The Perfect House: A Journey with Renaissance Master Andrea Palladio

by Rybczynski, Witold

  The east and west rooms of a villa were commonly referred to as a mattina (in the morning) and a sera (in the afternoon), recognizing the movement of the sun. The same room bathed in bright sunlight or illuminated with flickering candlelight assumes a different character. At the Villa Saraceno, for example, the living room is bright and sunny a sera, and in the evening it is almost cavelike. The dining room, which has north-facing windows, only comes into its own in the evening.

  Although I am skeptical that Palladio’s secret lies in mathematically precise dimensions, there is no doubt that the rooms in the villa are exceptionally pleasing. We all agree on this—this house feels good. It’s hard to pin down exactly why. The peasantlike roughness of the materials contrasting with the elegantly carved stone details has something to do with it; so does the commodiousness of the rooms and their pleasing overall proportions. There must be more to it than that, however. I finally come to the conclusion that what also contributes to the sense of well-being of these rooms is their height: they are extremely tall—nineteen feet according to my measurement. This makes the interior spacious and airy, almost like being outside. At night, with a few candles and the glow of a fire, the ceiling disappears entirely; even during the daytime it is usually outside my cone of vision. The sense of spaciousness is not only, and perhaps not mainly, visual, it is also aural, for tall ceilings affect sound. Under a high ceiling, voices, footsteps, a chair scraping, seem more distant than they really are.5 When I’m talking to Shirley across the table, she’s only five feet away, but I “hear” a larger distance. No wonder that the relatively small Villa Saraceno feels palatial.

  Palladio devoted an entire chapter of Quattro libri to the height of rooms. He listed more than one way of calculating room height, “to ensure that most of the rooms of different sizes have vaults of an equal height.”6 According to his different formulas, the ceiling of the Saraceno living room, for example, could be 19, 23, 233/4, or 241/2 modern feet, and still “turn out beautiful to the eye.”7 Another example of Palladio’s pragmatism. Whatever formula was used, the ceiling would be high. Evidently, this was an aesthetic issue. Most ordinary buildings have low ceilings—all one really needs is sufficient headroom, after all. I’m 6 feet 1 inch and I’ve been in plenty of farmhouses and cottages where I’ve had to stoop. Tall ceilings produce a wonderful sense of luxury, not only for a 6-footer; everyone likes tall ceilings, as modern real estate agents and homebuilders know. I’m used to ceilings of 9 or 10 feet, but within a day or two, the ceilings of the villa felt normal; a week later, when we checked into a hotel in Venice, I was almost crushed by the low ceiling of our attic room.

  Generally, there is a variety of ceiling heights in Palladio’s villas. In order to simplify construction, and increase the space in the attic, he made all the ceilings in the Villa Saraceno the same height. To counter the monotonous effect, he added vaults to the two smaller rooms. One of these vaults has been restored, giving a beautiful touch of refinement to the otherwise simple interior. It is likely that Palladio planned the frescoed frieze in the large rooms for the same reason—to effectively lower the perceived ceiling height, thus increasing the contrast with the sala.

  The sala is always the architectural climax of a Palladio villa, and I immediately headed for it the evening we arrived at the house. The room was not only not exceptionally tall for a sala, it was not very large and had a flat, uninteresting ceiling. As in the living room, the upper third of the walls was frescoed, though the effect was less successful than in the living room.III The sala was an odd T-shape, the result of two little rooms cut out of each corner, one containing a stair, the other a camerino, or small room. There were monumental doors on each side, one leading into the loggia, the other opening to the back of the house, but since it was a blustery night and raining, the doors and the window shutters remained closed. The room had a curiously makeshift quality; on the whole, I was disappointed.

