The Perfect House: A Journey with Renaissance Master Andrea Palladio

by Rybczynski, Witold

  Palladio is an architect whose personal style became a Style. The eighteenth-century Scottish architect Robert Adam is another rare example; so is the nineteenth-century American master H. H. Richardson. Palladio was so widely imitated not because he was easy to copy but because the principles that underlie his style were easy to understand, and because his classically inspired vocabulary of architectural elements was rich enough to provide his followers with the means to express their own ideas, whether they were Inigo Jones, James Gibbs, or Thomas Jefferson. Thanks to this suppleness, Palladio’s style returned not once but several times, and will likely do so again in the future.

  Palladio’s architecture is a combination of mathematics, especially geometry, scale, and proportion. At the same time, a Palladio villa is not a theorem, or a poem, or a painting—it’s a building. It is beautiful, but it is practical, too. It is not an abstract creation; it is made of specific materials: smooth reddish battuto on the floor, scribed intonaco on the exterior, carved stone frames around the doors and windows. Palladio loved to build. I imagine him in the attic, inspecting the huge timber trusses, or walking into the sala, fondly running his hands over the stone door frames. His buildings are so palpable, so real. Wotton was wrong about that; we do need stuff as well as art “to satisfy our greatest fancy.” Perhaps that is Palladio’s real secret: his equilibrium, his sweet sense of harmony. He pleases the mind as well as the eye. His sturdy houses, rooted in their sites, radiate order and balance, which makes them both of this world and otherworldly. Although they take us out of ourselves, they never let us forget who and what we are. They really are perfect.

  THE VILLA SARACENO, ONE OF PALLADIO’S SMALLEST AND SIMPLEST HOUSES, PERFECTLY COMBINES BEAUTY WITH FUNCTIONALITY AND SOUND CONSTRUCTION.

  • • •

  The afternoon is drawing to a close. I lock the sala doors—a complicated system of bolts and latches—and go back into the dining room. Embers are smoldering among the ashes of the burnt-out fire. The light has changed in the course of the day and the room has a listless quality. As I gather my notes I hear the sound of a car outside, the slamming of a door, then voices. The others are back. I go outside to welcome them home.

  * * *

  IPerhaps Giacomo engaged the Pedemuro workshop, where Andrea di Pietro was still working as a stonemason, for the window arrangement of the Palazzo delle Trombe anticipates the Villa Godi.

  IIConsidering that the treatise was compiled over a span of fifteen years, such discrepancies are exceedingly rare—I found only two other dimensional errors among the villas: the larger rooms of the Villa Cornaro are described as a square and three-quarters but the dimensions are 16 by 261/2 feet; the sala of the unbuilt Villa Mocenigo at Dolo is described as two and a half squares but is shown as 30 by 76 feet.

  IIII surmise that Palladio’s original idea was to have a frieze only in the large rooms, and that it was Pietro or Euriemma who added it to the sala.

  AFTERWORD

  About a year after I finished this book, it came to my attention that an old retaining wall in our garden had started to bulge and sag and was in need of repair. Made of stones laid atop each other without mortar, it had to be dismantled and rebuilt. I was not up to the job—the wall is 150 feet long—so I hired a professional to do the work. Over the next four weeks, watching Brian Corrigan and his assistant labor in my garden, I realized that I had not paid enough attention to Andrea Palladio’s original calling. Of course, I had understood that the nearly two decades of his youth and early manhood spent working as a stonemason had provided him with useful knowledge of the building crafts. But I had not considered how the actual occupation may have affected him.

  I had always imagined Palladio as he appears in the statue beside the Basilica in Vicenza—a pensive scholar, albeit a self-educated one. But, as was obvious from watching Brian at work, handling heavy stones is an intensely physical activity. (So is wielding a stone-carver’s mallet and chisel.) However refined and courtly Palladio may have become under Trissino’s tutelage, and however gentlemanly he appears in Maganza’s portrait, he could not have been a delicate sort—he must have had a rugged and powerful physique. His active and extremely productive life should be seen in that light.

