The Perfect House: A Journey with Renaissance Master Andrea Palladio

by Rybczynski, Witold

  • • •

  I am reminded of the Basilica as I walk up to the loggia of the Villa Poiana. Palladio designed the villa just as he was finalizing the plans for the Basilica, and obviously serlianas were uppermost on his mind. The tall arched opening leads into a long, barrel-vaulted space with white walls and a beautifully frescoed ceiling. A cross-vault in the center echoes the archway of the serliana. The semicircular fresco over the door depicts the Poiana coat of arms and an assortment of military trophies, anomalously edged by a border of gay wildflowers. On the projecting architrave of the door frame, a bust of the bearded padrone, Bonifacio Poiana, gazes sternly down on his callers. The large door is locked.

  I go around to the side wing and what appears to be a service entrance. There’s a small car parked next to the house. A temporary signboard announces that the commune of Poiana Maggiore is in the process of refurbishing the villa—that accounts for the raw, graded earth, the brand-new rainwater gutters around the roof, and the patches of fresh plaster on the walls. I tap on the window.

  A woman opens the door. She’s wearing rubber gloves and a kerchief around her head. I can see a mop and pail behind her. I ask if it’s possible to visit the house, explaining that I’ve come from Philadelphia. She seems happy to be interrupted.

  “Come in,” she says. “I’ll show you around.”

  The large room in which we are standing occupies the entire east wing. A door at the far end leads into the central block. We enter a square room with crescent-shaped quarter-vaults, or lunettes, in each corner. The space is bare—none of the rooms is furnished—but the interior has obviously been recently restored to its original state. (In the 1950s, the villa had been converted into a tenement, subdivided, and rented to six local families.18) We pass into a camerino, perhaps once used as an intimate cabinet or study, with an elaborate cross-vaulted ceiling and frescoes. The subjects are grottesche—grotesques—fanciful figures of satyrs, cherubs, monkeys, and parrots. They are the work of Bernardino India, who may have done the ceiling frescoes at the Villa Pisani.

  THE ARCHED MOTIF OF THE SERLIANA IS ECHOED IN THE WINDOW OVER THE DOOR AS WELL AS IN THE VAULTED CEILING.

  From here, we enter the sala. As usual it is the tallest room, with ceilings about thirty feet high, although less grand than the cruciform hall of the Villa Pisani. The walls, devoid of architectural ornament, are painted white. The ceiling, partially frescoed, is a simple barrel vault. Light enters the room through small arched windows at each end, and through windows on each side of the doors; the oculi in the rear wall project sunny circles onto the floor. The arc of oculi is repeated on both end walls of the sala—circular windows at one end, recesses at the other. The vault itself corresponds exactly to the semicircular archway of the façade. The effect is very beautiful. In each new villa Palladio is achieving a greater sense of unity, not only relating the back to the front but also the interior to the exterior.

  Across the sala is a reverse sequence of rooms: a small study, a medium-size square room, and finally a larger room.

  “La Sala degli Imperatori,” my guide announces.

  I am obviously supposed to be impressed. The room is the same size as the sala and the raised coved ceiling makes it almost as tall. Walls and ceiling are covered in frescoes. The flat panel on the ceiling depicts a Roman equestrian battle scene, fierce but curiously bloodless. The walls have painted niches filled with statues of Roman war heroes—the emperors. A painted window looks out on an Arcadian scene in which an old man extinguishes the torch of war on the altar of peace, probably a reference to the Peace of Bologna, which in 1529 officially ended the Cambrai war. These frescoes are the work of Anselmo Carnera, who was also working with Palladio on the Palazzo Thiene. The painted architectural framework of Ionic columns and niches in the Sala degli Imperatori bears a marked resemblance to the drawing of a “Corinthian hall” in Quattro libri. “They [the Romans] made the vault either semicircular or coved, that is, its frezza [the radius of the cove] was a third of the breadth of the hall,” Palladio wrote, “and it had to be decorated with compartments of stucco and paintings.”19 The layout of the room in the Villa Poiana precisely follows this recommendation, which makes it likely that the overall design of the painted décor, as in the Villa Godi, was Palladio’s responsibility.

