The Perfect House: A Journey with Renaissance Master Andrea Palladio

by Rybczynski, Witold

  As often happens in architecture, the breakthrough design of the Villa Poiana was actually the result of hasty improvisation. A few years earlier, around 1544, Palladio had been commissioned by a Vicentine nobleman named Bartolomeo Pagliarino to build a small villa. A rough draft of the plan has survived, showing the house surrounded on three sides by expansive walled courtyards.4 The small house has a T-shaped sala flanked by two rooms and two camerini—small rooms—and fronted by a projecting loggia with a serliana. Before construction could begin Pagliarino unexpectedly died, and the project was shelved. When Palladio received the Poiana commission, he dusted off the Pagliarino drawings.5 (This is not unusual; Frank Lloyd Wright frequently adapted unbuilt house designs; Mies van der Rohe’s National Gallery in Berlin started life as an office building in Cuba.) Palladio redrew the plan of the house using the same overall dimensions and the same cross-vaulted, T-shaped sala, although he simplified the projecting loggia and changed the configurations of the walled courtyards to fit the new site in Poiana Maggiore.6

  VILLA POIANA, THE BACK

  This drawing is neatly drafted and dimensioned, suggesting that it was intended as the final version. However, on the back of this sheet are two rough sketches.7 One is a slightly revised plan of the house. Palladio tried moving the interior wall so that the loggia was deeper and the T-shaped sala was rectangular. The other is a sketch of the front of the house, showing the serliana opening. After finishing this sketch, Palladio must have turned the sheet around to show the drawings to someone—perhaps Poiana?—who was sitting across the table from him. While explaining the design, Palladio idly jotted dimensions on the upside-down floor plan. I once had a teacher who insisted that we rotate the plans on our drafting tables from time to time to see them afresh. Palladio always drew his plans so that the entrance faced the bottom of the page; looking at the Poiana plan upside-down, he must have realized that if he made the sala the loggia, and vice versa, the house would be greatly improved. The new loggia would have more light, and the sala would align with the front and back doors.

  The change was approved, and that is how the house was built. It appears that this correction may have occurred after construction started, for there are superfluous structural walls in the basement that correspond to the earlier plan.8 For the exterior, Palladio simply duplicated the serliana on the front façade, and since the loggia was now wider, he turned what had been sala windows into windowlike openings (he never repeated this makeshift solution). There was one final modification. Bonifacio Poiana apparently decided that he wanted to expand his small house in the future, for the plan in Quattro libri showed four additional rooms in projecting wings on the east and west sides of the house.I

  The surviving drawings of the Villa Poiana suggest a different Palladio from the conservative novice of the Villa Godi and the careful designer who evolved the plan of the Villa Pisani. Like all architects, he had learned to think on his feet and respond quickly to a client’s demands. Unlike a novelist or a painter, an architect cannot squirrel himself away in his studio; he often makes important design decisions in the field, sketching and thinking on the fly. This does not imply sloppiness. For example, the final Poiana loggia is definitely superior to the earlier versions; the two wings are not a tacked-on afterthought but enclose intimate gardens. Directly in front of the entrance, Palladio designed a large walled cortile. “On one side are the courtyard and other places essential for farm life, on the other a garden which mirrors that courtyard, and in the area at the back the orchard and a fishpond,” he wrote.9 This functional separation of formal entrance, farmyard, and pleasure garden represents a sophisticated evolution in Palladio’s thinking. The farmyard had porticoes along two sides, in the manner of the Villa Pisani; the garden was simply walled. These walls and porticoes were destroyed in the nineteenth century, and today the surroundings of this splendid house are barren: no gardens, no trees, no fishpond, a cornfield where the orchard once stood.

