The Perfect House: A Journey with Renaissance Master Andrea Palladio

by Rybczynski, Witold

  Construction started immediately, and when Vasari visited Venice the base was already finished. San Francesco was an important project for Palladio, but it was only a façade. His real breakthrough came when the Benedictines, obviously pleased with their refectory and perhaps galvanized by the boldness of his design for San Francesco, asked him to build an entirely new monastic church to replace the old one at San Giorgio Maggiore. A large church, with grand interior spaces—and an immense building budget—was a true test of a Renaissance architect’s powers. Vasari saw the model and predicted, correctly, that the new church “will prove a stupendous and most lovely work.”16 The church combined Palladio’s interest in antiquity—the nave resembles a Roman basilica—with a richness and magnificence, inside and out, that all Venetians could admire.

  San Giorgio catapulted Palladio into the first rank. As his religious work in Venice increased, he accepted fewer and fewer villa commissions; while he designed fourteen country houses in the 1550s, there were only four in the 1560s. The munificent Leonardo Mocenigo commissioned a second villa, and Palladio produced a similar two-story design for Count Annibale Sarego of Verona, Marc’antonio’s brother. For some reason, neither house was built. There was a third two-story house, this one with curious castello towers, designed for Count Giovanni Valmarana, for whose brother Palladio was building a palazzo in Vicenza.III All three of these villa designs are rather stodgy, with imposing two-story porticoes but unrefined plans. I have the impression that Palladio accepted these commissions more out of a sense of obligation to faithful clients, or their brothers. His attention was elsewhere. I cannot imagine that, approaching sixty, he was unhappy to give up the hard travel associated with building houses in remote rural locations in exchange for a more settled life in the city. Yet during that eventful and busy decade he found time for one final country-house commission—his last villa.

  * * *

  IFrank Lloyd Wright used a house-planning grid—usually two feet by four feet—that was inscribed in the concrete floor-slab; R. M. Schindler, who practiced in California in the 1930s, used a four-foot house module laid out on the building site and keyed to the drawings.

  IILeonardo Emo’s request was honored for more than four hundred years. In 2001, in what must have been a wrenching decision for the Emo descendants, the villa was put up for sale.

  IIIThe Villa Valmarana at Lisiera, outside Vicenza, still exists, although in much altered form, having been almost completely rebuilt after suffering damage in the Second World War (yet worth a visit for its evocative setting).

  IX

  The Last Villa

  he unpaved lane—a track, really—skirts the flank of Monte Bèrico, part of the Bèrici hills that dominate the southern outskirts of Vicenza. The slopes are largely without buildings, so it feels like countryside, although my destination is “less than a quarter of a mile away from the city,” as Palladio wrote—a short walk from my hotel.1 I round a corner and the domed silhouette of a building materializes out of the morning haze. The villa sits on high ground, lightly shrouded by bare tree branches, its architectural details blurred.

  The lane joins a paved road and the building disappears from view behind a high stone wall. Halfway down the steep hill a large formal gateway signals the entrance. A caretaker lets me in. The gate is at the bottom of a ramped drive that is cut into the hill like a long slot, defined by two retaining walls, one of which is actually the side of a farm building. The gravel carriageway is edged by cobblestoned walks. The villa looms dramatically at the top of the drive. It has the usual Palladio accouterments: a broad staircase leading to a portico; a tall main floor; an abbreviated attic; statues on the parapet. Its exceptional feature is a squat dome that caps the red-clay-tiled roof.

  It is only when I reach the top of the drive that the house exerts its full impact. The portico atop a broad staircase has counterparts on the other two sides and, although I can’t see it from here, on the back as well. This square house has not one but four temple fronts! Palladio succinctly explained his reasoning:

  The site is one of the most pleasing and delightful that one could find because it is on top of a small hill which is easy to ascend; on one side it is bathed by the Bacchiglione, a navigable river, and on the other is surrounded by other pleasant hills which resemble a vast theater and are completely cultivated and abound with wonderful fruit and excellent vines; so, because it enjoys the most beautiful vistas on every side, some of which are restricted, others more extensive, and yet others which end at the horizon, loggias have been built on all four sides; under the floor of these loggias and the hall are the rooms for the convenience and use of the family.2