  The woman beckons me to follow her back to the sala where a door leads to a staircase. The brick treads are illuminated by natural light, since Palladio thoughtfully provided a window looking onto the loggia. The stair goes down to the basement. Here the construction is brick: heavy walls, vaulted ceilings. The extremely low vaults—I can almost touch the ceiling—are reinforced by iron tie-bars; the floors are brick. It’s surprisingly bright, the whitewashed surfaces reflecting the light that enters through the small windows. There is nothing improvised about the design: the intersecting curves of the broad vaults have the simple but affecting beauty that straightforward engineering sometimes achieves. Although the basement is empty, I imagine it as a bustling place, with large tables for food preparation, cooking fires, ovens, and rows of copper and cast-iron pots. Much of the cool space would have been used for food storage: casks of wine, containers of olive oil and vinegar, barrels of pickles and salted meats, hams and sausages hanging from the ceiling. On rainy days there would have been racks of clothes drying, for laundering was also done here.

  We go back to the stairs and climb all the way to the attic. Partway up is a low-ceilinged amezato built above the camerino, which has a lower ceiling than the larger rooms. There is a square window, almost at floor level. A few steps up is the attic’s counterpart to the square room. Since the heavy, brick walls of the villa are load-bearing, the plan of the main floor repeats on every floor. There is no floor above the Sala degli Imperatori; instead, the rough back of the coved ceiling swells up like a huge balloon. Palladio built ceilings in different ways. Flat ceilings that supported a floor were made of closely spaced wooden beams (as in the Villa Godi and the Villa Pisani) or of brick, if they were vaulted. The vaulted ceiling of a room that was not required to carry a floor was lighter, made of plastered cane lath supported on a structure of wood. That is the case here.

  My redoubtable guide leads me downstairs, crosses the sala, and takes me up the second stair. Palladio villas often have two staircases, which were needed when the upper portion of the sala divided by the attic in two, or when the space below the sala was unexcavated. Walking around the attic is like being in a large barn, since the roof is supported by an open framework of crisscrossing wooden trusses, the huge timbers, about a foot square in cross section, banded together with wrought-iron straps. The large timbers came from forests high up in the mountains and were more expensive than stone, which is why masonry arches were used whenever possible. The wooden trusses carried purlins, smaller beams to which clay tiles were attached; the underside of the tiles is plainly visible since there are no ceilings.

  Palladio described the attic of the Villa Poiana as a granaro, or granary.20 Agricultural productivity in the sixteenth century was low, less than ten bushels per acre of cultivated land. Since a part of the land was regularly left fallow—and land was also used for grazing, vineyards, and hay and vegetable production—a large Vicentine estate of four hundred acres produced only four or five hundred bushels of wheat, rice, millet, and barley.21 Such a valuable harvest had to be kept in a secure place, especially as the owner was not always in residence. When I later calculate the storage capacity of the Poiana attic, it turns out that filled to a height of four feet, it could easily accommodate six thousand bushels. Evidently, the attic wasn’t only a granary. It was also used as a box-room, a seasonal store for clothes and furniture, and not the least, as living quarters for servants. This explains the many windows and why country houses without agricultural lands, as well as town houses, had similar attics.

  The basement and the attic of a villa are like the backstage of a theater: the delicate architecture of the owner’s rooms is supported on vaults as
massive as catacombs, and covered by timberwork as hefty as a railroad trestle. The Villa Poiana is not just an achievement of Palladio the designer, it is also an accomplishment of Palladio the builder. “There are three things in every building that have to be considered,” he writes in the opening lines of Quattro libri, paraphrasing Vitruvius, “these are usefulness or convenience, durability, and beauty.”22 Usefulness related to planning, beauty to aesthetics, and durability to construction. Palladio took construction seriously. In his treatise, he devoted the first eleven chapters to such mundane topics as where to find good building sand, how to make lime, and the best way to build foundations. Like Alberti, Palladio followed Vitruvius’s lead in emphasizing technique, but unlike that patrician scholar, the ex-stonemason knew at firsthand what he was talking about. And he built well, as this 450-year-old house attests.

