The Perfect House: A Journey with Renaissance Master Andrea Palladio

by Rybczynski, Witold

  This loggia was not supported by arches and piers but by freestanding columns. In his early villas, Palladio had only suggested columns. Since a house consists chiefly of walls, if an architect wished to use the grammar of classical architecture—that is, columns—he could do so only by attaching flat pilasters or half-columns to the walls’ surfaces. This was not a satisfactory solution, for, as Goethe shrewdly observed: “[Palladio’s] major problem was that which confronts all modern architects, namely, how to make proper use of columns in domestic architecture, since a combination of columns and walls must always be a contradiction.”2 The Palazzo Chiericati neatly resolved the contradiction: Palladio simply separated the columns and the walls, juxtaposing the columned loggia with the house proper. Put that way, it sounds simple enough, but it had taken him almost a decade to arrive at this fortuitous solution.

  PALAZZO CHIERICATI

  He made the discovery in a related project. The same inheritance that made Girolamo Chiericati owner of the Isola properties provided his brother, Giovanni, with an estate on the outskirts of the city. Giovanni, likewise an admirer of Palladio, commissioned a small villa.3 The house still stands, surrounded by open fields, still part of a working farm, somewhat neglected, its architectural presence crudely compromised by an attached modern farmhouse and barn. The plan is unremarkable: a square sala, flanked by two suites of small, medium, and large rooms. However, instead of a recessed three-arch loggia, there is a splendid freestanding portico whose classical pediment is supported by four giant Ionic columns, rising the full height of the house.

  When I go to look at the Villa Chiericati, the friendly farmer who lives next door asks me if I am German. Many German architects come to look at the house, he explains. I can sense that he is puzzled why this rather decrepit structure attracts so much attention.

  VILLA CHIERICATI

  “There are porticoes descended from this one all over the world, even in the United States, where I live,” I say. “This is a historic building.”

  I am not exaggerating. What started in 1485 as the mere suggestion of a temple pasted to the front of a Medici villa has grown into the real, three-dimensional thing. No Renaissance architect had ever done anything quite like this before; indeed, the Chiericati portico marks a great event in the development of Western architecture. For the next four hundred years, architects will design and build countless variations of the temple portico, adorning country houses, mansions, royal palaces, and presidents’ homes, not to mention churches, museums, and banks. In the seventeenth century, Claude Perrault will make it the centerpiece of the Louvre; in the eighteenth century, it will front E. M. Barry’s Royal Opera House in Covent Garden and Samuel Blodgett’s First Bank of the United States in Philadelphia; in the early 1800s, the great German architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel will use it on the Berlin Theater; and more than a hundred years later it will reappear in John Russell Pope’s imposing National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. It is likely that when twenty-first-century architects tire of titanium swirls and jagged metallic zigzags, they will return to find new inspiration in this ancient device.

  • • •

  Construction of the Villa Chiericati proceeded extremely slowly and only the basement and the bare outlines of the main floor were completed by 1558, when Giovanni’s death put a stop to construction. The house remained in this unfinished state for the next two decades; Palladio must have despaired of ever seeing the villa finished, for he did not include it in Quattro libri. Yet he was obviously excited about the new portico since he immediately used it in another villa. That is my next destination: the Villa Foscari.

  The house is better known as La Malcontenta, supposedly named after an unhappy—and allegedly unfaithful—wife who was locked up here by her suspicious husband. In fact, the hamlet was known as Malcontenta long before the villa was built, after the neighboring marshes that offered refuge for outlaws, or malcontenti.4 I’ve been looking forward to visiting this villa ever since I first read the evocative name and saw lyrical photographs of its imposing portico, surrounded by weeping willows and reflected in the still waters of the Brenta.

  I look out of the car window, which is streaked with rain. Instead of the Brenta and weeping willows, all I see is the grimy industrial outskirts of Mestre, the port of Venice: factories and warehouses, interspersed with dreary apartment buildings. Can this really be the place? A sign announces the Ristorante Palladio, so the villa can’t be far away. I park the car in front of the restaurant and continue on foot. Around the bend, next to the road but separated by a low steel barrier, a narrow canal comes into view, its surface barely two feet lower than the pavement. The sluggish Brenta is exactly as John Ruskin described it 150 years ago, “a muddy volume of yellowish-gray water, that neither hastens nor slackens, but glides heavily between its monotonous banks.”5 Hardly a picturesque sight but it suits this ashen, overcast day.

