The symbolic use of a temple pediment on the front of a house was not, strictly speaking, Palladio’s invention. It had been suggested a century earlier by Alberti, who, while cautioning that “the pediment to a private house should not emulate the majesty of a temple in any way,” allowed that “the vestibule itself may be ennobled by having its façade heightened slightly, or by being given a dignified pediment.”29 Alberti’s suggestion was taken up by the Florentine architect Giuliano da Sangallo (the uncle of Antonio da Sangallo, who had worked with Sanmicheli), who included a complete all’antica temple porch with freestanding Ionic columns on the front façade of Lorenzo de’Medici’s villa in Poggio a Caiano. Completed by 1492, this is the first temple-fronted villa of the Renaissance. The porch, however, is awkwardly related to the house—it appears stuck onto the façade—and it did not inspire other architects. During the 1530s, just before Palladio started his architectural career, three prominent villas were built in the Venetian Republic. Sanmicheli, who knew da Sangallo well, built the Villa La Soranza in Castelfranco, not far from Vicenza. The simple structure (which no longer exists) had a central arcaded loggia but no pediment. Falconetto, perhaps with Cornaro’s collaboration, built a villa for the bishop of Padua inspired by the Villa Madama, but did not include a pediment either. Nor did Jacopo Sansovino, who built only one villa in the Veneto, also near Padua, an impressive, palazzolike structure surrounding an inner courtyard. So when Palladio added a temple front to the Villa Pisani, he was neither following a current fashion nor copying something he had seen elsewhere.
VILLA VALMARANA
VILLA GAZOTO
VILLA PISANI
• • •
Of all the applied arts, architecture is the least progressive—that is, while engineering and technology evolve, architecture itself, its forms and spaces, is constant. A Renaissance fireplace is not as efficient as a modern gas furnace, but a Renaissance building, judged purely architecturally, can be as good as, or even better than, a modern one. Architecture, especially great architecture, does not become obsolete. That is why Palladio looked at Bramante, and I am looking at Palladio.
When Palladio visited Rome, he experienced the antiquities both as archaeology and architecture. The Villa Pisani is a relic of a distant time, yet it is also a house in which I could imagine living. This impression is no doubt heightened by the fact that the villa is somebody’s home. In 1976, the Countess Cornelia Ferri de Lazara, a Pisani descendant, began an ambitious project to restore the architectural integrity of the house. Not only was the building in a dilapidated state, during the eighteenth century it had suffered multiple indignities such as the infilling of the arches of the loggia, which was subdivided into small rooms, the addition of a catwalk across the sala linking the two sides of the attic, and the crude infilling of ground-floor windows to minimize a Napoleonic fenestration tax. These changes were undone. When the basement, which had flooded and was full of silt, was excavated, it was discovered that over the years, perhaps in an attempt to control the flooding, the ground around the exterior of the building had been raised more than two feet. With the original levels reestablished, the house regained its base, and the façades their original proportions.
Palladio’s architectural intentions have been restored, yet the house does not feel like a museum. The furnishings are, for the most part, contemporary—tasteful but unpretentious sofas and easy chairs, coffee tables, sisal mats, a Heitzmann grand piano. The rooms, while commodious, are not overwhelming. After the uniform room sizes of the Villa Godi, Palladio developed an arrangement that he would follow for the rest of his career. “There should be large, medium-sized, and small rooms,” he recommended, “one side by side with the next, so that they can be mutually useful. The small ones should be divided up to create even smaller rooms where studies or libraries could be located, as well as riding equipment and other tackle which we need every day and which would be awkward to put in rooms where one sleeps, eats, or receives guests.”30 In the Villa Pisani there is a small-medium-large suite of rooms on each side of the sala. The large rooms face the courtyard and are entered directly from the sala. One is furnished as a living room, the other as a kitchen (the kitchen was relocated here in the eighteenth century when the basement flooded). The medium-sized rooms are next, the one adjacent to the kitchen furnished with a dining table and chairs, the other used as an informal sitting room—a collection of old maps hangs on the walls. The small rooms are within the corner towers, and because they are entered directly from the loggia, probably served as antechambers or reception rooms. Unlike the other rooms, they have domed ceilings.