  The tour over, I thank my guide profusely and bid her good-bye. There is time for one last stroll around the exterior of the house. The sun is higher than when I arrived, and the architrave and the moldings throw sharp shadows on the wall. The deeply shaded oculi and dark loggia interior contrast sharply with the dazzling white walls. The masterly chiaroscuro effects attest to the lessons that Palladio has learned while designing the Basilica, just as the serliana entrance and the pediment refine themes that he has explored in earlier houses. The impression is of a mature architect fully in control of his medium. But what sort of architect? Thanks to the influence of Quattro libri, and the systematic analyses of Palladio’s villa plans, Palladianism has come to represent, at least in the public’s eye, a sort of architectural recipe: a central hall, a pediment, a couple of columns. In 1992, one enterprising Yale art historian, in collaboration with a Microsoft software engineer, devised a computer program that was capable of generating innumerable “Palladian” villa plans and façades according to predetermined geometrical rules.23 Despite the authors’ numerous caveats, this mechanical approach leaves the distinct impression that designing a Palladio villa was simply a matter of rigidly adhering to a few simple rules. Palladio himself contributed to the perception that he was a disciplinarian. “And though variety and novelty must please everybody, one should not, however, do anything that is contrary to the laws of this art and contrary to what reason makes obvious,” he wrote, “so we can see that the ancients also made variations, but that they never departed from certain universal and essential rules of this art, as we shall see in my books on antiquities.”24

  Yet what is striking about the Villa Poiana is not how Palladio follows rules, but rather how he invents. The Villa Poiana is full of novel ideas such as the projecting wings, the extremely low basement, the stair windows looking into the loggia. Some of these features will reoccur in later houses, others will not. The chunky abstracted serliana appears only once more, in the Villa Forni, a small house probably built in the 1540s. The oculi, for example, appear in the sala of the Villa Caldogno, which has circular and elliptical windows, but they are concealed within the loggia. The wonderful arc motif of Poiana is unique. Although the demands of the client, and the character of the site, influenced the distinct personality of each villa, the chief reason for the variety was Palladio’s restless imagination.

  This restlessness makes Palladio curiously modern. He is not modern like Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who really was disciplined and whose later work, typified by the Seagram Building in New York, consisted of a rigorously controlled number of architectural elements: I-beam mullions, plate glass, travertine slabs. Nor is Palladio like Louis I. Kahn, who laboriously developed his own architectural vocabulary of brick and precast concrete, which was sometimes brilliant but often cramped and confining. Rather, Palladio resembles the Swiss-French genius Le Corbusier. Le Corbusier, too, published his architectural ideas and formulated many architectural rules, but his fecund creativity periodically drove him in new architectural directions, bending and often breaking his earlier pronouncements.

  It sounds farfetched to compare Palladio, who was constrained by traditional building methods and by his admiration for the past, with a modernist firebrand such as Le Corbusier, who embraced new technology and wanted to rewrite, if not destroy, history. But Palladio was part of an architectural revolution that was more profound—and of considerably longer duration—than its twentieth-century counterpart. It is true that he lived at the end of that revolution—Brunelleschi’s seminal Ospedale degli Innocenti was already almost a hundred years old when Palladio was born. Yet Palladio occupied a unique position in the Renaissance. Working in Vicenza, far from the architectural centers of Florence and Rome, he had to discover the all’antica style for himself. He built on the achievements of his predecessors and shared some of the romantic outlook of his contemporaries, but his architecture was neither jaded nor mannered; it had the fresh first blush of discovery—of true Rinascimento—which is probably why it proved so influential.