  The next day the weather cleared. Early in the morning I went to the sala, swung open both pairs of twelve-foot-high doors and unlatched the window shutters. It was like raising the lights on a darkened stage. Through the wide-open doors I could see far into the landscape. Much is made of modern architecture’s discovery of the continuity between inside and outside—thanks especially to the invention of plate glass—but the effect was obviously known to cinquecento architects; the two tall doors brought the outside right into the house. Standing in the center of the clay-tiled floor, out one door I could see the loggia and the forecourt, and out the other the open fields behind the house.

  Every time I looked through the doorway, across the loggia, and down the garden path, or if I walked from the dining room to the living room, I was looking down—or moving along—an imaginary line, or axis. The two main axes of the Villa Saraceno intersect, appropriately, in the center of the sala. That explains the T shape: the upright of the T is the north-south axis of the loggia and the entrance doors, the crossbar is the east-west axis of the large rooms and the barchessa. The locations of interior doors and windows reinforce these axes. Standing in the kitchen, for example, I could look through the entire house—a distance of almost a hundred feet—and through three sets of doors see the far window of the living room. Although a Palladio villa is cut up into discrete rooms, such long vistas reinforce an agreeable sense of openness.

  Leaving my work in the dining room, I cross the sala and go out the back door. The cleared area immediately around the villa, originally the site of the bruolo, or orchard, is still bounded by irrigation ditches. Beyond I can see flat cultivated fields interrupted by hedgerows of poplars, and in the far distance the gray outlines of other farms. Two far-off promontories bracket the view: Monte Bèrico on the left and the Euganian Hills on the right.

  The ground is spongy and wet—no wonder Palladio had flooding problems. The rear of the villa has no portico, and according to Quattro libri none was intended. A pediment over a very slightly projecting center portion and the row of chunky modillions under the eaves are the sole classical motifs; otherwise the façade is relieved only by several flat moldings, one marking the main floor, one at the level of the windowsills, and the third defining the attic. The big doors and the windows have attractive sandstone frames. The wall is roughly plastered where earlier makeshift windows have been blocked up and patched. This side of the villa shows its years, but its bulk and its massive proportions are still impressive.

  Quattro libri sometimes gives the false impression that Palladio was only interested in idealized geometry and classical vocabulary. In fact, much of the impact of the villas has to do with their sympathetic relationship to their surroundings. The hilltop sites of Godi and La Rotonda, the canalside setting of La Malcontenta, the foothills backdrop of the Villa Barbaro, are an integral part of their designs. In that regard, Saraceno recalls Emo, for it, too, sits in a flat agricultural plain. Although more than fifteen years separate the two houses, they share the flinty self-sufficiency of a Roman outpost. When we drive back to the villa after shopping in the nearby town, its comforting bulk is visible a long way off, rising behind a surrounding wall. Like the lines of poplars and the long straight canals that crisscross the Vicentine plain, it marks the civilizing hand of man.

  The backs of the barchessa and the old farm buildings extend to the left. On the right is the brick wall of the compound. After walking around the meadow, to get a view of the house from a distance, I return to the wall, which has a small gate leading into a courtyard about two hundred feet square. The enclosing brick wall is believed to have been built by Palladio, although the ornamental gates on two sides are seventeenth-century additions. The gravel drive that leads from one of the gates to the villa is formally laid out, but this was always a working farmyard, not a ceremonial cortile. On the north side stand the villa, the adjoining barchessa, and the medieval farm buildings; on the east, another older house, where Lorella and her husband, David, live, additional outbuildings, a large brick barn (parts of which date from the
fifteenth century), and an old dovecote tower. Here, even more than in the majestic Villa Emo, one has the sense of the casa di villa as an integral part of a farm.

  The nineteenth-century barchessa gives a general sense of Palladio’s intentions. The six massive Tuscan columns and pilasters have an exaggerated taper, and are spaced a little too far apart, but they imbue this rather ordinary space with great dignity. It’s too cool to eat at the rough-hewn wooden table that stands in the arcade, but it makes a nice place to sit in the late afternoon, when the setting sun casts long shadows across the flagstones. The covered arcade is deep enough to roll in a wagon—or park a car, which we sometimes do when it rains.

