The Perfect House: A Journey with Renaissance Master Andrea Palladio

by Rybczynski, Witold

  * * *

  IThe serliana originated in antiquity and was revived by Bramante. It is named after the architect Sebastiano Serlio, who popularized it in a widely read treatise.

  IINot in any sexual sense—Trissino had a reputation as a ladies’ man.

  IIIA modest payment since a pair of men’s trousers cost about three lire.

  II

  Che Bella Casa

  must have driven by the house without realizing it. I know that I’m in the right hamlet—Bagnolo di Lonigo—but there is no sign of a Palladio villa. The building is supposed to be next to a river, but there’s no water either; the highway is lined with small houses on one side and a massive grassy embankment on the other. A marker announces the next town, confirming that I’ve gone too far, so I turn the car around and head back. Rounding a curve, I glimpse a small arrow indicating “Villa Pisani.” I miss the turnoff and again make a U-turn, not easy with trucks barreling up and down the road. A narrow track ramps up to the top of the embankment, which turns out to be a dyke enclosing the narrow Guà River. On the other side, a large roof sticking out of the trees must be the villa.

  The road crosses a small bridge, and a short, tree-lined gravel drive leads down to a closed gate. There are two cars parked haphazardly among the trees, and I pull up beside them, get out, and ring the buzzer. A young woman dressed in jeans and a white shirt appears.

  “Is it possible to visit the house?” I ask hopefully, knowing that some villa owners restrict access to visitors.

  She smiles. “Come in. You can go wherever you like.”

  The gate is at the edge of a compound whose centerpiece is a large square lawn. Palladio referred to this space as a cortile, or courtyard. It was originally bounded on three sides by columned porticoes, which were destroyed in the Second World War. Today the house encloses one side of the courtyard, and a long, two-story stone barn the other.

  I take a turn around the cortile. Reaching the far side, I look back at the house. The white stucco is freshly painted and sparkles in the sun. The grand building is almost as wide as the Villa Godi, with a similar red-clay-tile roof, but the resemblance ends there. The design is both simpler and more complicated. Simpler, because from this side the house resembles a shoe box with a hipped roof that slopes on four sides. The fenestration reflects the same tripartite organization as the Godi—a basement, the main floor, and an attic—although there are fewer windows and they are equally spaced, which gives the façade a calmer, more considered appearance. A broad stair leads to a central door. The complexity arises from several subtle refinements. The basement is partially buried, lowering the main floor and reducing the height of the house. Rugged stonework frames the small basement windows as well as the corners of the house. At the level of the main floor, about six feet above the ground, is a horizontal stone molding called a water table since its function is to throw water away from the foundations. It is echoed by a second stone molding at the level of the windowsills. The two horizontal bands, which girdle the house, give it the appearance of sitting on a base. They also accentuate the horizontal proportions of the façade, whose most distinctive feature is a large arched window directly above the door. The arched window, a semicircle divided vertically into three unequal parts, is a thermal window similar to the one that was originally in the Villa Godi.

  I walk around to the side of the house facing the river. Palladio considered riverside locations to be advantageous for villas, “because the produce can be carried cheaply by boat to the city at any time, and it will satisfy the needs of the household and the animals; this will also make it very cool in the summer and will be a lovely sight, and is both useful and pleasing in that one can irrigate the grounds, the gardens, and the orchards, which are the soul and delight of the estate.”1 Unfortunately, the lovely sight is long gone. The view of the river is obstructed by a tall brick wall—a counterpart to the grassy embankment—built to contain spring floods. The Guà is one of many rivers that flows across the Veneto plain, fed by the melting snows of the Alps. In the process of controlling the level of water in their lagoon, the Venetians became master hydrologists whose canal and river system was the principal means of communication in the terraferma. The cinquecento owners of the villa traveled to their estate by boat—across the Venetian lagoon, up the Adige River, finally reaching the Guà. So, just as in many American plantation houses in Virginia, a Veneto villa’s front door faced the river.

  PALLADIO’S SIGNATURE THERMAL WINDOW DOMINATES THE REAR OF THE STARKLY BEAUTIFUL VILLA PISANI.