  VILLA ROTONDA

  Simple enough, yet the effect is extraordinary. The location is a low knoll that has been transformed into a grassy podium by a surrounding retaining wall. The land drops away on all sides. The vistas, while hardly as bucolic as in Palladio’s day, are still impressive. Since the house itself is raised on a tall basement, it looms prominently against the sky, the top of the bulging dome creating the effect of one hill on top of another. Palladio wrote that he provided the house with four loggias to take advantage of the views, but that simple explanation is disingenuous. For one thing, La Rotonda is actually oriented not to the views but to the sun; the house is turned precisely forty-five degrees to the north-south axis, ensuring that even in winter all rooms receive some sun. For another, he could have responded to the views in different ways. He could have made the front more prominent than the other sides, or combined projecting and recessed porticoes, in the manner of the Villa Cornaro, or done a dozen different things. Instead, he made the four sides identical.

  Palladio had been thinking of such a house for a long time. Twenty-five years earlier, at the beginning of his career, he had made a drawing of a square villa with a central sala rising up into a domed lantern, a roof structure with windows on four sides.3 Although the façades in the drawing are not identical, the tall lantern is symmetrical, with four pediments above four thermal windows. In a second version, he made the sala octagonal, perhaps influenced by a square house with an octagonal sala and two loggias that was illustrated in Serlio’s treatise.4

  For years, Palladio had no occasion to build a domed house, but the idea stuck. He returned to it in a project begun in the late 1550s, a villa for the Trissino brothers, which has already been mentioned. The site, which Palladio called “stunning,” was a hilltop near the village of Meledo, on the Guà River. “At the top of the hill should be the circular hall, surrounded by rooms,” he wrote, adding that “because each face of the house has wonderful views, there are four Corinthian loggias.”5 The loggias, however, were not identical; two were projecting, and two were recessed. Moreover, the villa had a definite front, facing a huge forecourt defined by curved loggias and barchesse that cascaded down the hill. Had it been built, it would have been Palladio’s most spectacular villa; the splendid drawing in Quattro libri could be a movie set for Ben-Hur. But the ambitious project was abandoned in 1563, with only a part of a barchessa completed, when one of the brothers died. Yet another precursor of the domed house on Monte Bèrico was Palladio’s historical reconstruction of an ancient sanctuary at Praeneste, which he drew in the late 1560s. The hilly site outside Rome was covered in ruins, terraces, the remains of colonnaded structures, and traces of a small temple at the very summit. He imagined a sort of wedding cake of colonnades and loggias, surmounted by a circular domed temple with four identical Ionic porticoes.6 Palladio was fascinated by circular temples and illustrated several in Quattro libri, including Bramante’s beautiful chapel, called the Tempietto, overlooking Rome from Montoria, the only modern building in his treatise, apart from his own work. Thus in a variety of projects the images of domed circular buildings on hilltop sites simmered in his imagination.

  THE VILLA ROTONDA, ON A HILLTOP ON THE OUTSKIRTS OF VICENZA, IS PALLADIO’S MOST IMITATED HOUSE.

  Climbing the wide stair between massive abutments on whic
h stand heroic statues, I reach the portico. From up here the view of the Bèrici hills is even more spectacular. The front doors open into a wide vaulted passage. There are rooms on each side, but the focus is the arched entrance into the sala. And what a sala!—a circular space under a breathtaking hemispherical dome. Not large—about thirty-five feet in diameter—the dome rises to a height of fifty feet, higher than any Palladio sala, and has a round hole, or oculus, at the top. The most famous domed space in the cinquecento was the Pantheon, then known as La Rotonda, which gave the villa its nickname.7

  The use of a domed circular space, normally associated with ancient temples and Renaissance churches, in a domestic setting has struck some historians as odd. Certainly, Palladio was aware that the ancient Romans did not use circular rooms in their homes, nor was the dome intended to have religious overtones. The domed sala, like his temple porches, is a reminder that he was first an architect interested in form, and second an archaeologist. Moreover, as the images of domed pavilions picturesquely perched on hilltops amply demonstrate, he was an architect with a romantic streak.

