The Perfect House: A Journey with Renaissance Master Andrea Palladio (32 page)

This accommodation is a matter of scale, not of size. Although size and scale are often used interchangeably in popular speech, their meanings in architecture are distinct. To say that a door is “big” describes its size; to say that a door has “big scale” says nothing about its actual dimensions, but rather characterizes its impact on us—it
looks
big. Scale has to do with relative size: how large or small is the door frame compared to the surrounding wall, how heavy or light is the door handle compared to the door. It is easy to ignore scale, particularly today when so many building components are standardized. But adjusting the size of a baseboard, say, to the size of a room, or the proportion of a window to the proportion of a wall, is one of the simplest way to achieve architectural distinction.

Palladio had this to say about scale: “Beauty will derive from a graceful shape and the relationship of the whole to the parts, and of the parts among themselves and to the whole, because buildings must appear to be like complete and well-defined bodies, of which one member matches another and all the members are necessary for what is required.”
¹⁰
That is why his drawings of ancient buildings were full of dimensions. It was not only the actual size of things that concerned him, but also
the correct relationship between the different parts. Once this relationship was established, any element of classical architecture could be proportionately enlarged or reduced. Corinthian columns could rise the full height of the nave at the church of Il Redentore, support lower arches over side chapels, and also carry miniature pediments in the altarpiece.

The harmonious combination of different scales sets classical architecture apart from the preceding Gothic style, which used the pointed arch motif at a single scale.
¹¹
The rediscovery of scale was one of the great accomplishments of the Renaissance, and Palladio, like his contemporaries, manipulated scale to produce different effects. Classical elements such as columns could be made larger or smaller, more or less delicate, more or less monumental, to alter the atmosphere of a building or a room. For example, the Saraceno loggia is wider than the loggia of the Villa Godi, and has correspondingly larger piers, imposts, and base moldings. But whereas the Godi loggia recedes (literally, by being recessed into the house), the Saraceno loggia asserts itself by jutting forward about six inches from the façade. Palladio further emphasized this effect by creating an incised masonry pattern—now almost worn away—on the front of the loggia, but leaving the walls of the house plain to create a contrast.
¹²
On the other hand, assertive as the loggia is, its scale is commensurate with the scale of the façade, which is why we don’t feel overwhelmed; it’s big, but it doesn’t feel big.

V
ILLA
S
ARACENO

The presence of small and large scales, and the rapport between the parts, accounts, I think, for the sense of well-being that the villa conveys. As Palladio beautifully put it, he aimed to build “in such a way and with such proportions that together all the parts convey to the eyes of onlookers a sweet harmony.”
¹³
This is not exciting architecture; indeed, it is the opposite of exciting—it is composed, serene, ordered. The Renaissance produced many great architects—Brunelleschi was the most daring, Bramante the most inventive, Giulio the most expressive, Michelangelo the most iconoclastic—but in his calm, considered way, Palladio has been more influential than any of them. Generation after generation of architects, professionals and amateurs, aristocrats and commoners, have come to the Veneto, seen his architecture, and fallen under his spell.

Palladio is an architect whose personal style became a Style. The eighteenth-century Scottish architect Robert Adam is another rare example; so is the nineteenth-century American master H. H. Richardson. Palladio was so widely imitated not because he was easy to copy but because the principles that underlie his style were easy to understand, and because his classically inspired vocabulary of architectural elements was rich enough to provide his followers with the means to express their own ideas, whether they were Inigo Jones, James Gibbs, or Thomas Jefferson. Thanks to this suppleness, Palladio’s style returned not once but several times, and will likely do so again in the future.

Palladio’s architecture is a combination of mathematics, especially geometry, scale, and proportion. At the same time, a Palladio villa is not a theorem, or a poem, or a painting—it’s a building. It is beautiful, but it is practical, too. It is not an abstract creation; it is made of specific materials: smooth reddish
battuto
on the floor, scribed
intonaco
on the exterior, carved stone frames around the doors and windows. Palladio loved to build. I imagine him in the attic, inspecting the huge timber trusses, or walking into the
sala,
fondly running his hands over the stone door frames. His buildings are so palpable, so real. Wotton was wrong about that; we
do
need stuff as well as art “to satisfy our greatest fancy.” Perhaps that is Palladio’s real secret: his equilibrium, his sweet sense of harmony. He pleases the mind as well as the eye. His sturdy houses, rooted in their sites, radiate order and balance, which makes them both of this world and otherworldly. Although they take us out of ourselves, they never let us forget who and what we are. They really are perfect.

T
HE
V
ILLA
S
ARACENO, ONE OF
P
ALLADIO’S SMALLEST AND SIMPLEST HOUSES, PERFECTLY COMBINES BEAUTY WITH FUNCTIONALITY AND SOUND CONSTRUCTION.

 • • • 

The afternoon is drawing to a close. I lock the
sala
doors—a complicated system of bolts and latches—and go back into the dining room. Embers are smoldering among the ashes of the burnt-out fire. The light has changed in the course of the day and the room has a listless quality. As I gather my notes I hear the sound of a car outside, the slamming of a door, then voices. The others are back. I go outside to welcome them home.