  THE RUSTICATED TEMPLE FRONT OF THE LOGGIA IS SURMOUNTED BY THE PISANI FAMILY COAT OF ARMS.

  The centerpiece of the front façade is a three-arch loggia made of heavily rusticated stone. Rustication refers to stonework that is rudely chiseled, and laid with deep V-shaped joints, to create a rough and coarse texture. This loggia is as massive and imposing as one of Sanmicheli’s monumental city gates, an effect that is accentuated by the flanking towers that resemble a medieval castello. Although the Villa Pisani, like the Villa Godi, was built on top of an older house, these towers were not a holdover from the past but were designed by Palladio.I,2

  I go up a flight of semicircular steps and enter the loggia. No frescoes this time, but the long narrow space is vaulted, and at each end there is a large apse, or curved niche. It is a curious solution and not, to my eye, an altogether successful one. The two curved ends emphasize the length of the loggia, drawing attention away from what should be the main focus: the front doors. The tall doors lead directly into the sala. And what a sala! The splendid room rises more than thirty feet, and extends all the way through the house, a distance of about thirty-five feet. This is a much more complex space than the sala of the Villa Godi. The ceiling is not flat but vaulted, and the plan is not rectangular but cruciform, the four barrel vaults of the unequal arms intersecting in a great groin vault in the middle. Light streams in through the thermal window on the far wall; the two arms of the cruciform likewise have thermal windows, which are indirectly lit by skylights in the roof; the fourth thermal window, on the loggia side, is blank.

  When Palladio wrote Quattro libri, he devoted two chapters to villas, distinguishing the country houses of “noble Venetians” from those of “gentlemen of the terraferma” such as Girolamo Godi. The Venetian chapter opened with the Bagnolo house, home of “the magnificent Counts Vettor, Marco, and Daniele, the Pisani brothers.”3 The Pisanis, Palladio’s first Venetian clients, belonged to one of the city’s leading families. Merchants and landowners, they had been an important presence since the twelfth century, and had long been members of the Gran Consiglio, the governing body of the Republic. The branch of the family that commissioned Palladio was known as the Pisani del Banco, since its members specialized in banking. The brothers were newcomers to Bagnolo. Their father had bought the estate, which had been confiscated from a turncoat Vicentine nobleman, after the war. The house had been badly damaged during the fighting, and in 1542, on the occasion of Vettor’s betrothal, they decided to replace it with a grander structure.

  The Pisanis’ status on the five-hundred-acre estate (soon to be expanded to fourteen hundred acres, chiefly devoted to growing rice) was that of feudal lords, with all the accompanying privileges. Their exalted position was reflected in Palladio’s design. The sala was not only a social area, it was where the Counts received their tenant farmers (who owed their lords one day of labor a week), where they listened to petitions and grievances, dispensed justice, and presided over public ceremonies. Hence the imposing vaulted space that resembles a Roman basilica. It is likely that the frankly monumental entrance loggia and the twin castello towers—age-old symbols of the feudal aristocracy—were also chosen because Palladio considered them suitable for the residence of such “magnificent” clients.

  Vettor Pisani was the oldest brother and head of the family. He was only twenty-one when he commissioned Palladio, whom he had met three years earlier in Padua while a student at the university.4
Vettor was an unusual young man, who had not yet reached his majority (which in Venice was twenty-five years) but clearly knew his own mind. While he was presumably acquainted with Sanmicheli and Serlio, he chose an unknown and relatively inexperienced architect. For Palladio, a novice from the terraferma hinterland, the Pisani commission represented a remarkable opportunity.

