The Perfect House: A Journey with Renaissance Master Andrea Palladio

by Rybczynski, Witold

  Palladio’s earliest idea for the villa has survived in the form of a proverbial napkin sketch, crudely drawn on the back of a used sheet and obviously intended for his own use, for it includes three impatient scratches made to unclog his pen.20 The unfinished drawing is the sort of sketch architects make to get the creative juices flowing. Palladio placed a large entrance hall and a monumental staircase inside the old castello, adding separate suites of rooms and a sala for each brother in the two arms of the barchesse. He located a new vaulted loggia in front of the house, which recalls the theatrical loggia in Alvise Cornaro’s garden, and sketched in a large terrace. The germ of the Villa Barbaro plan is already here, and it was refined in a second drawing, made at a later date, in which he eliminated the outdoor room and the grand entrance hall, introduced a cruciform sala, and moved the monumental stair to the rear.21 When the house was built, he dispensed with the elaborate stair altogether, substituting two enclosed staircases—a fancy one for family and guests, and a plain one for servants.

  The Villa Barbaro would originally have had public reception rooms on the ground floor (which today contains the living room, the dining room, and a study) and the more private family quarters above. Although the current owners still use the front door, paying visitors enter the villa via an open-air service stair that is located within the arcade. At the top of the stairs, on the landing outside the door, is a box of felt slippers. The box is empty, which means that I have to wait until somebody leaves—an effective method of crowd control.

  The Villa Barbaro, which accommodated two households, has two salas and no fewer than thirteen rooms, yet it feels unexpectedly intimate. I am standing in one arm of a vaulted, cruciform sala, similar to the Pisani sala but much smaller and with a proportionately lower ceiling. The old castello into which the house was fitted was narrow, so the ends of the cruciform room correspond to the exterior walls and have large windows—French doors, really—surmounted by glazed arches, facing south, west, and east. The abundance of light and view gives the sala a cheerful domestic feeling.

  Behind me is an arched doorway leading to a room that is called the Salone. The Salone is the “head” of this figural plan whose “body” is the casa del padrone and whose “arms” are the barchesse. Square with a tall vaulted ceiling, this is, in effect, a second sala, providing access to the rear terrace garden and to suites of rooms on each side: Daniele in the east wing, Marc’antonio and his family in the west. The suites are closed to the public, but one can look inside the spacious chambers through a glass door. The inviting room is furnished as a study. The focus of the view from the Salone and its adjoining rooms is the nymphaeum, a hemicyclical garden structure with niches containing yet more statues of Olympian gods. In the center is a grotto whence rises the spring that feeds the elaborate water system. Two jets of water spout from the breasts of a nymph that stands above the pediment and splash into a semicircular pool—the “fishpond”—next to a stone terrace enclosed by tall conifers. Despite the clumsiness of some of Marc’antonio’s sculptures, the effect is magical.

  The Salone is also called the Sala dell’Olimpico since the frescoed ceiling contains several images of Olympian gods. The decoration of this room sets the theme for the rest of the house. The exact meaning is in dispute, however, for Daniele Barbaro, who devised the allegorical program, left no explanation, and cinquecento iconography is notoriously difficult to decipher. For example, art historians have variously identified the female figure astride a serpent in the center of the ceiling as representing Divine Love, Divine Wisdom, Providential Fortune, and Transcendent Grace.22

  The upper walls of the Salone are frescoed with a trompe l’oeil balcony, rendered in foreshortened perspective. The balcony is peopled with members of Marc’antonio Barbaro’s family. On one side are his two elder sons and their pet monkey, and on the other, his youngest son, his wife, and an old nurse.23 Beside them are more pets—a Pekinese and a parrot. Like most of the frescoed figures, the members of the household are life-size. Mary McCarthy, for one, found the effect of the family group inexplicably sad. “It is a stage house inside a real house,” she wrote, “an idea that sounds sportive and playful, a mirror trick, but that is too well executed to be amusing, like a sort of game, where the children playing it work themselves up till they begin to cry.”24

  As at the Villa Godi, the frescoes in the house are a mixture of illusion and reality, of gods and ordinary people, of antique allegory and visual puns. The walls of some rooms are frescoed with country landscapes; a ceiling creates the illusion of sky seen through the arboreal canopy of a vine bower. Classically attired young women, sometimes identified as muses, stand in niches holding a variety of musical instruments: a violin, a trombone, a mandolin, and an unusual boxlike instrument called a Bernaise tambour that looks like a hurdy-gurdy. In addition to Daniele’s allegorical scenes, there are occasional comic touches: a brush and a pair of shoes on a windowsill; a small dog half-hidden behind a column. A page boy looks out from behind a half-open door surrounded by an actual stone frame, opposite a corresponding real door.

