The Perfect House: A Journey with Renaissance Master Andrea Palladio

by Rybczynski, Witold

  The cramped site made this difficult. It was a narrow rectangle of land extending back from the main street. Palladio was obliged to accommodate a long barn and a working farm court on half the site, which left only about an acre to build on—the equivalent of a large American suburban lot. Except for the Villa Godi, whose ramparted podium was relatively constricted, most of Palladio’s villas had large sites on which he could lay out forecourts. Here he could not create an impression of grandeur by spreading out, so he did the next best thing—he went up.

  Palladio responded to the particular demands of his clients—that was part of his success as a residential architect—but he often developed ideas simultaneously in several projects. At the same time he was building the Villa Cornaro, he was working on two other houses. One was a villa for Francesco Pisani (a kinsman of Vettor), just outside the city gates of Montagnana, a walled town south of Vicenza; the other was a house for Signor Floriano Antonini on the outskirts of the city of Udine. Both were two-story houses in suburban locations with double porticoes. Altogether, there are eight double porticoes in Quattro libri, five villas and three town houses. The front double portico of the Villa Cornaro is unique, however, since it projects forward, making this one of Palladio’s most impressive frontispieces.

  THE TWO-STORY PORTICO OF THE VILLA CORNARO WAS PALLADIO’S ANSWER TO A NARROW SITE.

  THE SOUTH-FACING LOGGIAS OF THE VILLA CORNARO ARE A MIRROR IMAGE OF THE FAÇADE AND PROVIDE A SHELTERED SITTING AREA.

  With houses such as the Villa Chiericati, La Malcontenta, and the Villa Cornaro, Palladio at last created the architectural prototype that combined the temple architecture of antiquity with a modern house. The latter was simplicity itself: a plastered brick box with carefully proportioned openings, unifying moldings and fascias, and masonry patterns scribed on plastered walls. The box was adaptable—it could have wings, a lower or taller basement, one floor or two. The interior was conveniently subdivided vertically into service basement, family rooms and amezati, and a storage attic. As for the portico, it could front a recessed loggia or a projecting porch, be one level or two, and have more or fewer columns, to suit.

  The rear garden of the Villa Cornaro, unlike the front, has room to breathe. The long spread of lawn looks out on farmland, a view that cannot have changed much since the sixteenth century. At the end of the lawn is a curious seven-arched bridge, said to be designed by Palladio, that leads over a fishpond to an imposing set of gates. I’m looking at the bridge when the custodian comes around the corner of the house. He tells me that a road once led over the bridge, through the gates, and straight across the fields to the edge of the property, about a quarter of a mile away. I’m not sure I agree with him when he says that this was the original front entrance (Quattro libri clearly indicates that the villa faced the street). Yet the house’s two-sided character no doubt reflected two different approaches: one from the village street and the other along the country road flanked by orchards, which would have made a more attractive arrival for visitors coming from Venice, about twenty miles away.

  Since the back entrance is obstructed by temporary scaffolding, we go around to the front. The outside stair, which extends the full width of the portico, is unusual. Palladio was always experimenting with entrance stairs—semicircular stairs at Piombino, a simple broad sweep at Poiana, double stairs at Malcontenta—in order to create a dignified way to bring people up to the portico. Here he designed a series of three steps interrupted by slightly inclined landings. The result is a sort of ramped stair. Instead of simply climbing, we glide up the stately ascent.

  The front door opens into a shallow vaulted vestibule, with doors leading to rooms on either side. Straight ahead is the sala, a large squarish room.II Since there is a similar room immediately above, the ceiling is flat rather than vaulted, but drama is provided by four intersecting beams resting on four immense, freestanding Ionic columns, one in each corner of the room. Palladio designed several variations of the square sala in his two-story houses, all inspired by ancient examples. “[Roman halls] were called tetrastyle because they had four columns,” he wrote. “They made these square and built columns there in order to make the breadth proportionate to the height and to make the structure above stable.”2 Like the sala of the Villa Pisani, this has the feeling of an outdoor space, an impression magnified by the giant columns. Unlike that room, however, this is a dynamic, three-dimensional space, the columns creating a central cube of space with a sort of aisle around the edges. Sunlight from a profusion of windows in the south-facing wall creates patterns across the clay-tile floor. The room is particularly bright since the walls are not frescoed but white.