  Palladio was lucky. Although he missed the golden age of the Venetian Republic by more than a century, in some ways he could hardly have lived in better times for an architect. For hundreds of years Venice had been a maritime powerhouse, the commercial intermediary between western and central Europe, and the Middle East and the Orient. During the fifteenth century, the island city emerged as one of the important land powers of the Italian peninsula, holding sway over an area that stretched as far west as Bergamo, northeast into Friuli, and south to the Po Valley. The chief reason to conquer these territories was to control the overland trade routes from Venice to northern Europe, but starting in the 1540s, exactly the time that Palladio embarked on his architectural career, the role of the terraferma changed. Wealthy Venetians began to invest heavily in mainland agriculture—land reclamation, irrigation canals, and drainage schemes. Historians do not agree about the exact reason for this newfound interest, but it was probably a combination of factors. Thanks to the growth of the Turkish empire, the discovery of alternative trade routes, and the growing naval power of the Baltic states, England, and the Low Countries, Venice was no longer dominant in international trade, and wealthy Venetians needed new vehicles for their investments. As Venice grew, the demand for food increased and so did its price, and the flat, rich lands of the terraferma—drained and irrigated—were ideally suited to agriculture.5 Land also provided a good hedge against inflation. Finally, there is no doubt that the merchant elite of Venice were attracted by the image of spending part of each year on country estates in suitably grand villas.

  • • •

  Palladio began the Villa Pisani only five years after the Villa Godi, yet its design is far more ambitious and accomplished than his first commission—and much more original. The most important experience a beginning architect can have is to build, for it is on the building site that he sees his ideas realized, gains self-confidence, and learns from his mistakes. The prominence of the Villa Godi, and the continuing patronage of Count Trissino, quickly led to other Vicentine commissions. The first was a large town house for the Civena family. The Palazzo Civena, today a nursing home, is a handsome two-story structure, facing the Retrone River, with a covered arcade at street level for pedestrians.II The following year, the Da Monte family likewise commissioned a residence in town, a small building with a rusticated base and a second floor with a central serliana. These two commissions were followed by a pair of villas on the outskirts of Vicenza, one for Giuseppe and Antonio Valmarana, cousins who had inherited an estate at Vigardolo outside Vicenza, the other for Tadeo Gazoto, a merchant who owned land in the nearby village of Bertesina. Neither house was as big or as prominent as the Villa Godi, but both would offer Palladio an opportunity to take his architecture in a new direction. The catalyst for this development was, again, Giangiorgio Trissino.

  In the summer of 1541, Palladio accompanied the Count on a two-month visit to Rome. Rome was the site of the greatest concentration of antiquities in Italy: the crumbling remains of the Roman Forum, triumphal arches and temples, the hulking remains of several Imperial baths, the Colosseum, and the best preserved of the ancient monuments, the Pantheon, an enormous circular temple capped by a great dome. The importance to Palladio of experiencing these sites firsthand was immense. Later, it was common for budding architects to visit Rome, but in the sixteenth century this was not the case, particularly for Venetians. Although Palladio had studied Vitruvius and other secondary sources, and visited antiquities in Padua and Verona, the architecture of Rome was a revelation. “I set myself the task of investigating the remains of the ancient buildings that have survived despite the ravages of time and the cruelty of the barbarians,” he recollected, “and finding them much worthier of study than I had first thought, I began to measure all their parts minutely and with the greatest care.”6 His admiration for Roman architecture was unbounded: “It will be obvious to anyone not entirely devoid of common sense that the methods by which the ancients built were excellent because the ruins of so many magnificent buildings survive in and outside Italy after such a vast amount of time and so many changes and falls of empires; because of this we have absolute proof of the extraordinary virtue of the Romans which otherwise, perhaps, nobody would believe in.”7

  Palladio was following in the footsteps of quattrocento architects such as Filippo Brunelleschi, who was responsible for what is generally considered the first classical building of the Renaissance—the Ospedale degli Innocenti in Florence. Turning away from what he judged the rude disorder of Gothic, Brunelleschi went to Rome to study the monuments and adopted an elegant and spare architectural style loosely based on ancient precedents. The classical connection was later elucidated and given a theoretical underpinning by Brunelleschi’s friend Leon Battista Alberti, whose Of Built Things was a reworking—and updating—of Vitruvius. By the time Palladio visited Rome, Bramante and Raphael had produced bodies of work that were explicitly inspired by the ancient monuments of Rome. Or what was left of them. With notable exceptions, such as the Pantheon, most of the temples and bath buildings existed only in fragmentary form. Although several popes had begun excavating the ancient ruins during the preceding century, the remains were still largely covered by a thousand years of accumulated debris.