Several features add to the domestic atmosphere. The rooms are bathed in light. The large amounts of glass are not unusual by modern standards, but they were exceptional in sixteenth-century European houses whose “glazing” was generally oiled paper or canvas. It was only in the Venetian Republic, which led Europe in glassmaking, that glass was plentiful and relatively inexpensive.31 Palladio took full advantage of this material, and provided many large leaded-glass windows, which accounts for his uniformly bright interiors. The walls of the Villa Pisani are white. With the exception of a single decorated vaulted ceiling, there are no frescoes in the rooms. As in the Villa Godi, the window niches are fitted with two little seats composed of stone slabs supported on delicate columns. The medium and large rooms have fireplaces, the small square rooms have none, suggesting that they were not used for sleeping, at least not in winter. The fireplaces are important decorative elements, with elaborate stone mantels, differently carved in each room. The interiors have a simple charm and are not so very different from those of a modern house, although the sixteen-foot ceilings of dark stained wooden beams are much taller.
Combining rooms of different sizes within a rigidly rectangular plan requires skill, all the more so when the plan also has to accommodate extraneous elements such as stairs. In the Villa Pisani, two stairs, one on each side of the sala, are hidden within the fabric of the walls. Palladio went to some lengths to explain why he had not bothered to provide these stairs with natural light, since they “serve only the rooms at the bottom and at the top of the house, which are used for either granaries or mezzanines.”32 Mezzanines, or amezati, were distinct from the attic spaces, and despite their name were not balconies but second-floor rooms with lower ceilings, usually used as servants’ quarters. In the Villa Pisani, amezati were located in the two castello towers. Today, these rooms, like the attic spaces, have been converted into bedrooms.
THE SALA OF THE VILLA PISANI IS A GRAND RECEPTION ROOM WITH A THIRTY-FOOT CEILING THAT RISES THE FULL HEIGHT OF THE HOUSE.
After visiting the villa I sit down on a wooden bench in the sala and write in my notebook. The house is absolutely still. This is a remarkable room. The overhead vaults are fully frescoed, possibly by Bernardino India, a Veronese who worked regularly with Sanmicheli, or by Francesco Torbido, a pupil of Giulio—the attribution is unclear. The walls, on the other hand, are painted white. The architectural décor consists of giant Doric pilasters with carved stone capitals and bases and a stone frieze supporting the vaults. The presence of actual, rather than frescoed, interior architecture, as well as the complicated vaulting, attests to Vettor Pisani’s magnanimous building budget. The sala is largely unfurnished, as it was in Palladio’s day. Nor are there any fireplaces—the cavernous space would have been impractical to heat. The absence of such domestic features, as well as the tall vaulted ceilings and the bright light, make me feel that I am outdoors. It is almost as if Palladio were underlining the difference between the domestic rooms and the grand sala.
The doorways leading to the rooms beside the sala have elaborate stone surrounds and architraves that make them resemble exterior doors. It is known that the Pedemuro workshop was involved in the construction of the villa, and it is likely that Palladio himself did some of this carving. Despite Trissino’s support, and an encouraging string of commissions, he was not yet a full-fledged architect; th
e fees for designing two town houses and three villas over five years would hardly have supported his family. Like most Renaissance architects, Palladio needed official patronage—a secure position with an annual salary—and that seemed far in the future. For the moment, he prudently kept his day job.
• • •
The afternoon is coming to a close and it’s time to go. Reluctantly, I make my way to the gate, which is locked. There is a car parked next to mine, so there must be somebody still here. The small room that functions as an office is empty. I call out, but no one answers. Going around the corner, I knock on a small door, but no luck. Partway down the length of the barn, arched openings lead into an arcaded loggia. The dark space beyond is empty except for a parked minivan. Continuing along the building, I approach a second arcade. Hearing a buzzing noise from somewhere inside, I go into the dark interior. The noise is louder here, the familiar high-pitched whine of an electric table saw, an anomalous modern sound in these old surroundings. There is a light at the far end of the cavernous space. Behind a partition is a carpentry shop, or rather a musical instrument maker’s shop; a man and the young woman who earlier let me in are leaning intently over a burnished piano case. They are wearing ear-protectors and are obviously engrossed in their work. Sheepishly I ask if someone could unlock the gate.