  Palladio further responded to Cornaro’s demand for pomp and circumstance by including another feature from antiquity: niches for life-size statues. The stucco figures, added twenty years after Giorgio’s death by his son, represent eminent Cornaro ancestors: the stern paterfamilias Marco, wearing his Doge’s cap; his grandson, Zorzi the Elder, a famous military commander who acquired the Piombino lands; Zorzi’s granddaughter, the beautiful Caterina, wearing a crown; her brother Zorzi, another soldier and Giorgio’s grandfather; Giorgio’s father, Girolamo, who fought for the Republic in Crete and Padua; and Giorgio himself, bearded and heavyset, who died in action commanding a Venetian galley in a war against the Ottoman Turks.

  We pass through the other rooms, whose layout follows the same L-configuration as in La Malcontenta—small, medium, and large—each with a different type of ceiling vault. This plan is repeated on the upper floor (which is closed to visitors). My guide scrupulously describes each of the wall and ceiling frescoes. To my eye, the biblical paintings and the blowsy stucco reliefs are an alien presence and do not enhance Palladio’s architecture. These rococo adornments were commissioned in the eighteenth century by Giorgio Cornaro’s great-great-grandson; he would have done better to leave well enough alone.

  The villa remained in the Cornaro family until the beginning of the nineteenth century, when it passed to a succession of private owners. During the 1950s and 1960s the house was a parochial kindergarten, then stood vacant, and was finally bought—by an American—and restored. The house changed hands again in 1989. I remember coming upon the improbable advertisement in the real estate pages of the New York Times Magazine: “Palladio Villa for Sale.” The current owners, likewise Americans, have furnished the house attractively with period pieces. My guide refers to bedrooms, living room, and dining room; Palladio did not use such terms. He gave precise names only to utilitarian rooms: wine casks and foodstuffs were stored in the cantina; food was prepared in the cucina and served from the dispensa (pantry); the servants ate in the tinello, or servant’s hall. But the important rooms on the main floor, other than the sala, were simply called camere or stanze, anterooms were anti-camere, and rooms located beyond the main room were post-camere. Palladio did not label such rooms according to their function because in cinquecento villas and palazzos rooms did not have predetermined uses; people slept and dined and socialized all over the house. Although formal banquets were held in the sala, everyday meals were taken in one’s room, which was furnished somewhat like a modern hotel room, with beds, wardrobes or chests, tables, chairs, and settees. Most rooms contained several beds, children sharing the room with their parents, guests with one another. Standards of privacy were, of course, different, for sixteenth-century residences did not have corridors—people simply passed through one room to get to the next. Only the master of the house warranted a private room—which Palladio called a studiolo, or study—where he kept money, papers, valuables, and books. Such small rooms were also called stanze piccole—little rooms—and were often created by subdividing a stanze after the house was built.

  PLAN OF VILLA CORNARO, FROM QUATTRO LIBRI

  The Italian word for furniture is mobilia, and furniture was moved from room to room, which is why Palladio did not draw tables or chairs in his plans (nor, as far as we know, did he ever design any furniture). Rooms we
re often used seasonally, north-facing rooms in the summer, and south-facing in the winter. Room adornments—tapestries, easel paintings, candlesticks—were likewise portable. Much sixteenth-century furniture is foldable or demountable, for furniture was also moved from house to house. When Cornaro relocated his household from Venice to Piombino, to oversee the harvest, say, or to avoid an epidemic, he traveled with bedsteads, linens, and table silver.