  • • •

  The Villa Poiana was begun after 1547 and finished six or seven years later. The 1540s were a busy decade for Palladio. His next clients after Vettor Pisani had been the Counts Marc’antonio and Adriano Thiene. The brothers, who belonged to what was reputedly the wealthiest family in Vicenza, had originally commissioned Giulio Romano to design a palatial town house, but after Giulio’s death in 1546, Palladio took over. The enormous structure occupied an entire city block on the Corso, Vicenza’s main street. Not to be outdone, the Thienes’ newly married brother-in-law, Iseppo da Porto, commissioned Palladio to design another house, farther down the street. The beautiful façade of the Palazzo da Porto marks the first time Palladio designed statues for the attic story of a building; erected years later, they are likenesses of Iseppo and his son. Meanwhile, the country house commissions kept coming. In addition to the relatively modest villa for Biagio Saraceno, Palladio started a large country house for the Thiene brothers, who had become enthusiastic patrons and, in the case of Marc’antonio, a friend. The Thienes owned an estate beside the Tessino River at Quinto, on the outskirts of Vicenza, where Palladio devised an unusual twin-house, with elaborate suites of rooms for each brother on two sides of a common entrance loggia and sala.II The design included a large courtyard surrounded by colonnades, which was an interpretation of the ancient villas described by Vitruvius.

  Palladio was making his mark among the Vicentine nobili, but the commission that represented his breakthrough was yet to come. It concerned the Palazzo della Ragione, or Palace of Justice, which stood on the Piazza dei Signori, Vicenza’s beautiful main square, the site of a twelfth-century tower and of the omnipresent emblem of the Republic, a column topped by the winged lion of St. Mark. The old palazzo, an imposing Italian Gothic building erected in the 1450s, had been Vicenza’s answer to the Doge’s Palace in Venice. Built on medieval foundations, it incorporated shops on the ground floor and above, under a wooden keel-like roof, a cavernous meeting room for the city’s governing Great Council. The rectangular building, whose enormous copper roof resembles an upturned washtub, was surrounded by a delicate two-story loggia added in 1496. Only eighteen months after the loggia was completed, a large section collapsed. The war postponed repairs and succeeding generations of city fathers took no action. Wealthy Vicentines built grand houses for themselves, but they were generally niggardly when it came to paying for public works (unlike Padua and Verona, Vicenza never modernized its city wall after the war). When the remaining loggia of the Palazzo della Ragione started showing further signs of weakness, it was merely shored up with temporary props.

  Finally, a committee was appointed to deal with what had become a civic embarrassment, though only after Venice agreed to subsidize part of the cost of repairs. Between 1538 and 1542, Vicenza sought the advice of a series of eminent architects. Jacopo Sansovino, who was state architect of Venice, was consulted first; he was followed by Sebastiano Serlio. A few years later, Michele Sanmicheli was brought from Verona, and lastly the celebrated Giulio Romano was invited from Mantua. Still, the committee vacillated. The causes were a lack of political will and fiscal prudence—this was a major expenditure of public funds for the small city. In addition, there was dissatisfaction with the visiting experts. Sansovino seemed uninterested in the project; Serlio was vague—he was probably thinking of his impending departure for France (where he would remain for the rest of his life); for some reason, Sanmicheli made a poor impression on the committee; only Giulio’s ambitious proposal to reconfigure the surrounding piazza in addition to restoring the loggia had some support.

  In 1546, Giulio, though only in his early fifties, died. Sensing an opportunity, Palladio, who had not been consulted, threw his hat into the ring. He had been sketching solutions of his own as early as 1540, and as a member of the Pedemuro workshop had worked on repairs to the palazzo. Joining forces with his old master Porlezza, he submitted a proposal to the committee, which was sufficiently impressed to forward the design to the Great Council.

 
; Palladio had the support of such influential members of the council as Godi, Thiene, and da Porto, yet even his most partisan admirers could not argue that he was in the same league as the famous visiting experts. The Great Council, cagily withholding judgment, authorized the construction of a large wooden mock-up of one bay of Palladio’s proposal on the piazza as a trial. This was done, but still no decision was taken.

  THE BASILICA, FROM QUATTRO LIBRI

  Eighteen months later, Palladio (by then Porlezza had dropped out of the picture) was commissioned to make additional drawings and models. It was another three and a half years before matters came to a head. The Great Council considered three alternatives: rebuilding the original design, Giulio’s proposal, and Palladio’s scheme. On April 11, 1549, by an overwhelming vote of ninety-nine to seventeen, the council chose Palladio’s design and appointed him superintendent of the project.10

  It was a moment of triumph for the forty-year-old Andrea. He was now, in effect, the city architect of Vicenza. For this position he was paid a monthly salary of five gold scudi, about three hundred modern dollars.11 The conversion is misleading since it is impossible to accurately compare the cost of living in cinquecento Italy with today, but it was not a huge sum—Giulio had received fifty scudi for just two weeks’ consultation. Five scudi a month was about what Palladio would have earned as a stone carver.III Nevertheless, since the building promised to take decades to complete, this stipend would at least guarantee his family a modest living, leaving him free to augment his income with private commissions.