  The Brenta, which empties into the Venetian Lagoon a few miles away, was a key terraferma navigation route. The modern excursion boat that takes tourists for cruises up the canal covers the six miles from the city to Malcontenta in two hours. This is probably about the same length of time it took sixteenth-century Venetians to make the journey in a burchiello, or luxury barge, pulled by mules. The owners of the villa must have made this short trip many times, for theirs was a special kind of country house, not the administrative center of a farm but a city dweller’s country getaway.

  The concept of rural retreats was popularized by the fourteenth-century poet Petrarch, who had built a small house (which still exists) outside Padua, and spent the last five years of his life “surrounded by olive groves and a vineyard . . . far from alarms, noise and commotion.”6 A hundred years later, urban “noise and commotion”—not to mention the summer heat and pestilential atmosphere—had become intense and the countryside offered a popular alternative. By Alberti’s time, it was necessary to distinguish between country houses that were associated with agriculture and those that were intended for pleasurable escape. “The fortunate will own a villa as a summer retreat,” he wrote. “By this means they enjoy all the advantages to be found in the country, of light, breeze, open space, and views.”7 Many of Alberti’s wealthy Florentine neighbors built such villas in the hills overlooking the city. Associating the villa suburbana with antiquity, he quoted an ancient Roman poet on the pleasures of villa life:

  How in the country do I pass the time?

  The answer to the question’s brief:

  I lunch and drink, I sing and play,

  I wash and dine, I rest. Meanwhile

  I Phoebus quiz

  And Muses frisk.8

  Venice was larger than Florence, and being built on the water was more crowded and unhealthy. To temporarily escape such conditions, wealthy Venetians built summer houses on the island of Murano, next to the glass factories whose hot exhausts were curiously believed to be beneficial to one’s health. The island of Giudecca was another favorite location.9 Eventually, villa builders moved farther out, and the banks of canals such as the Brenta, which provided convenient access from the city, likewise filled up with summer retreats.

  UNUSUAL STAIRS LEAD TO THE TALL LOGGIA OF THE VILLA FOSCARI, ALSO KNOWN AS LA MALCONTENTA, WHICH OVERLOOKS THE BRENTA CANAL.

  Phoebus, the god of the sun, is not much in evidence today as I walk beside the murky Brenta. The villa comes into view, or rather a corner of its portico, behind a stand of weeping willows; a giant Ionic column and a glimpse of pediment announce “Palladio villa” as unmistakably as a billboard. Alberti advised that a suburban villa “will be most attractive, if it presents a cheerful overall appearance to anyone leaving the city, as if to attract and expect visitors.”10 As I observe La Malcontenta, “cheerful” is not the word that comes to mind—this is the most dramatic portico I’ve ever seen, with giant columns rising the full height of the house. The monumental effect of the portico is magnified since the house itself, while not particularly large, is raised on a story-hig
h podium and looms over the narrow Brenta across a short stretch of lawn. The flooding at the Villa Pisani had taught Palladio to build riverside basements aboveground, but he also seems to have acquired a taste for verticality, for he has made the basement—and the attic—exceptionally high, producing a house that is even taller than the two-story Palazzo Chiericati. And just as that building faced a piazza, Palladio pushed La Malcontenta toward the canal, ensuring that the visitor stepping out of his burchiello experienced the full dramatic impact of the monumental portico.

  The main floor is reached by two exterior stairs, one on each side. The frieze of the broad entablature carries a Latin inscription commemorating the men who commissioned the house: NICOLAUS ET ALOYSIUS FOSCARI FRATRES FEDERICI FILII (The brothers Nicolò and Alvise Foscari, sons of Federico). The Foscari brothers were wealthy Venetian nobles, descended from a famous fifteenth-century doge. I can imagine them examining a drawing of Palladio’s latest design, the as yet unbuilt Villa Chiericati, and instructing him, “We like this plan, but make the portico larger. We want our friends and visitors to be impressed.” Palladio turned up the architectural volume; the Malcontenta portico is not only taller than the portico of the Villa Chiericati, it is supported by eight columns instead of four.

