The Perfect House: A Journey with Renaissance Master Andrea Palladio

by Rybczynski, Witold

  Praise for The Perfect House

  “Rybczynski learned firsthand what made Palladio’s houses so attractive, so imitated, so perfect—and so could you.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “Insightful, deft . . . an easy-to-follow tour of Palladio’s greatest legacy.”

  —The Seattle Times

  “[A] wonderfully informative and evocative guide to both the elegant rooms of Palladio’s villas and the fascinating history of how a humble stonemason from Padua became one of the most influential architects of all time.”

  —Ross King, author of Brunelleschi’s Dome

  “[A] deeply able and aptly enchanted guide.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “[Rybczynski] is one of our most original, accessible, and stimulating writers on architecture. . . . [The Perfect House] is a small but lasting gift to the reader.”

  —Library Journal

  “Rybczynski leads us through Palladio’s beautiful villas, illuminating each room for its own sake and in the process helping us understand what Palladio thought ‘the perfect house’ was, and where so many of our own ideas on that subject have come from. He puts his great historical and architectural knowledge to work to explain private houses—the small, the intimate, the domestic. The result is a delightful and enlightening book, full of warmth and intelligence.”

  —Cheryl Mendelson, author of Home Comforts

  “Rybczynski has applied all his usual grace, style, and curiosity to explore an important chapter of domestic history.”

  —The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “Evocative, compelling, charming, The Perfect House is the perfect traveling companion.”

  —The New York Times

  “Undoubtedly, this book will be immensely useful as a guide and handbook for anyone planning to make a tour of Palladian villas in Italy. . . . Rybczynski’s clear descriptions of what he sees and his lucid explanations of Palladio’s ideas and methods enable the reader to see and understand the essence of this architect’s accomplishments.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  The Perfect House “will doubtless serve as an amiable and knowledgeable companion for future pilgrims in search of [Palladio’s villas], providing the visitor an evenhanded historical introduction to Palladio and a thoughtful meditation on the extent and sheer complexity of the architect’s continuing presence in the cultural atmosphere.”

  —Dave Hickey, Harper’s

  ANDREA PALLADIO BY GIOVANNI BATTISTA MAGANZA

  (Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura)

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  CONTENTS

  FOREWORD

  I Godi

  II Che Bella Casa

  III The Arched Device

  IV On the Brenta

  V Porticoes

  VI The Brothers Barbaro

  VII An Immensely Pleasing Sight

  VIII Emo

  IX The Last Villa

  X Palladio’s Secret

  AFTERWORD

  THE VILLAS

  GLOSSARY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT WITOLD RYBCZYNSKI

  NOTES

  INDEX

  To Shirley, once more

  For one could not describe as perfect a building which was useful, but only briefly, or one which was inconvenient for a long time, or, being both durable and useful, was not beautiful.

  —ANDREA PALLADIO

  FOREWORD

  he Villa Barbaro in Maser, north of Venice, was my first Palladio villa. It faced south at the top of a gentle slope, overlooking cultivated fields and vineyards. The gable end of the central portion was a delicately modeled temple front consisting of four giant half-columns supporting a pediment filled with sculptural figures. Two long arcades terminating in pavilions adorned with fulsome scrolls created an animated silhouette against a dark tangle of trees. The golden yellow plastered walls glowed in the afternoon sun. Photographs had not prepared me for the real thing; Palladio’s design had the immediacy and freshness of something built the day before yesterday. “You have to see these buildings with your own eyes to realize how good they are,” wrote Goethe, who came upon this architecture when it was already more than two hundred years old. “No reproductions of Palladio’s designs give an adequate idea of the harmony of their dimensions; they must be seen in their actual perspective.”1

  I, too, was smitten. That was in 1985. I wrote a short essay on Palladio, and two years later made some tentative notes for a book.2 The notes were tentative because I was interested in the man as well as his buildings, and although he wrote a famous architectural book, the details of his personal life are sketchy. My editor was supportive but I was not sure exactly how to proceed, and the idea languished. I filed the Palladio notes away under “Ideas for Books” and forgot about them.