  The simple exterior of the Villa Cornaro masks six or seven different floor levels. Since this was a two-story house, Palladio provided two grand stone staircases, oval in plan and brightly lit by windows on three sides; smaller wooden spiral stairs in each wing were for the use of the servants. The Villa Cornaro has no fewer than twelve rooms and two salas, not including the service rooms in the two wings, and the amezati over the smallest rooms, which accommodated the large household staff. It is likely that the Cornaro family lived on the upper floor, whose high-ceilinged rooms caught the cooling summer breezes and were more private; the downstairs was probably reserved for occasions of state. The cavernous upper sala, which extends up into the roof space, does not have columns, which made it useful for dancing and dramatics. If it was occasionally crowded with people, that also explains the structural function of the four supporting Ionic columns below.3

  The Villa Cornaro was hardly a “machine for living in,” as Le Corbusier once described a modern house; it was an elegant stage on which Giorgio and his family could lead their privileged lives. There was finery, but comfort was rudimentary by modern standards. The small and large rooms had fireplaces, but the medium-sized rooms and the salas were unheated. The elegant oval stairs were only accessible from the loggia, which meant that to go upstairs, one had to go outside. There was no plumbing. Servants carried hot water for bathing up to the rooms from the kitchen. Palladio provided the villa with indoor privies, in alcoves behind the main stair. In the house that he was building at the same time in Montagnana, he also incorporated indoor privies—two-holers. He assured the reader of Quattro libri that the privies “do not smell much because they were put in a place away from the sunlight and have some vents, leading from the bottom of the pit through the thickness of the walls, that let out at the top of the house.”4 The vents may not have worked as intended, for these are the only indoor privies recorded in Quattro libri.

  • • •

  “You can stay in the garden as long as you like,” my guide tells me as he locks up the house. “Just shut the front gate when you leave.”

  I take some photographs of the portico, then go to the back garden, where I sit on the bridge parapet, writing up my notes. The utter simplicity of the house is charming. The basement is unplastered brick, with a stepped brick band separating it from the plastered walls above. Whereas the front façade has arched windows—rare in Palladio villas—the ones in the back are square as well as arched, with arches in the scribed masonry pattern. Such a transparently scenographic device only makes the majestic porticoes more substantial.

  It’s after one o’clock and time to go. The carnival ride is silent, the children have gone home for lunch. I cross the street to the Caffè Palladio to get a bite to eat. The young man has left and the place is empty. Ordering a ham and cheese sandwich and a glass of beer, I take a table by the window. The sandwich arrives—it is grilled, provolone and prosciutto—and I munch contentedly, staring absentmindedly out of the window at the villa, which is plainly visible across the street. Piombino must have been only a hamlet when the house was built, yet the surroundings already were less than pastoral. Perhaps that’s why the villa does not really look out of place; it is, as it was always intended to be, the finest house in town.III

  From a distance the double portico looks very familiar, actually very American. There are similar two-story pedimented porches all across the United States, particularly in the South, where a columned porch in front of a mansion is synonymous with “plantation house.” Drayton Hall is a famous plantation house outside Charleston with several Palladian features: a symmetrical plan, a regular window arrangement, pronounced moldings, blocky modillions supporting a cornice under the eaves, and prominent double porticoes. It was built almost two hundred years after the Villa Cornaro. A series of unusual individuals and fortuitous events leads from Piombino Dese in the hinterland of the Venetian Republic, to the backwoods of a remote British colony on the Atlantic seaboard of the New World.

  The complicated story begins in Jacobean England with a remarkable architect, Inigo Jones. A portrait by Van Dyck shows Jones in his late sixties, a handsome bearded man with unruly hair flowing from under a silk skullcap, and a deceptively mild look considering a biographer described him as “a personality of alarming force, totally intolerant of the lesser creatures in his environment.”5 In the painting, Jones is holding a sheet of paper that could be a billet-doux, a list of accounts, a costume sketch, or an architectural drawing, for he was a courtier, an art expert, and a theatrical designer, as well as an architect. He overlapped Palladio—just barely—being born in London in 1573 (Palladio died in 1580). The son of a cloth-worker, he apprenticed as a joiner. Yet at thirty he abandoned this trade. “Being naturally inclined in my younger years to study the Arts of Design,” he later recalled, “I passed into foreign parts to converse with the great masters thereof in Italy.”6 After an extended sojourn in southern Italy, where he apparently made high-placed friends, he reemerged in London society described as a “picture-maker”—that is, a painter. It was in this capacity that he joined the court of James I under the personal patronage of the new queen, Anne of Denmark. Jones’s chief occupation was designing the scenery and costumes for masques, or theatrical entertainments, most of them written by Ben Jonson. Jones replaced the Elizabethan arena stage with the Continental proscenium and introduced English audiences to Italian scenery, much of it in the all’antica style. For almost thirty years, Jonson and Jones’s spectacular combination of drama, dance, and music was the vogue.

