensions of the room as built. The text of
Quattro libri
specifically describes the “larger rooms”—the dining room and living room—as “one square and five eighths,” that is, 16 by 26 Vicentine feet, but the dimensions on the plan are 16 by 26
¹
/
₂
. It appears that Palladio, or his son Silla, who wrote many of the captions in
Quattro libri,
either made a mistake in the text, or gave erroneous information to the printer who cut the wood blocks.
^II
Probably the latter, since my measurement shows the rooms to be precisely 16 by 26 Vicentine feet.

This leaves one puzzle. The square and five-eighths proportion that Palladio specified—and built—is
not
one of Vitruvius’s five recommended room shapes. This piques my interest, and I methodically go through the twenty-three villas in
Quattro libri.
Of the ten villas with 16-foot-wide rectangular rooms, half follow Vitruvius—that is, they are either 24 Vicentine feet long (a square and a half) or 26
¹
/
₂
feet long (a square and two-thirds, rounded off). The rest are 26, 27, or 28 Vicentine feet long. Since it is difficult for the human eye—even Palladio’s expert eye—to appreciate such small differences, and since all these rooms are presumably equally beautiful, the inescapable conclusion is that while their general proportions are important, their precise dimensions don’t really matter.

Heresy? Not really. Much has been written about the mathematics of Palladio’s room proportions. But it’s one thing to analyze a room using a floor plan from
Quattro libri,
and quite another to be in the room itself. When I woke up this morning,
my bedroom was darkened by the closed shutters that allow only cracks of daylight to enter. The blurry outline of the walls and ceiling were barely discernible. Not wishing to wake Shirley, I tiptoed out. Empty wineglasses littered the refectory table, and the smell of burnt wood hung in the air. The
battuto
was cold on my bare feet. The dining room, so cozy and convivial the evening before, seemed abandoned and inhospitable. I opened the tall window shutters, which helped to breathe a little life into the place.

The experience of a room depends on so many things; materials, for example. The floor of the Saraceno living room is brick-red tile, the walls are rough white plaster (surprisingly, some of it original), the wooden ceiling is dark brown, almost black. If the floor were linoleum, the walls plywood, and the ceiling acoustic tile, obviously this would be a different, and considerably less agreeable, room, notwithstanding its identical proportions. It would also be different without the prominent, six-foot-wide frescoed frieze that covers the upper parts of the walls. The frescoes were commissioned by either Pietro Saraceno or his daughter Euriemma in the 1590s; the artist has not been identified. The band of mythological figures significantly affects the room, enlivening the space and altering the perceived proportions of the walls.

V
ILLA
S
ARACENO LIVING ROOM

A broad wooden molding, similar to a picture rail, defines the bottom edge of the frescoed band. The interiors of Palladio’s villas are typically Spartan with simple, almost rustic details; there are no baseboards at Saraceno, for example, and doors and windows are straightforward and unaffected in design. This makes details, such as the fresco molding, the carved stone surround of the fireplace, and the attractive little stone seats under the living room windows, arresting. That is, they catch the eye, and in the process they change the way the room is perceived. More, or different, details would likewise change the Saraceno living room.

The east and west rooms of a villa were commonly referred to as
a mattina
(in the morning) and
a sera
(in the afternoon), recognizing the movement of the sun. The same room bathed in bright sunlight or illuminated with flickering candlelight assumes a different character. At the Villa Saraceno, for example, the living room is bright and sunny
a sera,
and in the evening it is almost cavelike. The dining room, which has north-facing windows, only comes into its own in the evening.

Although I am skeptical that Palladio’s secret lies in mathematically
precise dimensions, there is no doubt that the rooms in the villa are exceptionally pleasing. We all agree on this—this house feels good. It’s hard to pin down exactly why. The peasantlike roughness of the materials contrasting with the elegantly carved stone details has something to do with it; so does the commodiousness of the rooms and their pleasing overall proportions. There must be more to it than that, however. I finally come to the conclusion that what also contributes to the sense of well-being of these rooms is their height: they are extremely tall—nineteen feet according to my measurement. This makes the interior spacious and airy, almost like being outside. At night, with a few candles and the glow of a fire, the ceiling disappears entirely; even during the daytime it is usually outside my cone of vision. The sense of spaciousness is not only, and perhaps not mainly, visual, it is also aural, for tall ceilings affect sound. Under a high ceiling, voices, footsteps, a chair scraping, seem more distant than they really are.
⁵
When I’m talking to Shirley across the table, she’s only five feet away, but I “hear” a larger distance. No wonder that the relatively small Villa Saraceno feels palatial.