The Perfect House: A Journey with Renaissance Master Andrea Palladio (29 page)

Palladio dedicated the first two books to his friend and client Count Giacomo Angarano, a Vicentine nobleman who had commissioned a palazzo in Vicenza and a villa on the Brenta, and the second two to Emanuele Filiberto, Duke of Savoy, a great patron of the arts whom he had met in Turin. He also singled out the mentors of his youth, Giangiorgio Trissino (“one of the most illustrious men of our time”) and Alvise Cornaro (“a gentleman of exceptionally fine judgment”), and praised Marc’antonio Barbaro (“a Venetian gentleman of great intellect”). Yet his supporter and patron Daniele Barbaro received no thanks or accolades—he was mentioned in connection with the translation of Vitruvius, but was coolly referred to merely as the “Most Reverend Barbaro.”
²⁴
There appears to have been a falling-out between the two, caused perhaps by something that occurred during the design of the villa at Maser, either concerning the instructions given to Veronese, or something else. In any case, when Daniele published the second edition of his Vitruvius in 1567, he rewrote his praise of Palladio, making it less effusive.
²⁵
Barbaro died without warning the year
Quattro libri
was published, and though he mentioned Palladio affectionately in his will, he pointedly listed the architect among his household servants, not bequeathing him a personal memento—his main gifts to his brother were his books and his astronomical instruments—but rather the modest sum of fifteen ducats (he left his principal servants forty ducats each, and his valet two hundred).
²⁶

That same year, Palladio moved his household to Venice, perhaps emboldened by the death of Jacopo Sansovino, his only architectural rival. Ironically, his next major commissions were back in Vicenza: the Palazzo Barbaran, and an important public building, the Loggia del Capitaniato. The Loggia, which stands on the Piazza dei Signori opposite the Basilica, was the
official residence of the
capitanio,
or Venetian governor of Vicenza. It is a splendid building, representative of the direction that Palladio’s secular architecture was taking in the final decade of his life. Four giant engaged Corinthian columns rise the full height of the façade. The columns are unplastered brick, like those of the Carità, but there is nothing subdued or severe about this design—every square inch of the walls is covered with a riot of high-spirited stone and plaster decoration. The side wall in particular is rich in pictorial embellishment, as it commemorates the Venetian naval victory over the Turks at Lepanto. Compared to the severity of La Rotonda of only a few years earlier, the Loggia represents a new and unexpected facet of Palladio’s fertile imagination.

The architectural exuberance of the Loggia belies the great sadness that had descended on the Palladio family. In 1572, two of his sons died: Leonida, the eldest, who was helping with the architectural work, and Orazio, who had graduated a doctor of civil law from the University of Padua. One can imagine the pride that Palladio felt in their achievements. We do not know the cause of their deaths, which occurred within a few months of each other, but they most likely resulted from one of the epidemics that regularly swept through the city.

A few years later, an extremely severe plague decimated the Venetian Republic, killing more than half a million people and reducing the population by as much as a third. The calamity brought Palladio an unexpected commission. During the plague the Venetian Senate declared that it would erect a church to Christ the Redeemer—
Il Redentore
—as an offering. A site on the island of Giudecca was chosen, Palladio was appointed architect, and construction began in 1577. The façade continues the illusion of two overlapping temple fronts that he had begun in San Francesco and continued in San
Giorgio Maggiore, but the design is tauter and is achieved with simpler means. Palladio’s virtuoso composition of Corinthian columns and pilasters is an extraordinary fusion, as Ackerman wrote, of “the intellectual and the sensuous.”
²⁷
The monochrome interior, which shimmers in the pale Venetian light, is surely one of the most beautiful church interiors anywhere.

With both San Giorgio Maggiore and Il Redentore under construction, there was no doubt that Palladio was now the premier architect in the city. This had been confirmed a few years earlier when he was invited to design a temporary triumphal arch and loggia for Henri de Valois’s state visit to the city. One of those responsible for that commission, as well as for Il Redentore, was Marc’antonio Barbaro, who as the procurator of St. Mark’s was an important personage in Venetian politics and one of Palladio’s most vocal supporters. Palladio originally proposed a centralized domed church for Il Redentore. Though the idea was rejected in favor of a more conventional solution, it appealed to Marc’antonio, who invited Palladio to build a miniature version as a private family chapel in the village of Maser adjacent to the villa. Legend has it that it was here, on August 19, 1580, while he was working on the chapel, that Palladio died. He was seventy-one.