  Years later, rummaging through the Ideas file, I came across the Palladio material. It read in part:

  The nineteenth-century discipline of art history applies the techniques of studying painting and sculpture to buildings, that is, it treats them primarily as works of art. But a building, even if it is designed with artistry, is also a product of clients’ demands and economic constraints, of a way of life, of building technology, and of its surroundings. When a Venetian patrician hired Palladio to design a villa, he did so because he wanted a home, and if Palladio’s career flourished, it was because he was specially skilled at fulfilling this requirement.

  It seems to me that it would be possible to learn a great deal about Palladio by looking at his buildings, not with the eye of an art historian but with the eye of an architect, and not only as works of the imagination, but as products of a particular time and place. Such a study would necessarily be impressionistic and personal; it is not intended to turn up new historical evidence (although it would rely on recent scholarly work), but rather to give the reader new insights, a new way of looking at Palladio’s work.

  My interest was rekindled. As it happened, I had just finished a book on architectural style, and style features in Palladio’s work. Also, having recently written a biography, I was more confident about dealing with his life. I was on sabbatical from the university, with a book completed and time on my hands. It was spring and the airlines were offering bargain fares to Europe. It was not a difficult decision; I would take Goethe’s advice, go back to Italy, and see the buildings with my own eyes.

  I had already visited Palladio’s churches in Venice, as well as his palazzos and public buildings in Vicenza—this time I would concentrate on the villas. They dot the flat Veneto plain north of Venice, chiefly clustered around the city of Vicenza. The houses stand at country crossroads, beside rivers and canals, and at the ends of tree-lined drives. Many were built as the seats of country estates, and are still surrounded by farm buildings and agricultural equipment, albeit tractors rather than horse-drawn wagons. In some cases, the rural settings have been transformed into prosaic backdrops of apartment blocks, garages, and suburban gardens. Even in such inhospitable surroundings, the villas maintain their noble presence, their unremitting sense of order, and their beauty. Most are occupied and lovingly maintained, the wear and tear of centuries erased or, at least, concealed. Others, no less captivating, show evidence of careless upkeep:
cracked and peeling plaster, broken steps, sagging shutters. A few are in advanced stages of disrepair with crumbling brickwork and gaping windows. Of the roughly thirty villas attributed to Palladio, seventeen have survived largely intact.I

  To British and American visitors, Palladio’s villas are familiar objects in this foreign terrain. They recall country seats in Kent and Tidewater plantation houses in Virginia. Traces of Palladio are found in famous buildings such as Inigo Jones’s Queen’s House at Greenwich and Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, and in national symbols such as Buckingham Palace and the Mauritshuis in The Hague. The great portico of the White House in Washington, D.C., also owes a debt to Palladio’s villas, as do many American small-town banks and courthouses. That a handful of houses in an obscure corner of the Venetian Republic should have made their presence felt hundreds of years later and halfway across the globe is extraordinary. It makes Palladio the most influential architect in history.

  The villas of Palladio also mark an important moment in the history of the home: the beginning of domestic architecture—that is, the beginning of architects’ interest in the private house. An architectural language previously reserved for temples and palaces was introduced to residential buildings. Much of the potent architectural symbolism associated with the home, whether it is the grand porch of a stockbroker’s mansion in Connecticut or the modest pediment over the front door of an American Colonial bungalow, is derived from these sixteenth-century structures. It all starts with Palladio.

  As the architectural historian James S. Ackerman pointed out, there are really two Palladios.3 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.4 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.”5 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.6 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.

  * * *

  ISeven 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.

  I

  Godi

  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.1 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.

  VILLA GODI

  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.”2 This pragmatic stacking of warehouse and domestic uses originated in Venice, where land was scarce.3 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.4 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 foun
dations 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.”5 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.6 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.I 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.