  I walk over to the barn and, balancing my notebook on top of an old wellhead, sketch the house. With its plain, three-arched loggia, it belongs to an early villa type that Palladio repeated several times even after he discovered the columned portico. Like the nearby Villa Poiana, the Villa Saraceno has a stripped architectural style of great severity and force. The three arches have prominent keystones and imposts, and are topped by a large pediment. Smaller pediments are repeated over the windows. The row of modillions under the cornice casts a serrated shadow on the plastered wall.

  I reflect on the anomaly of the all’antica style—that is, the anomaly of Renaissance humanists such as Palladio reviving the architecture of an ancient civilization that was, in addition to its artistic accomplishments, slave-owning, imperialist, and obsessed with power. That power is evident even in this modest house. The three arches of the muscular loggia resemble a stylized triumphal arch. The arches are elongated, for like all of Palladio’s villas, this house surges proudly upward, placed high on a basement podium, the tall main floor made even taller by the attic. No doubt such monumental qualities explain the attraction of Palladianism to landed aristocrats in Kent as well as to plantation owners in South Carolina. Yet there is more to Saraceno than its echo of ancient imperial glories. This noble but almost rustic building does not have the full-blown classical details of Chiswick or Mereworth. It wears its all’antica style lightly, and merely hints at the Roman past. Because of this reserve, Palladio villas are sometimes described as exalted farmhouses, an appellation that captures neither their commanding authority nor their imposing presence. Yet the description has merit, for the unabashedly simple materials and uncomplicated details serve to amplify Palladio’s achievement. “There is something divine about his talent,” Goethe wrote, “something comparable to the power of a great poet who, out of the world of truth and falsehood, creates a third whose borrowed existence enchants us.”8 That’s exactly how I feel about the Villa Saraceno. With its massive walls and clay-tile roof, it is a real farmhouse, but one that incorporates a Roman triumphal arch. Its monumental presence is almost, but not quite, belied by its ordinary plastered brick construction. It is as if Palladio were turning straw into gold. Enchanting is exactly the right word for this little architectural masterpiece.

  VILLA SARACENO

  Finishing my sketch, I walk over to the broad steps that ascend to the loggia. The abutment walls date from the seventeenth century (although their design is based on Quattro libri). If, as seems likely, they reproduce the original, then this may be the first application of the simple, full-width stair that Palladio would use so often. In some ways, the loggia is the most dramatic space in the villa, taller even than the sala, with a high, barrel-vaulted ceiling and three arched openings that recall the Villa Godi. The ceilings and walls are likewise frescoed, although clumsily painted compared to Zelotti, and much worn. Still, the patches of vivid color give a festive air. Two 8-foot-long garden benches fit comfortably on each side of the loggia with room to spare. Perhaps it’s because I’m used to modern houses, where everything is “just large enough,” that Palladio’s amplitude is so striking. Just as the height of the rooms alters my perception of the space, the largeness has unexpected effects. The windows, for example, which are all the same, are 41/2 feet wide and no less than 81/2 feet tall. When I open the shutters in the morning, it’s not like raising a blind at home. Through the tall windows I can see more sky than land, which both brings the exterior into the house and heightens the sense of protective shelter when I close the shutters at night. There are lessons here for anyone building a house today: instead of concentrating on increasingly refined details and exotic materials, focus instead on spaciousness. Make things longer, wider, taller, slightly more generous than they have to be. You will be repaid in full.

  The English architect Raymond Erith attributed the generosity of Renaissance architecture to its different units of measure. According to him, the Venetian foot, which like the Vicentine foot is about fourteen modern inches long, “was a better unit for classical architecture because, for instance, if they made a door 3 Venetian feet by 6 Venetian feet, it was big enough to walk through, i.e., it was 3 feet 6 inches by 7 feet by our measurements.”9 (This is exactly the size of the interior doors of the Villa Saraceno.) Of course, measurements are abstractions, and the doors could easily have been made any size, but architects have always had a tendency to round off dimensions to whole numbers. When sketching the plan of a house, for example, and trying to fit the various bits and pieces together, it is easier to remember that clothes closets and kitchen counters are two feet deep, that stairways and exterior doors are three feet wide, that patio doors are six, eight, or ten feet wide, and so on. Using Venetian feet makes everything slightly larger, slightly more generous.