  The column was the basic module of ancient Roman architecture, and its diameter was the dimensional module that determined the sizes of the other parts of the building, including the space between the columns, or the intercolumniation. Vitruvius described five types of intercolumniation, ranging from 11/2 to 3 diameters, but strongly recommended the so-called eustyle “with the intervals apportioned just right.”11

  Eustyle, which required the space between the columns to be equal to 21/4-column diameters, was Palladio’s favorite, too. Roman temple fronts always had an uneven number of bays—typically three, five, or seven—and the central bay opposite the entrance door was sometimes made slightly wider so that “a free passage will be afforded to those who would approach the statues of the gods,” according to Vitruvius.12 Palladio usually followed this practice, and the five-bay portico of La Malcontenta has a wider bay in the center. This serves no practical function, since one enters the portico from the side, but the larger space emphasizes the central axis of the house.

  The tall house behind the portico is massive. The brick walls are faced with a Venetian type of stucco called marmorino, a mixture of powdered seashells and travertine marble dust mixed with lime. This was plastered onto the walls, then pressed with a hot iron, which made an integrally colored, shiny surface that resembles soapstone. As in most of Palladio’s villas, the stucco is incised with a masonry pattern, the joint lines here conspicuously highlighted with reddish paint. The effect is almost crude, but it strikes me as authentic. The roof is crowned by a wide dormer window whose gable creates a second, smaller pediment above the portico. On each side of the dormer are exceptionally tall chimneys with characteristically bulbous Venetian caps. In fact, despite its rural surroundings, the imposing house distinctly recalls a Venetian palazzo. This grand—almost grandiose—façade is the work of a Palladio who is less interested in chiaroscuro and history than in solemn monumentality. Like some of Michelangelo’s works, the portico of La Malcontenta conveys a sense of terribilità—“sheer awe.”13

  To get to the villa I have to walk a short distance back along the canal’s edge until I find a bridge. A track leads to a gate where a dour old woman dressed in black collects the entrance fee. “The villa is a private residence; inside it is forbidden to touch or use the furnishings, to take photographs and to smoke,” reads a baleful warning in Italian, English, French, and Japanese. “During your visit, please be careful on the staircase outside since there is no handrail and on the waxed pavement inside.”

  LA MALCONTENTA

  A curving path leads to the front of the house. Close-up, the podium is even more impressive—it must be all of fifteen feet high. I have to crane my neck to see the tops of the Ionic columns. I climb the staircase carefully, for as the ticket warns, there are no handrails. Above the generous portico, heavy rustic beams support clay roof tiles whose underside is plainly visible, the rude construction emphasizing the heavy load that is carried by the burly columns. There are no railings between the columns, merely a stone parapet just the right height for sitting. Now the architectural reason for the podium is clear—it’s the ideal vantage point from which to greet visitors arriving by boat. From up here, the Brenta looks almost picturesque.

  The front entrance is immense—fourteen feet high, twice as tall as a conventional door. Above is a cartouche commemorating the 1574 visit of Henri de Valois, who stopped in Venice on the way to Paris to accede to the throne. The doors must have been opened wide for the future king, but I enter through a low aperture cut out of one of the panels. The spectacular sala is cruciform in plan, similar to the Villa Pisani but even taller, with a soaring, barrel-vaulted ceiling. The surfaces of the walls and ceilings are frescoed with allegorical and mythological subjects within a trompe l’oeil architectural frame of giant Ionic columns that mimic those of the portico. It is likely that Palladio designed the architectural décor, for the frescoes are painted by the same Giambattista Zelotti with whom he had recently decorated the Villa Godi. As at the Villa Godi, Zelotti replaced a painter who died on the job, Battista Franco. The dramatic vaults offered Zelotti greater scope for his talents, and above the orderly framework of columns, niches, and door frames, nymphs, gods, and goddesses run riot. The frescoes are faded and somewhat damaged, evidence of the hard treatment that La Malcontenta has received over the years. In 1848, the house was occupied by Austrian troops besieging Venice; during the First World War it was a field hospital; and in the years following it was used for storing grain and for the cultivation of silkworms. A subsequent restoration has not entirely erased the marks of a century of abuse. The frescoes are easy to see since the sala is exceptionally bright—the south-facing wall opposite the door is almost entirely windows, rectangular openings below and the large semicircle of a thermal window immediately beneath the vault. Palladio always provided plenty of fenestration but here he outdid himself.