  While undoubtedly aware of the similarity, Palladio did not play up the resemblance to the Pantheon. For example, he did not design the dome with coffers, like the Roman original, and although the plan of the sala is often described as round, it is really a cruciform, with four tall vaulted passages like the arms of a Celtic cross. The quadripartite theme abounds: four passages, four porticoes, four entrances, inside the sala four doors leading to four staircases, and above them four windows. Encircling the room, well below the springing of the dome, is a balustraded gallery, accessible from the attic.

  Although the sala is not artificially lit, it is surprisingly bright. Daylight comes from the doors leading to the porticoes and streams in through the oculus. The seven-foot-diameter hole was originally open to the sky—Inigo Jones described a “Net to cover the top Hole to keep out the Flies”—and a perforated stone drain in the shape of a faun’s face in the center of the floor allowed rainwater to drop into the basement.8 It is a shame that the oculus is now capped by a small cupola. Palladio once described an ancient Corinthian house as having an “unroofed space in the middle,” and the original Rotonda sala would have recalled such an atrium, especially for the first thirty or forty years of its life when the dome was unfinished.9

  I regret that the oculus is not open, but in any case Palladio’s architectural intentions are somewhat obscured by the florid stucco decorations, plaster figures, and frescoes that cover the underside of the dome. These were carried out in the 1580s and represent different tastes and fashions. So do the showy, billboardlike eighteenth-century frescoes on the lower walls and in the passages. How much more beautiful this evocative space would be with white painted walls forming a neutral backdrop to the carved stone door and window frames.

  Walking from room to room, I make a quick circuit of the house. The experience of the identical porticoes with their different views is delightful, a bit like being in a revolving restaurant; the view changes while the architecture stays the same. The round sala is surrounded by eight rooms, arranged in four suites. All the rooms have shaped ceilings: low flat-vaults in the small rooms (with amezati, or mezzanines, above) and high coved ceilings with elaborate stucco decorations in the larger rooms. Except for the domed sala, the interior is surprisingly intimate. “Far more space has been lavished on the stairs and porticoes than on the house itself,” wrote Goethe after visiting the villa, adding that the “hall and rooms are beautifully proportioned, but, as a summer residence, they would hardly satisfy the needs of a noble family.”10 That is how it appeared to an eighteenth-century German aristocrat; in fact, with eight rooms and a generous sala, La Rotonda is larger than most Palladio villas.I It just doesn’t feel overwhelming.

  I return to La Rotonda three days later. It is Saturday morning and misty. Since today the interior is closed to the public, there are no other visitors. I sit outside and sketch. The overall conception of La Rotonda is straightforward, yet the exterior details are anything but simple. The cap of the abutments turns into a fascia that girdles the house at the level of the main floor. A very complicated molding, about four feet wide, runs around the house at the level of the architrave frieze. It consists of a cyma recta (or ogee molding), a flat fascia, a pulvinated (or cushion-shaped) molding, and three stepped bands of diminishing size. This molding, like the others, is made of plastered brick, except at the corners, where, to guarantee the sharpness of the profile, Palladio has substituted carved stone. Like the gently swelling tapering of the columns, this optical refinement is a reminder that Palladio’s style, however coolly rational and historical its roots, was ultimately concerned with perception and experience.

  How many visitors have sat here, marveling at this extraordinary building? Immediately on his arrival in Vicenza, Goethe hurried up Monte Bèrico to see the house, which he found to be “located just where such a building belongs, the view is unimaginably beautiful.” Yet he added a curious comment in his diary: “here the architect was free to do whatever he liked and he almost went a bit too far.”11

  EXTERIOR MOLDING AT THE VILLA ROTONDA

  A bit too far; I can see what Goethe meant. At first glance the self-assured Rotonda, with its four identical temple fronts, appears slightly preposterous, a facile tour de force, an architectural parlor trick. “It is not done well,” said Samuel Johnson of a dog walking on its hind legs, “but you are surprised to find it done at all.” Yet after spending time in and around the villa, under its lofty dome, within its princely porticoes, there is little doubt that, surprising as it may be, the domed house is done well. If it’s a parlor trick, Palladio the magician is too fast for me. La Rotonda exerts a strange allure, which is why I’ve come back to look at it again. Goethe, too, was entranced, and returned the following evening; “one more occasion for me to admire his towering genius,” he noted.