  Palladio made his own detailed archaeological surveys using a measuring tape, a plumb line, and a circumferentor, a primitive surveying instrument that consisted of a compass with a sighting device. He demonstrated a scholarly bent and ultimately acquired such an intimate knowledge of the ancient city that in 1554 he would publish two guidebooks, one on churches and the other on antiquities—L’Antichità di Roma—a standard reference that would go into more than thirty editions over the next two centuries.8 “Every great architect finds his own antiquity,” James Ackerman wisely observed.9 Palladio found his version climbing over ruins and poring over his field sketches, trying to decipher and comprehend this distant past. For the Renaissance, ancient Rome was chiefly an imagined re-creation, yet it was a potent fiction that encouraged architects to dream on a big scale. Palladio made ingenious, and sometimes fanciful, reconstructions. In the case of the Baths of Agrippa, for example, which were almost completely destroyed, he portrayed the building in frontal view and cross section. Although these drawings were a serious attempt to portray “what might have been,” the powerful, vigorous images are as much a reflection of Palladio’s architectural interests as they are of ancient Rome.

  He made precise drawings of capitals, friezes, and entablatures, meticulously dimensioning each torus and fillet. He copied details. He sketched moldings, either drawing them by eye or modeling their outlines with a thin strip of lead that he used as a drawing template. The purpose of this activity was twofold. Drawing, which involves long periods of intense scrutiny, internalizes the subject (in a way photography does not begin to approximate); Palladio was schooling his eye and trying to better understand what he was seeing. He was also compiling a visual lexicon to which he could refer when he was working. Classical buildings of the type that Palladio designed depended on numerous details, especially moldings—around doors and windows, surrounding fireplaces, at dados and cornices. His field sketches provided an invaluable catalog of models.

  As an archaeologist, Palladio was concerned with accuracy, but as a designer he was looking for beauty. Describing the octagonal Baptistery of Constantine at St. John Lateran, an early Christian building in Rome, he wrote: “In my opinion this temple is modern and made from the spoils of ancient buildings, but, because it is beautifully designed and has ornaments that are exquisitely carved in a great variety of patterns that the architect could make use of on many
occasions, I thought it essential to include it with the ancient buildings, particularly because everybody supposes that it is ancient.”10 The entrance loggia to the Baptistery was a long space with an apse at each end, which probably provided the model for the loggia at the Villa Pisani. Another reconstructed plan, also drawn during the 1541 visit, shows the Baths of Titus and includes a vaulted cruciform hall that reappears, in reduced form, as the Pisani sala. The point is not that Palladio was copying ancient precedents, but rather that in the process of documenting and re-creating the past he was discovering solutions for the present.

  Rome also provided Palladio with the opportunity, no less important, to see the work of his contemporaries. These included Sanmicheli, Giulio, and da Sangallo, as well as their predecessors, Bramante and Raphael. Bramante had died in 1514 and Raphael in 1520, so their designs were, in a sense, somewhat old-fashioned. Yet Palladio was drawn to their architecture. He was definitely a provincial—a hayseed in the big city—but he was not swept up by the latest trends. Bramante’s bold rustication impressed him; so did his unusual exterior stair in the Cortile del Belvedere, whose semicircular (concave) steps rise to a circular landing, whence a second set of (convex) semicircular stair continue into the building. This and the succeeding Roman visits were a crucial part of Palladio’s architectural training; Raphael had worked under Bramante, and Giulio under Raphael, but Palladio had no master to emulate. Like Michelangelo, he made his own way.

  Trissino, who continued to take a lively interest in Palladio’s architectural education, introduced him to the most ambitious—if unfinished—private building project in Rome, a villa designed by Raphael for Cardinal Giulio de’Medici, later Pope Clement VII. The palatial retreat, today known as the Villa Madama, was Raphael’s idealized vision of an ancient Roman villa, and his design included garden loggias, terraces, water features, and an open-air theater. The centerpiece was to be a circular entrance court more than one hundred feet in diameter. Work started in 1518, and when Raphael died two years later, the vast complex was only half-finished. It was damaged during the Sack of Rome, repaired, but never completed. When Palladio saw it, the building had been standing unoccupied for two decades, the walls of the incomplete court forming a great semicircle, the immense apses and unfinished colonnades as forsaken and overgrown as their ancient models.