  The frescoes of the Villa Barbaro have been described as “one of the supreme decorative achievements of the Italian Renaissance.”25 They are the work of Paolo Caliari, who was called Veronese, one of several artists from Verona who had been trained by Sanmicheli. Veronese’s first villa frescoes were done for Sanmicheli’s Villa La Soranza when he was only twenty. He also frescoed parts of Palladio’s Palazzo da Porto in Vicenza. Under Daniele Barbaro’s direction, Veronese worked on the decoration of the council chamber ceiling in the Doge’s Palace, which brought him great fame. Thus when he came to Maser, in the late 1550s, he was not only an experienced painter, he was also familiar with villa decoration, and knew both Palladio and Daniele Barbaro.

  There is no evidence that Palladio had a hand in the design of the frescoes. Indeed, the complicated architectural frameworks in some of the rooms alter, rather than simply enhance, the experience of the actual spaces. Perhaps that is why Palladio artfully neglected to credit the painter by name in Quattro libri (although a few years later they would work together again in Venice). Thanks to Veronese’s masterful frescoes, the Villa Barbaro is probably the most visited of Palladio’s villas, which is ironic since it is in many ways the least representative. Palladio’s villas are usually surrounded by fields, not gardens. The abundantly decorated exterior lacks the sober, almost ascetic presence of his best work. The somewhat convoluted plan does not demonstrate his usual clarity. Yet whatever awkwardness working with the Barbaro brothers produced, the collaboration seems to have brought out a new side of Palladio. Even if this is not the best resolved of his villas, it is surely the most lighthearted: theatrical, flamboyant, exuberant—and happy.

  * * *

  ILate in life, Marc’antonio oversaw the construction of Palmanova, a fortress town with an extraordinary star-shaped plan.

  VII

  An Immensely Pleasing Sight

  ell, it had to happen. The large gates of the Villa Badoer are chained and padlocked. The forecourt in front of the house is littered with construction debris and crisscrossed by power cables casually slung from temporary posts. An improvised shed made out of sheets of corrugated metal stands forlornly next to a beautiful stone fountain. The pristine lawn that I’ve admired in photographs is now beaten earth overgrown with clumps of weeds. A large signboard announces Lavori di Restauro e Manutenzione—restoration and maintenance work. The sign says that the lavori, which apparently started five years ago, are due to be completed next month, and indeed, despite the disorder of the forecourt, the house itself is freshly plastered and painted. There does not appear to be a last-minute rush, however—it’s ten o’clock in the morning on a Friday yet the place is deserted.

  The house stands on the banks of the narrow Scortico River in the center of the village of Fratta Polesine, in a region that was the southern extremity of the Venetian Republic. The Villa Badoer is, in many ways, the classic Palladio v
illa. This house has it all: an impressive portico, a noble pediment supported by six giant Ionic columns, a monumental staircase, and two majestic curved loggias that form quarter circles on each side of the forecourt.

  An unpaved lane runs beside the house, across from an open shed belonging to a neighboring farm. A burly man working on a piece of machinery looks up. I explain that I am interested in the villa.

  “They’ve been spending money on the repairs for years,” he says gruffly.

  I hear the displeasure in his voice. Actually, I’m happy the house is being taken care of, but I don’t want to get into an argument, so I nod my head understandingly. Mollified, he unbends.

  “Go around there”—he points—“you’ll be able to see the back.”

  At the end of the lane, flat, treeless fields stretch out to the horizon. The dark, cultivated earth comes right up to a tall wall that hides the villa from view. I walk beside the wall down a track as far as an opening, a counterpart to the front gate. This, too, is locked, but I can look in.