Luigi and Paola Borgato, whose workshop this is, build pianos to order. Every year they produce three or four nine-foot grands. The Borgato piano is highly regarded—I later learn that the London-based concert pianist Radu Lupu owns one.
“Grazie mille,” I say to Paola Borgato as I leave.
I want to tell her how much I’ve enjoyed my visit, and how much I appreciate the care with which the villa has been restored and maintained, and what a magical place this is. But all I can manage in my rudimentary Italian is “Che bella casa.”
* * *
IYears later, Palladio used similar twin towers in the Villa Valmarana at Lisiera, and the Villa Thiene at Cicogna.
IIAlthough today grandly referred to as palazzos, in Palladio’s time the large town houses of the nobility were called simply case della città.
IIIAs far as is known, Palladio generally did his own drawing and rarely relied on assistants.
IVModern architectural drawings are made to a small number of standard scales. In Palladio’s time, scales were a matter of personal choice and convenience.
III
The Arched Device
oiana Maggiore is a hamlet about twenty miles south of Vicenza. It sits in the flat, lowland plain that was the Venetian Republic’s agricultural mainstay and is still farming country. It is a brisk morning, and the sun is shining brightly. The surrounding fields are freshly turned, ready for spring planting. The Villa Poiana is on the outskirts of the hamlet, plainly visible behind a long brick wall next to the road. I park the little rented Opel on the grass verge beside the wall and walk back to the gate.
The gate opens to a walled forecourt. The entire area seems to have been recently graded, and in many places the scrubby grass has been scraped away to reveal patches of raw earth. The building is hardly an obvious successor to the Villa Pisani—no triple arches, no rustication, no pilasters, no temple front. Instead, the most distinctive feature of the façade is a tall arched opening that leads to what I assume is an entrance loggia. The broad surround of the archway is punctuated by five round holes or oculi—literally, eyes. The arc of platter-sized oculi is like a cartoon of a juggler’s act. Yet there is nothing whimsical about this sturdy building. The horizontal moldings of the façade, the square piers that support the loggia, the three arches, even the elaborate bracketed architraves over the windows, are plastered brick—only the windowsills are stone. Since everything is freshly painted white, the massive building appears to be carved out of a single block of chalk. No doubt the absence of even rudimentary landscaping exaggerates the effect, but the house has a no-nonsense soldierly presence that the five circles only underscore. Just let me catch you smiling, it dares.
AT THE ENTRANCE OF THE VILLA POIANA IS A STATUE OF THE ROMAN GOD NEPTUNE; ABOVE IT IS AN ARC OF CIRCULAR OPENINGS, OR OCULI.
The client was Bonifacio Poiana, a cavaliere, or knight, of a long-established Vicentine family. The Poianas—the word means “buzzard” and the bird appears on their coat of arms—had a long history of military service, providing cavalry to the Venetian Republic. They also had a long history at Poiana Maggiore—their fifteenth-century fortified villa complex, including a medieval tower, stands across the road from the villa. Bonifacio Poiana bought the land for his new house in 1547, and soon after engaged Palladio. Palladio was still a stonemason when he first met the cavaliere; it was for his wife, Lady Angela, that Allegradonna had worked as a maid.
Seen close up, the façade is not what it appears to be. The oculi are not holes but deep recesses, nor are the plaster walls plain, they are incised with a masonry pattern. The entrance arch, whose simplified square piers seem to be a part of the wall, is actually the center of a highly stylized serliana. And what look like two more windows on each side of the entrance, with identical pediments and surrounds, are really apertures opening into the loggia. The loggia is reached by a wide stair, a short climb since the basement is partially buried. Lowering the house is Palladio’s accommodation to the surrounding flat landscape site. The horizontal impression is accentuated by the water table, which neatly turns into a parapet at the stair abutments, and by a second flat molding that surrounds the building at the level of the windowsills. The panels below the windows protrude slightly, creating additional shadow lines.