  The work of a stonemason involves strenuous activity, but the pace is stop-and-go, very different from the steady toil of a plasterer or a painter. Brian spent a lot of time considering the piece of wall he was working on, examining the different stones that were laid out on the grass like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. It was only after careful scrutiny that he would bend down to heft a stone into place. He did everything calmly and carefully, reinforcing my impression of Palladio as a deliberate sort of person who approached problems in an unhurried, almost ponderous manner. Thus he bided his time during the Basilica competition, waiting until the right moment before submitting the ideas over which he had evidently labored a long time.

  When Brian and I discussed how the wall should be rebuilt, he said that the original wall had been placed directly on the ground, and that before rebuilding it he wanted to add a foundation of crushed stone. Wouldn’t that add to the cost, I asked. Yes, he said, but if he didn’t do it, in another fifty years the wall would start moving again. His evident conviction made me realize that the subject wasn’t open to discussion—this was how it had to be done. Palladio may have given “the most intense pleasure to the Gentleman and Lords with whom he dealt,” but I wonder if stubbornness wasn’t also a part of his character. Not the willfulness of the self-involved architect—“it must be done the way I want”—but rather the considered but obstinate attitude of the experienced craftsman—“this is the right way to do it.”

  A stonemason contends against gravity and time, which are unrelenting. A badly plastered wall can be patched up, peeling paint can be scraped and re-covered, but a poorly built stone wall eventually will collapse. The stonemason is an innate conservative—or, perhaps, stonemasonry is a craft that attracts men of conservative temperament. The architect Palladio was innovative, sometimes unusually so, but his innovation was always in the context of the tried and true, for when Palladio found something that worked, he stuck to it. His invention was never gratuitous or capricious. And the evidence of superior building is in the villas themselves, standing strong after almost five hundred years.

  • • •

  Like so many who have visited Palladio’s villas, I was attracted by their somber beauty and chaste geometry. But since writing this book, I have discovered a more individual and personal connection. I was researching some family background and came across a surprising coincidence, something I had vaguely known but entirely forgotten: both of my parents grew up in houses built in the Palladian style. My mother’s family lived in the center of Warsaw in a villa built in 1860 by the Italian architect, Francesco Maria Lanci. On the hundred-foot-long street façade is a tall main floor punctuated by a row of windows with pediments supported by Composite pilasters. A lightly rusticated base indicates the ground floor.

  The country house where my father spent much of his childhood is in a village called Lusławice, in southern Poland on the Dunajec River. It did not belong to my grandfather; he was merely a houseguest—for more than twenty years. The house was a dwór, or manor house, built in the early nineteenth century. It is a long low structure, without a basement or attic, but with an elegant central pedimented portico supported by four Doric columns. The portico is distinctly Palladian, of course, but even more Palladian is the combination of a rustic structure with an elegant classical appendage.

  I felt at home in the Villa Saraceno, for Palladio’s architecture was not only a familiar part of my culture and education, it was also in my family history. The universal appeal of Palladio’s villas suggests that for many others, too they are not simply beautiful old houses, but in an immediate way their considered proportions and serene spaces provide a palpable connection to the past, bringing history to us, and us into history.

  December 2002
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  THE VILLAS

  A chronological listing of Palladio villas requires a caveat. Palladio described twenty-three villas in Quattro libri, but he did not include dates, and he did not arrange the designs in chronological order. Rather he “placed them in the text to suit myself.” To complicate matters further, he referred to certain villas as completed when they were still under construction, and sometimes when construction had not even begun. Roughly half a dozen additional villas have been attributed to Palladio on the basis of surviving drawings, likewise undated. Completion took years, in some cases, decades. Hence the precise times of design and construction are difficult to establish. Certain villas can be dated on the basis of contracts, wills, and contemporaneous accounts, or on stylistic grounds. The dates of others—Valmarana, Sarego at Santa Sofia—are only roughly known. Some dates are in dispute. The Villa Zen, for example, is dated as early as 1548 and as late as 1566. The captivating little Villa Forni is likewise variously dated, from 1541 to the 1560s. Moreover, its attribution, like that of the Villa Caldogno, is contested; some say it might have been designed by Alessandro Vittoria, a sculptor who often worked with Palladio. The fate of the Villa Ragona can only be guessed at despite its inclusion in Quattro libri, for it has vanished without a trace—possibly it was never built. Thus the list below includes conjecture, and the sequence of projects is necessarily imprecise.