There are two commemorative statues of Andrea Palladio: one was placed outside Chiswick House by Lord Burlington in the 1720s, the second was erected in 1859 beside the Basilica by Vicenza’s belatedly grateful citizens. The Palladio of Chiswick is a beardless young man, with rounded features and a romantic air, while the Palladio of Vicenza resembles a stern, bearded philosopher. For many years, Palladio’s physical appearance, like that of Shakespeare, was a matter of conjecture since no reliable likeness had survived. It was not until 1980 that a contemporary portrait turned up. It was painted by his friend Giambattista
Maganza in 1576, when Palladio was sixty-eight. Palladio is bald, with regular, attractive features and a neatly trimmed full beard flecked with white. He looks fit and is dressed in a dark tunic and a linen shirt with an embroidered collar, proper but not ostentatious; he could be a functionary or a small-town magistrate. He is holding a paper scroll that identifies him as “Architeto Vicentino,” attesting to the fact that he has been made a citizen, a singular honor and a major social advance for his whole family. Somewhat awkwardly he also grasps a pair of metal dividers. The common drafting instrument, used to transfer dimensions from one part of a drawing to another, is a reminder of the importance of geometry in his work. Architects were commonly portrayed with the tools of their trade—Titian painted his friend Giulio Romano holding an architectural plan. Titian’s Giulio—a tortured
artiste
—casts a melancholy look at the viewer as he points to his drawing. Maganza’s Palladio, by contrast, appears composed, his forthright avuncular gaze remarkably gentle. He looks into the distance with a mixture of unperturbed calm and cool intelligence. It is the countenance of a man who sees the world exactly as it is.

^I
The exterior dimensions of La Rotonda are about 80 by 80 modern feet, compared to roughly 75 by 70 feet for the Villa Emo, and 60 by 80 feet for La Malcontenta.

^II
The cleric was a worldly man who had at least one illegitimate son. The son inherited La Rotonda on Almerico’s death in 1591, and immediately sold it.

he Villa Saraceno at Finale di Agugliaro is one of Palladio’s early villas and not particularly renowned, which may be why I left it until last. I was driving to Finale, which is about fifteen miles south of Vicenza, when I was rear-ended by a delivery van. The rest of the drizzly afternoon was spent chatting to a friendly policewoman, waiting for a tow truck, and having my fender straightened and a sheet of plastic taped over the shattered rear window. By the time I got back on the road, I was in no mood to look at a villa. Taking the accident as an omen, I dropped the car off at the rental agency and spent the final days of my trip on foot. It was a chance to wander around Vicenza, where, as Vasari pointed out, there are so many Palladio buildings that “even if there were no others there, they would suffice to make a very handsome city with most beautiful surroundings.”
¹
I never did get to Finale on that trip.

After returning to Philadelphia, I came across a reference to the Villa Saraceno.
²
The magazine article described how the house had recently been restored by a British trust that rescues old buildings and rents them to holidayers. I could live, for however short a time, in a Palladio villa! This was too good an opportunity to pass up, and together with two friends, my wife, Shirley, and I booked the villa for the following March.

“You have to see these buildings with your own eyes to realize how good they are,” Goethe had written. True enough, but experiencing a building is not the same thing as looking at a painting in a museum. Paintings are meant to be looked at; architecture should be lived in. Buildings reveal themselves slowly; they must be seen at different times of day and under different conditions, in sunlight and darkness, in fog and rain. Houses particularly should be appreciated in small doses. For days on end you may be unaware of your surroundings, then one day you stop what you are doing, look around, and indescribably but unmistakably you feel that everything, including yourself, is in the right place. That is the experience of architecture. That’s what I wanted—to wake up under Palladio’s roof, eat a meal in front of his fireplace, and watch the sunset from his loggia. If only for a short period I wanted to call a Palladio villa home.

L
IKE MANY OF
P
ALLADIO’S COUNTRY HOUSES, THE
V
ILLA
S
ARACENO WAS THE HEART OF A WORKING FARM.

I also wanted—although I didn’t admit this to anyone, hardly even to myself—to discover Palladio’s secret. What made his houses so attractive, so imitated, so perfect? I’d traveled from villa to villa, studied
Quattro libri,
pored over photographs and plans, and read scholarly papers, but I still wasn’t sure that I knew the entire answer. Now I had eight days to find out.

 • • • 

I’m alone in the villa, the others have gone to the food market in Padua. The house is silent, except for the occasional crackling of burning logs in the fireplace. Pale mid-morning light slips in through tall windows and across the worn refectory table that is spread with my books and papers. It’s an ordinary enough room, with white, roughly plastered walls, a reddish terrazzo floor, and an extremely high, dark wooden ceiling.

The Villa Saraceno dates from the first decade of Palladio’s career, roughly the same time that he was designing the Villa Poiana, which is only a few miles away. As happened so often, his client was the younger of two brothers, Giacomo and Biagio Saraceno. They belonged to a Roman ecclesiastical family that generations before had moved to Vicenza and established itself in the professions.
³
Their grandfather had bought the Finale estate, which they inherited on their father’s death in the late 1530s. Giacomo, the elder, got the customary lion’s share and forthwith built a large country house known locally as the Palazzo delle Trombe, perhaps because of its trumpetlike rain spouts. The spouts are gone but the house still stands, surrounded by a working farmyard. It is sometimes claimed that Giacomo’s villa was designed by Sanmicheli, but it is more likely that the sturdy, rather conventional design was the work of a local builder.
^I
A decade later, around 1548, the younger brother commissioned a villa of his own. He turned to Palladio, who by then was making a reputation for himself with the Basilica, a project with which Biagio, as a member of the city council, was intimately familiar. The site for the villa was an existing medieval farmyard, just down the road from Giacomo’s house.