  VILLA CORNARO

  When he was forty, Jones accompanied his patrons and friends, the Earl and Countess of Arundel, on a tour of Italy. They visited Naples, Rome, Florence, and Venice, collecting works of art, buying books, and visiting museums, with Jones (who was fluent in Italian) acting as tour guide and artistic consultant. They also saw the works of famous Renaissance architects, including Palladio. Jones was familiar with Palladio’s treatise, but he was unprepared for the experience of the buildings. It was love at first sight. The Arundel entourage stopped in Vicenza twice. Jones visited at least three Palladio villas, including the Villa Thiene at Quinto, which he was disappointed to find only partly built. “To this stroke it is finished and nothing more,” he scribbled in the margin of his heavily annotated Quattro libri.7 He interviewed craftsmen who had worked on Palladio’s buildings and on Arundel’s behalf bought more than two hundred of Palladio’s drawings (Arundel later gave him most of them). Jones seems to have felt a personal bond with Palladio. For example, he practiced copying Palladio’s signature and signed his own name in a similar fashion. The two men had much in common: both were late starters; both came from humble backgrounds; both were avid readers and self-taught scholars.

  When Jones returned to England he continued to design masques, but expanded his activities to include architecture. He was appointed Surveyor of the King’s Works, which effectively made him court architect, a role he continued to play under Charles I. It is no exaggeration to say that Inigo Jones single-handedly introduced Italian classicism to England. Although the Renaissance had influenced English scholarship, it had had almost no effect on English architecture. Jacobean buildings were distinctly old-fashioned, a fusty blend of decorative Flemish influences and Elizabethan traditions. Jones’s designs were different: spare, rigorous, geometrically disciplined, and, of course, classical. Although he was working half a century after Palladio’s death, Jones ignored the later generation of Mannerist architects, preferring the simpler styles of the cinquecento. “All thes composed orna
ments, the Which proceed out of ye aboundance of dessigners and wear brought in by Michill Angell, and his followers in my oppignion do not well in sollid Architecture,” he complained (in his unique orthography).8

  Jones’s “solid Architecture” is often called Palladian, but it is really Jonesian, for while he was inspired by his predecessor, he had the self-confidence—and the talent—to go his own way. His buildings, constructed of stone, not plaster, have a precision that is absent from Palladio’s domestic work, and despite his theatrical background, Jones—at least on the exterior—was a more severe designer. The house that he built for Queen Anne at Greenwich has an almost austere façade with a rusticated base and a columned loggia in the center, facing a cortile flanked by porticoes that recall the Villa Pisani. The Banqueting House at Whitehall Palace, originally designed as a performance hall for masques, is his masterpiece. The restrained pilasters and half-columns of the façade do not prepare one for the spectacular interior with a brilliant ceiling painted by Peter Paul Rubens. “Outwardly every wyse man carrieth a graviti in Publicke places,” Jones wrote, “yet inwardly hath his imaginacy set on fire, and sumtimes licentciously flying out, as nature hirself doeth often times stravagantly.”9 Like Palladio, he combined sober exteriors with rich décor, although he disposed of greater budgets than his predecessor, and his splendid interior architecture is not frescoed but the real thing.

  Jones followed Palladio’s lead in seeking inspiration from antiquity. He modeled St. Paul’s Church in Covent Garden on Vitruvius’s description of a Tuscan temple, and based the design of his most prominent work, the great portico on the west front of Old St. Paul’s Cathedral (which was destroyed some twenty years later in the Fire of London), on Palladio’s reconstruction of an ancient Roman temple. Only eight out of forty-six known works survive, but they show Jones to be a true successor of Palladio, applying his principles without copying his designs.