  Palladio’s proposal for rebuilding the arcades of the palazzo was remarkable, as practical as it was original. He kept the same number and size of bays as the existing loggia, and rather than demolishing the old structure, he encased the remaining columns in new material to create heavier, stronger piers. He also preserved some of the existing gallery vaulting, thus avoiding the risk of further endangering the stability of the building. Sixteenth-century builders could not take structural solidity for granted. A large section of Bramante’s Cortile del Belvedere had collapsed during its construction, and a vault of Sansovino’s library in Venice had failed only a few years earlier (causing the architect to be briefly jailed). But it was not enough merely to enlarge the supports; Palladio’s challenge was to reinforce the structure without creating unpleasantly dark interiors. His ingenious solution, arrived at only after exploring several alternatives, was to make each bay not a simple arch but a serliana. The arched device had a number of practical advantages: it effectively lightened the piers—both visually and physically—allowing plenty of sunlight into the interior of the loggias; it reduced the span of the arches by almost fifty percent, which lessened the chance of collapse; it also addressed a peculiar problem of the medieval building, which had an odd trapezoidal plan and irregular bays. By using serlianas, Palladio was able to use identical arches, while adjusting the dimensions of the side beams to fit the varying dimensions of the bays. No doubt the experience of adjusting the design of new villas to fit existing foundations, as he had done with Godi and Pisani, served him well.

  PALLADIO’S FIRST PUBLIC PROJECT, UNDERTAKEN WHEN HE WAS FORTY-ONE, WAS THE BASILICA—VICENZA’S CITY HALL.

  What probably appealed most to the Great Council was the style of Palladio’s architecture. Although he carefully accommodated his design to fit the Gothic building, his loggias were boldly and uncompromisingly modern in appearance. Old buildings were frequently rebuilt in old styles, as the Doge’s Palace would be after it burned down some years later, but Palladio well understood that the Vicentines wanted something new. Using serlianas in an arcade had been done before, notably by Sansovino in the upper floor of St. Mark’s Library, which Palladio had seen under construction during his first visit to Venice. He greatly admired Sansovino, but the similarity with the Venetian project is superficial. Like most cinquecento architects, Sansovino stressed the horizontality of his long building by making each floor different; Palladio’s novel solution was to repeat the serliana motif on both floors, emphasizing the gridlike character of the façade. The result was simultaneously more modern and more suggestive of antiquity.

  Palladio’s design is nothing more than a screen wrapped around an existing building. But what a screen! It is entirely built of hard, white Piovene limestone, and it is thick. To further strengthen the arcade, and to resist the lateral thrust of the fifteenth-century building, Palladio uses paired columns to support the serliana arches, so the screen wall is actually about five feet deep. And it is a very complicated screen, combining half-columns, full columns, pilasters, arches, and entablatures. The large half-columns, which correspond to the piers, rise a full floor to support an architrave. The lower columns are Doric, the upper Ionic. Like all Renaissance architects, Palladio believed that in multistory buildings the orders should be used in strictly hierarchical fashion. “Doric will always be placed under the Ionic, the Ionic under the Corinthian, and the Corinthian under the Composite,” he wrote.IV,12 The Doric entablature is decorated with traditional garlanded bucrania, or depictions of ox skulls, a reference to the sacrificial function of ancient Roman temples. The serlianas, supported on paired columns, are inserted within the almost square bays. In the triangular spaces between the arch and the entablature Palladio pierces oculi that subtly mimic the round windows of the great hall above. The other nod to the existing building is the vaults that support the galleries, which are not classical frescoed barrel vaults but Gothic-style brick cross-vaults. Thanks to such subtle stylistic accommodations, Palladio accomplished the improbable feat of wedding an all’antica loggia to the immense Gothic box.