VILLA POIANA, THE FRONT
The large hipped roof has a gable over the loggia. Instead of a full triangular pediment, however, Palladio interrupts the horizontal entablature and merely hints at a temple front—the same device that he designed for the Villa Valmarana. At Poiana he accentuates the effect of a frontispiece by pushing the whole central section of the façade slightly forward (the reverse of what he did at the Villa Valmarana, where the central section is slightly recessed); it’s only a few inches, but the resulting shadow line makes a subtle but unmistakable separation. The Villa Poiana reprises a number of motifs from Palladio’s earlier houses: it has the Spartan plainness and massiveness of the Villa Godi; the serliana of the Villa Valmarana is here, although in highly abstracted form; the central pediment of Gazoto is repeated in the gable over the loggia; and the moldings recall similar devices at the Villa Pisani. Yet this is not a collage. Palladio combines the different parts seamlessly—the house is all of a piece.
The pediment of the Villa Poiana is accented by three life-size statues. The female figures represent drama, sculpture, and music. Two additional statues—Hercules and Neptune—stand on the stair abutments, guarding the entrance. These statues were installed late, in 1658, but they followed the illustration in Quattro libri. Palladio generally embellished the exterior of his buildings with sculpted likenesses of human figures, although he was not the first Renaissance architect to do so; Sanmicheli placed sculptures on the roof parapet of the Palazzo Canossa in Verona in 1537. Like Sanmicheli, Palladio took his cue from the ancient Romans. Vitruvius mentions that the pediments of certain temples are “adorned in the Tuscan fashion with statues of terra-cotta or gilt bronze.”1 By the time Palladio saw the ancient ruins, the statues had long since disappeared—looted or simply fallen—but he surmised their presence from the empty niches and bare pedestals, and included statues in all his drawings of historical reconstructions. “Nobody should be surprised that I have put such a plethora of statues in these buildings,” he explained, “because one reads that there were so many in Rome that they looked like another population.”2 Another population is exactly what I think of as I look up at the figures on the roof of the Villa Poiana. The statues are not only allusions to antiquity, allegorical symbols, and attractive ornaments silhouetted against the sky, but also protective icons. Le Corbusier defined architecture as “the masterly, correct and magnificent play o
f masses brought together in light.” The Villa Poiana is all that, but the statues are a reminder that the masses are, literally, subordinate to the human presence.
I go around to the back. The design of the sides, which in the earlier houses is haphazard, is perfectly symmetrical. The rear façade is almost a mirror image of the front, although without a loggia. Between the piers of the serliana is a large set of solid doors, reached by an exterior semicircular stair similar to that of the Villa Pisani. The doors are surmounted by a miniature thermal window and an arc of five oculi, although here the circles are real windows. According to some historians, the oculi motif may have been copied by Palladio from Bramante (who in turn copied it from early Christian churches); or it may have been inspired by the oculi and stylized serliana of Sansovino’s Loggetta in the Piazza San Marco, begun the previous decade.3 The rear façade of the Villa Poiana represented an important stylistic development for Palladio. The earliest Renaissance architecture was urban, and walled towns and cities were extremely dense so that buildings, churches as well as residences, generally had but a single façade, facing the street. On the other hand, country houses were freestanding. Palladio’s first houses dealt awkwardly with this new freedom; I have the impression that he was not quite sure what to do. The backs of the Villa Gazoto and the Villa Valmarana, for example, were utilitarian and unresolved architecturally; the Janus-like Villa Pisani had handsome front and back façades, but they could have belonged to two different buildings. In the Villa Poiana, Palladio skillfully used variations on the serliana motif to create an interesting visual relationship between the front and the rear of the house while, at the same time, giving predominance to the former. Domestic architects have repeated this simple but original theme for centuries.
The Perfect House: A Journey with Renaissance Master Andrea Palladio Page 6