  As I write this, I have before me photographs of that eight-day idyll spread out on my writing desk. There are several views of the front of the villa, taken one late afternoon when the winter sun was low on the horizon. It had been a gray, drizzly day, and the four of us were in the loggia watching the sunset. In the photographs, the bare branches against the southwest horizon are burnished with golden halos. We look tiny next to the massive piers and the vast arches; the architecture appears overwhelmingly huge, the people minute. The photographs are startling because when we were in the villa I did not feel overwhelmed at all. Quite the opposite. Palladio’s architecture was large and powerful, but it was also welcoming and comfortable, not cozy but definitely accommodating.

  This accommodation is a matter of scale, not of size. Although size and scale are often used interchangeably in popular speech, their meanings in architecture are distinct. To say that a door is “big” describes its size; to say that a door has “big scale” says nothing about its actual dimensions, but rather characterizes its impact on us—it looks big. Scale has to do with relative size: how large or small is the door frame compared to the surrounding wall, how heavy or light is the door handle compared to the door. It is easy to ignore scale, particularly today when so many building components are standardized. But adjusting the size of a baseboard, say, to the size of a room, or the proportion of a window to the proportion of a wall, is one of the simplest way to achieve architectural distinction.

  Palladio had this to say about scale: “Beauty will derive from a graceful shape and the relationship of the whole to the parts, and of the parts among themselves and to the whole, because buildings must appear to be like complete and well-defined bodies, of which one member matches another and all the members are necessary for what is required.”10 That is why his drawings of ancient buildings were full of dimensions. It was not only the actual size of things that concerned him, but also the correct relationship between the different parts. Once this relationship was established, any element of classical architecture could be proportionately enlarged or reduced. Corinthian columns could rise the full height of the nave at the church of Il Redentore, support lower arches over side chapels, and also carry miniature pediments in the altarpiece.

  The harmonious combination of different scales sets classical architecture apart from the preceding Gothic style, which used the pointed arch motif at a single scale.11 The rediscovery of scale was one of the great accomplishments of the Renaissance, and Palladio, like his contemporaries, manipulated scale
to produce different effects. Classical elements such as columns could be made larger or smaller, more or less delicate, more or less monumental, to alter the atmosphere of a building or a room. For example, the Saraceno loggia is wider than the loggia of the Villa Godi, and has correspondingly larger piers, imposts, and base moldings. But whereas the Godi loggia recedes (literally, by being recessed into the house), the Saraceno loggia asserts itself by jutting forward about six inches from the façade. Palladio further emphasized this effect by creating an incised masonry pattern—now almost worn away—on the front of the loggia, but leaving the walls of the house plain to create a contrast.12 On the other hand, assertive as the loggia is, its scale is commensurate with the scale of the façade, which is why we don’t feel overwhelmed; it’s big, but it doesn’t feel big.

  VILLA SARACENO

  The presence of small and large scales, and the rapport between the parts, accounts, I think, for the sense of well-being that the villa conveys. As Palladio beautifully put it, he aimed to build “in such a way and with such proportions that together all the parts convey to the eyes of onlookers a sweet harmony.”13 This is not exciting architecture; indeed, it is the opposite of exciting—it is composed, serene, ordered. The Renaissance produced many great architects—Brunelleschi was the most daring, Bramante the most inventive, Giulio the most expressive, Michelangelo the most iconoclastic—but in his calm, considered way, Palladio has been more influential than any of them. Generation after generation of architects, professionals and amateurs, aristocrats and commoners, have come to the Veneto, seen his architecture, and fallen under his spell.