  According to Vasari, who saw the lower level of the loggia almost complete, the Basilica, as Palladio called his building, was “much renowned.”13 This single work would assure its maker a prominent place in the architectural pantheon—and Palladio knew it. “I have no doubt at all that this building can be compared to antique structures and included amongst the greatest and most beautiful buildings built since antiquity,” he observed.14 The Basilica represents Palladio’s peculiar position with respect to the architectural currents of his time; for despite his awareness of the latest fashion, his provincial status kept him out of the mainstream. Thus, while the Basilica was not in the style of Sanmicheli and Giulio, it did manipulate classical elements in an emotive, mannered fashion. For example, the entablature of the serliana created the illusion that it was interrupted by the half-columns, just as the half-columns created the illusion that they, and not the piers behind them, supported the arcade. “How hard he worked at that,” marveled Goethe on his visit to Vicenza in 1786, “how the tangible presence of his creations makes us forget that we are being hypnotized!”15

  Every evening I walk across the Piazza dei Signori, from the trattoria where I regularly eat dinner to my hotel. The ivory-white Basilica shimmers in the moonlight. Goethe characterized architecture as frozen music, which well describes this extraordinary building. I don’t know what kind of music Goethe heard when he looked at the Basilica, but I hear percussion—the great jazz drummer Philly Joe Jones, my boyhood idol. The tall half-columns are the steady rhythm beat of the bass drum, which Palladio accentuates by breaking the extremely deep cornice and projecting it forward over each capital. At the attic level, a statue above each column provides a high-pitched cymbal clash. The two levels of the arcade keep slightly different times, the lower Roman Doric, with its staccatolike frieze, is more articulated, while the upper Ionic is more delicate and smooth. At the end of the building, which is nine bays long, a cluster of three columns (topped by three statues) marks a pause—a drum roll—and the beat continues around the corner. The arches of the serlianas weave a sinuous backbeat, which is punctuated by the double tom-tom pulse of the oculi, and the rim-shots of the keystones, which are in the form of mascheroni, or grotesque masks.

  A DETAIL OF THE LOGGIA, FROM QUATTRO LIBRI

  Despite the masks and statues, the muscular loggias of the Basilica are re
latively plain. The plainness emphasizes the Basilica’s three-dimensional sculptural quality. In a typical vertical section of the loggia I count at least fifty distinct projecting and receding planes (compared to perhaps half a dozen in a modern façade). The vigorous modeling of cornices, moldings, and entablatures, the deep frieze, and the orchestrated play between solid and void create a chiaroscuro effect that represented a new interest for Palladio.

  He owed his awareness of modeling to Giangiorgio Trissino. In September 1545, shortly before Palladio was to submit his first design for the Basilica, the Count took him on a five-month excursion to Rome—Palladio’s second visit. The entourage included Marco Thiene, who was a cousin of Marc’antonio, and Giambattista Maganza, a painter who had been a pupil of Titian and became Palladio’s close friend and sometime collaborator. Marco Thiene described the outing as a “travelling Academia Trissiniana.” Some historians believe Trissino arranged the trip precisely at this critical juncture to offer Palladio a further opportunity to hone his architectural skills.16 In that case, the architect Palladio could not have missed in Rome was Michelangelo, who had just begun work on St. Peter’s and on the Capitoline Hill complex. While there was nothing yet built, Palladio would have been able to study models and drawings, which would account for the vigorous and sculptural Michelangelesque quality of the Basilica loggias.

  It would be another three years before the Great Council appointed Palladio architect of the Basilica. Trissino was still Palladio’s strongest supporter, and he likely played a behind-the-scenes role in the early deliberations of the building committee, but he was not in Vicenza during the final debate. He had become embroiled in a bitter dispute with his son by a first marriage, whom the Count wanted to disinherit. It was an ugly feud. At one point, Trissino broke into his son’s house looking for papers, and the son in turn had bailiffs eject his sickly, seventy-year-old father from his Cricoli home. The matter went before the magistrates, who not only found in the son’s favor but cruelly stripped Trissino of all his possessions, including his precious villa. Unable to reverse the decision, the embittered—and now impoverished—Count left Vicenza and moved to Rome. He stayed in Marco Thiene’s house, where, ill and suffering from gout, he heard of Palladio’s Basilica appointment. Trissino may have had the good news from Palladio himself. According to Paolo Gualdo’s contemporary account, Palladio was in Rome in December 1549, at the behest of Pope Paul III.V,17 It is heartening to think of mentor and protégé meeting one last time. Giangiorgio Trissino died the following year, a copy of his beloved Vitruvius by his bedside.