  * * *

  IPoiana never enlarged the house, although in 1606 a descendant completed the east wing.

  IIAdriano Thiene died in 1550 and Marc’antonio a decade later. Marc’antonio’s son continued construction, but neither the villa nor the palazzo were completed.

  IIIThe fact that Palladio could not command a large salary no doubt influenced the Great Council’s deliberations.

  IVPalladio was influenced by Sebastiano Serlio, whose treatise suggested a hierarchy among the five orders. Serlio seems to have invented this “rule”—Vitruvius has nothing to say on the matter—based on the façade of the Colosseum.

  VThe Pope, perhaps hearing of the Basilica project, wanted advice on the design of St. Peter’s, but he died as Palladio was en route to Rome and nothing came of the request.

  IV

  On the Brenta

  any of Palladio’s villas are in out-of-the-way places and my directions are sketchy. Getting back to Vicenza, where I am staying, is easy—I just follow the road signs. It’s only once I arrive in the city that I run into trouble. My hotel is in the historic center, a medieval maze of narrow, winding streets further complicated by a frustrating profusion of one-way signs, so if it’s dark by the time I get back, I usually get lost. The ride becomes increasingly nerve-racking as I juggle glancing at my map, peering at street names, and keeping abreast of the rush-hour traffic. Vicentine drivers are polite but relentless—and fast. Eventually I give up trying to navigate, and instead look for a familiar landmark near my hotel. Once I see the floodlit façade of the Museo Civico, I know I’m home.

  The municipal museum is a converted Palladio building, originally a nobleman’s residence. The impressive structure occupies a conspicuous site at the eastern edge of the historic center, where the Corso crosses the Bacchiglione River and joins the old Venice highway. In the sixteenth century, the open space between the palazzo and the river was called the Piazza dell’Isola and housed an outdoor cattle market. Adjacent to the market was the town wharf, where barges from Padua, Venice, and elsewhere unloaded their cargoes. People as well as goods traveled by water in the Republic, and in many ways, this was Vicenza’s front door.

  The Palazzo Chiericati was one of several commissions that came to Palladio following his appointment as architect of the Basilica. The client was Count Girolamo Chiericati, a leading citizen who, as a member of the Basilica building committee, had backed Palladio. In 1550, after inheriting three small houses facing the Isola, Chiericati commissioned Palladio to build a grand residence in their place. A cattle market might seem an unwelcome neighbor, but Chiericati guessed—correctly—that new construction would transform the area; it was up to Palladio to expedite the change. This was a challenge. The building plot was awkwardly shaped—more than a hundred feet wide facing the piazza but only about fifty feet deep. To overcome this constraint—and gain extra space on the upper floor—Palladio shrewdly suggested that Chiericati petition the city council to permit the building to encroach on the piazza in the form of a public arcade “for the comfort and ornament of the whole city.”1 Covered pedestrian a
rcades were a familiar feature of Veneto towns, and the proposal was accepted.

  The shallow plot could not accommodate the deep, courtyard type of town house that Palladio had designed for Thiene and da Porto. Yet the site had other benefits. While these earlier palazzos were on narrow, cramped streets, hemmed in by their neighbors, Chiericati’s house would be freestanding, its broad façade fronting a piazza and with a fine view to the lazy Bacchiglione River and water mills on the far bank. The prospect was almost countrylike. Perhaps that is why Palladio planned the town house like a villa, not introverted but outward-looking. He elevated the main floor by raising the basement partially aboveground. On each side of the entrance hall he placed suites of small, medium, and large rooms, as well as staircases. He repeated the plan on the upper floor, adding a large sala above the entrance hall; the third floor contained the attic. All these features were adapted from his villas, but on the exterior Palladio created something new: the entire hundred-foot façade overlooking the piazza was a commanding two-story loggia.