  LOCATION OF PALLADIO’S VILLAS

  1. Villa Godi, Lonedo di Lugo

  2. Villa Pisani, Bagnolo

  3. Villa Poiana, Poiana Maggiore

  4. Villa Foscari, Malcontenta

  5. Villa Cornaro, Piombino Dese

  6. Villa Barbaro, Maser

  7. Villa Badoer, Fratta Polesine

  8. Villa Emo, Fanzolo

  9. Villa Almerico (La Rotonda), Vicenza

  10. Villa Saraceno, Finale di Agugliaro

  The First Decade: 1540–50

  Villa Godi, Lonedo di Lugo Vicentino (Vicenza)

  Included in Quattro libri. Survives.

  Villa Piovene, Lonedo di Lugo Vicentino (Vicenza)

  Not included in Quattro libri. Survives. Fragments may be by Palladio. Attribution is contested.

  Villa Valmarana, Vigardolo di Monticello Conte Otto (Vicenza)

  Not included in Quattro libri. Survives.

  Villa Gazoto, Bertesina (Vicenza)

  Not included in Quattro libri. Survives, though in poor condition.

  Villa Pisani, Bagnolo di Lonigo (Vicenza)

  Included in Quattro libri. Survives. Porticoes destroyed.

  Villa Saraceno, Finale di Agugliaro (Vicenza)

  Included in Quattro libri. Survives.

  Villa Thiene, Quinto Vicentino (Vicenza)

  Included in Quattro libri. Unfinished. Fragments survive.

  Villa Muzani, Malo (Vicenza)

  Not included in Quattro libri. Destroyed in 1919.

  Villa Poiana, Poiana Maggiore (Vicenza)

  Included in Quattro libri. Survives.

  Villa Chiericati, Vancimuglio di Grumolo delle Abbadesse (Vicenza)

  Not included in Quattro libri. Survives.

  Villa Caldogno, Caldogno (Vicenza)

  Not included in Quattro libri. Survives. Attribution is contested.

  Villa Angarano, Angarano di Bassano del Grappa (Vicenza)

  Included in Quattro libri. House was vastly altered in eighteenth century, only barchesse survive.

  The Second Decade: 1550–60

  Villa Foscari (La Malcontenta), Gambarare di Mira (Venezia)

  Included in Quattro libri. Survives.

  Villa Forni, Montecchio Precalcino (Vicenza)

  Not included in Quattro libri. Survives in poor condition. Attribution is contested.

  Villa Schio, Montecchio Precalcino (Vicenza)

  Not included in Quattro libri. Destroyed.

  Villa Cornaro, Piombino Dese (Padova)

  Included in Quattro libri. Survives.

  Villa Pisani, Montagnana (Padova)

  Included in Quattro libri. Survives.

  Villa Ragona, Ghizzole di Montegaldella (Vicenza)

  Included in Quattro libri. No trace.

  Villa Thiene, Cicogna di Villafranca (Padova)

  Included in Quattro libri. Only an outbuilding was built. Survives.

  Villa Barbaro, Maser (Treviso)

  Included in Quattro libri. Survives.

  Villa Mocenigo, Dolo (Venezia)

  Included in Quattro libri. Built, remodeled. Demolished in 1835.

  Villa Sarego, Santa Sofia (Verona)

  Included in Quattro libri. Partially built. Survives.

  Villa Trissino, Meledo di Sarego (Vicenza)

  Included in Quattro libri. Only a fragment was built. Survives.

  Villa Repeta, Campiglia dei Berici (Vicenza)

  Included in Quattro libri. Burned in seventeenth century.

  Villa Zen, Donegal di Cessalto (Treviso)

  Included in Quattro libri. Survives in poor condition.

  Villa Emo, Fanzolo (Treviso)

  Included in Quattro libri. Survives.

  The Third Decade: 1560–70

  Villa Mocenigo, Marocco (Treviso)

  Included in Quattro libri. Not built.

  Villa Sarego, Miega di Cologna Veneta (Verona)

  Included in Quattro libri. Partially built. Destroyed.