  La Malcontenta is currently owned by descendents of the Foscari brothers. Easy chairs and divans line the walls of the sala, but the effect is distinctly undomestic, more like the waiting room of a railway station than a salon; the great space would best have been left empty. The sala is flanked by suites composed of the usual small, medium, and large rooms. The rooms have varied décor and different types of domed and vaulted ceilings. The smallest rooms are decorated in the so-called Pompeiian style, walls and ceiling vaults frescoed with satyrs and winged cherubs. Zelotti painted one of the square rooms—today used as a bedroom—to resemble a vine-entwined arbor; the other room is beautifully decorated by Franco with ruined columns and giant, contorted Michelangelesque figures.

  The floor plan of La Malcontenta is a virtual duplicate of an early version of the Villa Chiericati, which had a complicated vaulted cruciform sala.14 Apparently, Giovanni Chiericati had balked at the expense and demanded something simpler. Palladio complied, but in his usual persistent way he did not give up on the idea, and when the Foscari brothers approached him, he must have shown them the earlier plan.

  A young woman serves as a docent at La Malcontenta. It turns out that she is an architecture student for whom this is a part-time job. I ask her if I can see the attic, and she tells me that it’s not open to the public but shows me a book about the villa that contains plans of all the floors. The attic appears to be an exact duplicate of the main floor, with two suites of rooms and a cruciform central space directly above the sala.15 The upper sala is lit from each end by dormer windows.

  Clearly, in a suburban villa there was no need for a granary. In fact, Palladio specifically referred to the upper rooms of La Malcontenta not as granari but as camere, or rooms. “The upper camere are like mezzanines,” he wrote, “because of their lack of height, which is only eight feet.”16 The villa wa
s originally designed for two bachelors, but Alvise Foscari became betrothed while the house was under construction, and it is likely that Palladio altered the upper rooms, adding the unusual dormer windows, in order to provide more space for the expanded household.17 Thus Palladio subtly modified his design, solving a practical problem, adding a second floor disguised as an attic, and, as usual, creating beauty in the process.

  Since I can’t go upstairs I borrow the docent’s book on the villa and leaf through its pages. The author is a Swedish professor who visited the Veneto almost forty years ago with a group of architecture students. They toured Palladio’s villas, ending up at Malcontenta, where they spent several days taking precise measurements of the house, particularly the rooms. Their purpose was to compare the villa with the plan in Quattro libri, where the room dimensions are prominently noted. It is well known that Palladio favored certain room shapes. “There are seven types of room that are the most beautiful and well-proportioned and turn out better,” he wrote, and listed them: round, square, and several rectangular shapes of predetermined proportions.18 He was directly quoting Vitruvius, who devoted an entire chapter to the subject. In practice, Palladio did not use all seven shapes equally; he most often made rooms square, sometimes a square and a third, and sometimes a square and a half.I According to Quattro libri, these are the proportions of the small, medium, and large rooms that flank the sala of La Malcontenta.

  Palladio did not explain why these room shapes “turn out better” (neither did Vitruvius). Rudolf Wittkower, in an influential book on the architectural principles of the Renaissance, published in 1949, speculated that Palladio based the proportions of his rooms on music.19 He quoted a memorandum in which Palladio drew an analogy between architectural proportions and musical harmonies: “The proportions of the voices are harmonies for the ears; those of the measurements are harmonies for the eyes. Such harmonies usually please very much, without anyone knowing why, excepting the student of the causality of things.”20 According to Wittkower, Palladio’s “measurements” were based on sixteenth-century musical theory that expressed notes as numerical ratios. This complicated explanation is difficult to summarize, but the gist of it is that the dimensions that Palladio used for rooms, salas, and porticoes form ratios that were based on specific musical intervals such as fourths, fifths, major sixths, and so on. For example, according to Wittkower, at La Malcontenta the dimensions of the rooms (twelve by sixteen, sixteen by sixteen, and sixteen by twenty-four Venetian feet) and the width of the sala (thirty-two feet) form a series that represents the “keynote” musical theme, also present in the portico and the spacing of the columns.II,21