  The most striking characteristic of La Rotonda is, of course, its extreme symmetry, both inside and out. In turning to this form of composition, Palladio, like all Renaissance architects, was influenced by the remains of ancient Roman buildings and by the writings of Vitruvius, who taught that “since nature has designed the human body so that its members are duly proportioned to the frame as a whole, it appears that the ancients had good reason for their rule, that in perfect buildings the different members must be in exact symmetrical relations to the whole general scheme.”12 That is why La Rotonda is so baffling. It is not human at all. It is all fronts, like those spooky two-faced Venetian carnival masks, worn on the face and back of the head. If buildings are supposed to mirror the human body, what sort of being has four faces? The projecting stair abutments of La Rotonda stick out like the paws of a great sphinx, the mythical creature with the head of a woman and the body of a lion. The analogy strikes me as particularly apt not only because the porches are Ionic—supposedly the female order—but also because the four-headed house really is sphinxlike—mysterious, enigmatic, and a little monstrous.

  • • •

  The very qualities that make La Rotonda a distinctly odd villa—it is not my favorite—have also made it the most influential Palladio building. This distinction has to do with the idealized geometry of a circle in a square, the domed room, its iconic pavilionlike quality, and its extraordinary rapport with its prominent hilltop site. While architects have copied various Palladian motifs, no single villa of his, indeed, no house anywhere, has had so many distinguished imitators. The first to have a go was Vincenzo Scamozzi, a young Vicentine who was Palladio’s student at about the time La Rotonda was built. Scamozzi, something of a prodigy, did not stay a pupil long but quickly struck out on his own, and though only in his early twenties was soon receiving commissions for villas and palazzos. In 1576, he was approached by Vettor Pisani, who wanted a country retreat on the dramatic hilltop site of La Rocca in the Bèrici hills. This was near Bagnolo, where years earlier Vettor had built a villa with Palladio (who by the 1570s was no
longer accepting villa commissions). Scamozzi’s solution was a Rotonda-like house consisting of a round domed room set in a square block. Each side has a loggia, but the house is not symmetrical, for there is an Ionic portico on the front and serliana loggias on the back and sides. The handsome villa has the magisterial presence of its forerunner, and its domed central room, chaste and without distracting frescoes, is extremely beautiful. More than thirty years later, Scamozzi designed another domed villa, the Villa Molin near Padua, which recalls Palladio’s first drawing of a domed house. This time he used a square central sala that rises up into a lantern with four thermal windows. He again eschewed strict symmetry and provided but a single portico.

  VILLA ROTONDA

  Scamozzi’s relationship to Palladio was complicated. As far as we know, he was the only student to have been taken on by Palladio (other than his own son, Leonida). After Palladio’s death, Scamozzi was generally considered to be the great architect’s successor (Leonida having died some years before), and he was called upon to complete several unfinished Palladio projects, including the Teatro Olimpico, an extraordinary theater in Vicenza, which had been commissioned by the Olympic Academy, of which Palladio was a founding member. Scamozzi also completed the dome of the Villa Rotonda. During a long and successful career he designed many buildings: villas for Vicentines and Venetians, the beautiful Palazzo Trissino (now Vicenza’s city hall), and the sweeping Procurazie Nuove on the south side of the Piazza San Marco in Venice. He also published his own architectural treatise, ambitiously titled L’idea dell’ architettura universale. The treatise is notable for hardly mentioning Palladio. According to Inigo Jones, who met the sixty-five-year-old Scamozzi in Venice, the architect harbored bitter feelings toward his old master. This may be why he sold Jones and Arundel his entire collection of Palladio drawings, which he must have received from Silla, Palladio’s sole surviving son. Scamozzi, who was well-educated, considered himself Palladio’s social and intellectual superior, and while his own achievements were considerable, his reputation never equaled that of Palladio, who was always the one visitors like Jones wanted to hear about. In short, Scamozzi was jealous. Though he was an exceptionally gifted architect, like Antonio Salieri he had the misfortune to live in the shadow of a genius.