  The walled area in the rear of the house is about the same size as the forecourt. It is even more of a mess, recently dug up and dotted with piles of earth. There are stacks of construction materials—drainpipes, lumber, concrete blocks—as well as a parked truck and a cement mixer. No workmen in sight. Architecturally, this side of the house is unimpressive—just rows of shuttered windows without frames or pediments. The unrelieved, white stucco façade is as plain and unadorned as an International Style villa of the 1920s. Quattro libri shows a portico on the back of the house, which would have made a front-back arrangement of recessed and projecting porticoes comparable to the Villa Cornaro. Without the portico the rear of the villa looks incomplete.

  I briefly consider climbing over the gate, but it’s too high. Retracing my steps, I meet the farmer again.

  “It’s closed,” I say. “Is there any way that I can get in?”

  “Try the front,” he says, adding something that I can’t understand.

  I protest that the front is locked, too, but he waves me on encouragingly and returns to his work. The front gates are very tall, with spiky tops that resemble spears. Nothing to be done here, I think, pulling disconsolately on the padlock. It falls open! I look around—there is no one in the street. Quickly unwrapping the chain, I open the gate and slip in.

  Feeling nervous, I hurry across the forecourt. A small door next to the entrance stairs is ajar. The basement is a series of rooms spanned by broad vaults supported on brick walls. The plastered ceilings are painted white and the interior is surprisingly bright, lit by windows cut high into the vaults. The basement housed “the kitchen, cellars, and other places of practical use,” according to Palladio.1 One of the rooms has a large fireplace—this must have been the kitchen—and the rest are bare, except for sawhorses and scattered power tools.

  A stair leads to the main floor, which is murky since most of the windows are shuttered. A piece of scaffolding stands in one corner. The room smells of fresh plaster. There are ghostly outlines of white pails and polyethylene sheets where a section of wall is being repaired. The atmosphere is different from my other visits. With the empty rooms and the construction debris the house appears unclothed, as it must have done when it was brand-new, centuries ago.

  The shutters in the two far rooms are open, and the frescoes—“of brilliant inventiveness by Giallo Fiorentino,” according to Palladio—are plainly visible, although somewhat deteriorated.2 The architectural framework is simple, almost severe. In one room, the entire lower portion of the wall is painted to resemble marble panels, and the upper is divided into vertical strips by closely spaced faux pilasters supporting a painted entablature; in another room, the vertical panels extend from floor to ceiling. The subjects, rendered with an air of stylized fantasy, are ancient gods and goddesses as well as grotesques. The panels are painted in a flattened manner without trompe l’oeil effects, and are surrounded by decorative borders, which makes them resemble delicate wall hangings or banners. The effect of this ordered, geometrical composition is considerably less scenographic than Veronese’s lush frescoes at Maser. It also directly complements the architecture, which could not have displeased Palladio.

  It doesn’t take me long to see all the rooms. Despite its grand loggias and imposing portico, the Villa Badoer is a small house with only two rooms and two little camerini on each side of the narrow sala, which reminds me of the center hall of an American Colonial house. The floor plan is not one of Palladio’s best: the large rooms can be reached directly only by going outside through the portico, and the intimate camerini are little more than passageways. This awkward arrangement is similar to that of the Villa Poiana, but in the intervening decade Palladio had developed much more sophisticated plans, such as La Malcontenta and the Villa Cornaro, and it is unclear why he went back to this earlier layout.

  PLAN OF VILLA BADOER, FROM QUATTRO LIBRI

  There are fireplaces only in the two larger rooms. Unlike the Barbaro fireplaces, for which Marc’antonio created fantastically carved mantels, these have austere stone surrounds. As far as I can see, this is the only dressed stone in the interior. With the exception of two vaulted camerini, the eighteen-foot ceilings of the rooms and the sala are flat with closely spaced beams. The details of this house are distinctly on the plain side compared to the elaborately decorated Villa Barbaro. Palladio, perhaps breathing a sigh of relief, has returned to simpler ways.