^I
Perhaps Giacomo engaged the Pedemuro workshop, where Andrea di Pietro was still working as a stonemason, for the window arrangement of the Palazzo delle Trombe anticipates the Villa Godi.

^II
Considering that the treatise was compiled over a span of fifteen years, such discrepancies are exceedingly rare—I found only two other dimensional errors among the villas: the larger rooms of the Villa Cornaro are described as a square and three-quarters but the dimensions are 16 by 26
¹
/
₂
feet; the
sala
of the unbuilt Villa Mocenigo at Dolo is described as two and a half squares but is shown as 30 by 76 feet.

^III
I surmise that Palladio’s original idea was to have a frieze only in the large rooms, and that it was Pietro or Euriemma who added it to the
sala.

About a year after I finished this book, it came to my attention that an old retaining wall in our garden had started to bulge and sag and was in need of repair. Made of stones laid atop each other without mortar, it had to be dismantled and rebuilt. I was not up to the job—the wall is 150 feet long—so I hired a professional to do the work. Over the next four weeks, watching Brian Corrigan and his assistant labor in my garden, I realized that I had not paid enough attention to Andrea Palladio’s original calling. Of course, I had understood that the nearly two decades of his youth and early manhood spent working as a stonemason had provided him with useful knowledge of the building crafts. But I had not considered how the actual occupation may have affected him.

I had always imagined Palladio as he appears in the statue beside the Basilica in Vicenza—a pensive scholar, albeit a self-educated one. But, as was obvious from watching Brian at work, handling heavy stones is an intensely physical activity. (So is wielding a stone-carver’s mallet and chisel.) However refined and courtly Palladio may have become under Trissino’s tutelage, and however gentlemanly he appears in Maganza’s portrait, he could not have been a delicate sort—he must have had a rugged and powerful physique. His active and extremely productive life should be seen in that light.

The work of a stonemason involves strenuous activity, but
the pace is stop-and-go, very different from the steady toil of a plasterer or a painter. Brian spent a lot of time considering the piece of wall he was working on, examining the different stones that were laid out on the grass like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. It was only after careful scrutiny that he would bend down to heft a stone into place. He did everything calmly and carefully, reinforcing my impression of Palladio as a deliberate sort of person who approached problems in an unhurried, almost ponderous manner. Thus he bided his time during the Basilica competition, waiting until the right moment before submitting the ideas over which he had evidently labored a long time.

When Brian and I discussed how the wall should be rebuilt, he said that the original wall had been placed directly on the ground, and that before rebuilding it he wanted to add a foundation of crushed stone. Wouldn’t that add to the cost, I asked. Yes, he said, but if he didn’t do it, in another fifty years the wall would start moving again. His evident conviction made me realize that the subject wasn’t open to discussion—this was how it had to be done. Palladio may have given “the most intense pleasure to the Gentleman and Lords with whom he dealt,” but I wonder if stubbornness wasn’t also a part of his character. Not the willfulness of the self-involved architect—“it must be done the way I want”—but rather the considered but obstinate attitude of the experienced craftsman—“this is the right way to do it.”

A stonemason contends against gravity and time, which are unrelenting. A badly plastered wall can be patched up, peeling paint can be scraped and re-covered, but a poorly built stone wall eventually will collapse. The stonemason is an innate conservative—or, perhaps, stonemasonry is a craft that attracts men of conservative temperament. The architect Palladio was
innovative, sometimes unusually so, but his innovation was always in the context of the tried and true, for when Palladio found something that worked, he stuck to it. His invention was never gratuitous or capricious. And the evidence of superior building is in the villas themselves, standing strong after almost five hundred years.

 • • • 

Like so many who have visited Palladio’s villas, I was attracted by their somber beauty and chaste geometry. But since writing this book, I have discovered a more individual and personal connection. I was researching some family background and came across a surprising coincidence, something I had vaguely known but entirely forgotten: both of my parents grew up in houses built in the Palladian style. My mother’s family lived in the center of Warsaw in a villa built in 1860 by the Italian architect, Francesco Maria Lanci. On the hundred-foot-long street façade is a tall main floor punctuated by a row of windows with pediments supported by Composite pilasters. A lightly rusticated base indicates the ground floor.

The country house where my father spent much of his childhood is in a village called Lusławice, in southern Poland on the Dunajec River. It did not belong to my grandfather; he was merely a houseguest—for more than twenty years. The house was a
dwór,
or manor house, built in the early nineteenth century. It is a long low structure, without a basement or attic, but with an elegant central pedimented portico supported by four Doric columns. The portico is distinctly Palladian, of course, but even more Palladian is the combination of a rustic structure with an elegant classical appendage.

I felt at home in the Villa Saraceno, for Palladio’s architecture was not only a familiar part of my culture and education, it was also in my family history. The universal appeal of Palladio’s villas
suggests that for many others, too they are not simply beautiful old houses, but in an immediate way their considered proportions and serene spaces provide a palpable connection to the past, bringing history to us, and us into history.