  Villa Valmarana, Lisiera di Bolzano (Vicenza)

  Included in Quattro libri. Not built according to original design; rebuilt in 1969. Survives.

  Villa Almerico (La Rotonda), Vicenza

  Included in Quattro libri. Survives.

  Readers interested in visiting the surviving villas may consult Caroline Constant’s The Palladio Guide (Princeton Architectural Press, 1985, revised 1993).

  THE PARTS OF CLASSICAL ARCHITECTURE

  After Andrea Palladio’s drawing of the Temple of Jupiter Stator, Rome

  1. Pediment

  2. Entablature

  3. Column

  4. Cornice

  5. Frieze

  6. Architrave

  7. Capital (Corinthian)

  8. Shaft (fluted)

  9. Base

  10. Tympanum

  GLOSSARY

  Acanthus: Prickly Mediterranean plant whose stylized leaf is represented in classical decorations such as the capitals, or headpieces, of Corinthian and Composite columns.

  Apse: Semicircular or polygonal recess, usually with a half-domed ceiling. Palladio used apses in the entrance loggia of the Villa Pisani.

  Barchessa: Traditional barn of the Trevigiana region in the Veneto; the roof is extended to form a sheltered arcade on the south side. Palladio incorporated barchesse in the designs of the Villa Barbaro and the Villa Emo.

  Bucrania: Decorations in a Doric frieze representing ox skulls and recalling the sacrificial function of Roman temples. Palladio used bucrania in town houses such as the Palazzo Chiericati and in suburban villas such as the Villa Pisani in Montagnana, but rarely in country houses.

  Capital: Headpiece or carved block at the top of a column. While the columns in Palladio villas are made of brick—plastered or unplastered—capitals and bases are generally carved stone.

  Column: Basic element of classical architecture. Columns consist of three parts: bases, shafts, and capitals, or headpieces. They may be entirely freestanding or engaged—that is, part of the wall. A flat representation of a column that is part of the wall is called a pilaster. Ancient Roman columns were made of stone, but Palladio’s columns are usually plastered brick.

  Composite order: An order is the entire assembly of columns and entablature. The composite order is Roman in origin and its capital combines Ionic volutes with Corinthian acanthus leaves. Palladio rarely used this ornate order in country houses, the early Villa Gazoto being a rare exception.

  Corinthian order: Athenian order whose capital consists of stylized acanthus leaves. Palladio designed beautiful Corinthian columns for the upper porticoes of the Villa Cornaro.

  Dado:
Lower section of a wall that is decorated differently from the upper section—for example, a plaster wall might have a dado of inlaid stone. Palladio often had faux marble dados frescoed on the walls of his villas.

  Doric order: Greek order distinguished by an extremely simple saucer-shaped capital consisting of several moldings, and by its complicated frieze consisting of alternating panels called triglyphs and metopes. Doric, because it is the simplest order, usually represents the manly virtues, which may be why Palladio chose it for the Villa Emo, one of his most robust designs.

  Entablature: Horizontal beamlike element that is supported by columns. The entablature is divided into three parts: the architrave at the bottom, the frieze in the middle, and the cornice at the top under the eaves. Palladio derived the exact profiles of his entablatures from studies of Roman ruins. The entablature could be a real beam, as in the Villa Emo, or a flattened representation of a beam, as at the Villa Pisani.

  Entasis: Classical columns are always narrower at the top, and the subtle curved taper is referred to as entasis. This effect not only gives columns a gracious shape but it also creates the optical illusion that the columns are perfectly straight, since a column without entasis will appear to be bulging at the top.

  Fascia: Plain, flat horizontal molding projecting slightly from the surface of a wall. Palladio often used fascias to demarcate floor levels on the exterior of his villas.

  Fluting: Vertical grooves of concave profile carved into the shafts of columns. Although ancient Roman columns are almost always fluted, Palladio rarely used fluted columns since his plastered brick columns could not be carved. The stone columns in the interior of San Giorgio Maggiore are fluted.

  Giant column: Any column more than one story high. Also called colossal column. Palladio introduced giant columns to domestic architecture when he used them first in the portico of the Villa Chiericati.

  Groin: Line formed by the intersection of two vaults. Commonly found in the cruciform salas of Palladio villas.