  The wide brick staircase—there is only one—continues from the main floor to the attic. At the landing there is a window looking out onto the entrance portico. Palladio usually reserved such spacious and well-lit stairs for two-story villas. Since there were few rooms on the main floor, perhaps guests were expected to sleep upstairs, although Palladio specifically referred to the attic as a “granary.”3 Unfortunately the door to the attic is barred, and the padlock is firmly locked. I descend the stairs all the way to the basement and go back outside.

  I keep expecting someone to show up and chase me away, but it’s as empty as before. The most unusual feature of the cortile is the pair of curved loggias that seem to embrace it like two arms. Unlike the arcaded barchesse of the Trevigiana, these are not barns. Instead, the freestanding structures resemble the porticoes of the Villa Pisani. The design is simplicity itself: a clay-tiled shed roof spanning between a rear brick wall and a colonnade. From a distance, the Tuscan columns looked small next to the towering portico, but close-up they are huge–fourteen feet tall, with massive shafts that are at least two feet in diameter. The columns have no bases but stand directly on the ground. The pavement inside the loggia is made of rounded cobblestones like an ancient Roman street in Pompeii. Vasari described the porticoes as “very beautiful and fantastic.”4 The sinuous curved space is a startling contrast to the rigorous rectangular geometry of the house.

  The curving back wall is blank, save for a door-size gate. It leads to an open-air courtyard with an odd triangular shape, the walls meeting the bulging curve in tightly squeezed angles. I am reminded of the enigmatic cylindrical forms in the buildings of Louis Kahn, but that is reading too much into it; for Palladio this was merely a leftover space, the result of combining the curved loggia with an outbuilding containing “the rooms of the estate manager, the accountant, the stables, and other offices essential for an estate.”5

  A second gate opens to the rear yard. The sides and back of the villa are unremarkable, almost banal. Palladio wrote that “the cornice runs around the house like a crown,” but all that is left of the regal effect are the blocky modillions under the eaves and a single, thin molding, or fascia, a few feet below.6 In addition, the side wall is marred by two chimney flues that appear to be the same vintage as the house (Palladio usually hid flues inside the thick walls). There is another unusual feature: the house is surrounded on three sides by a raised brick terrace. Palladio illustrated this in Quattro libri and called it a “pedestal.” In fact, this is not a base but a bulwark. The flat Polesine plain, whi
ch was recently dredged marshland, was prone to flooding by the mighty Po River, so Palladio built the basement entirely aboveground and added this massive earthwork to reinforce the basement walls.

  Recrossing the triangular courtyard, I return to the curved loggia. An arched opening at the end closest to the house leads directly to a tall flight of steps. An elaborate system of stairs and landings, edged by decorative balustrades, not only provides access to the portico and joins the house to the loggias, but also connects to the brick terrace on the sides and back of the villa. The many landings provide a theatrical setting, and one can imagine the staircase functioning as a viewing platform for musical or dramatic performances.

  A final flight of broad stairs leads to the portico, whose pediment is supported by six tall Ionic columns. A giant temple front atop a flight of stairs has become such a familiar sight to us that it’s hard to imagine how striking it must have appeared to Palladio’s clients. Evidently it appealed to them, for he used this motif over and over again, on city houses as well as villas. There were many permutations: four or six or even eight columns; Doric, Ionic, or Corinthian orders; projecting (like La Malcontenta); flat against the façade (like the Villa Barbaro); or recessed, as it is here. The giant portico in all its forms became a Palladio trademark, and the most imitated of all Palladian motifs, a standard feature of British country houses, large and small. In America, the best-known Palladian portico is undoubtedly that of the White House in Washington, D.C. This building has a convoluted pedigree. James Hoban, an Irish architect and a protégé of George Washington, won the competition to build the President’s House in 1792, with a design based on Kildare House in Dublin. (He added the portico when he rebuilt the house after it was burned down by the British during the War of 1812.) Kildare House had been designed by Richard Castle, a German expatriate architect (perhaps from Kassel) who is generally credited with introducing Palladianism to Ireland. Castle, in turn, based his work on Campbell, who looked to Inigo Jones. And Jones’s first portico was the one that he designed for a brewhouse on the grounds of James I’s new residence in Newmarket, shortly after returning from his Italian journey.7