The English Civil War effectively ended Jones’s professional life. He served in Charles I’s army as a military engineer, was captured, briefly imprisoned, then fined, and died in 1652, three years after his royal patron’s execution. Jones’s assistant, the talented John Webb, who inherited his master’s practice (as well as his collection of Palladio drawings), carried on his brand of austere classicism. However, after Charles II’s accession to the throne, tastes changed, and Jones’s architecture was out of fashion. Nevertheless, Palladio remained a touchstone for British architects. When John Vanbrugh, a successful dramatist, turned his hand to architecture at the age of forty, having been appointed Comptroller of the Royal Works under Christopher Wren, he ordered a copy of Quattro libri from his bookseller. Vanbrugh, who would build such extravagant country houses as Castle Howard and Blenheim Palace, took English architecture in a theatrical and flamboyant direction, yet the springboard for his fertile imagination was Palladio.
Vanbrugh and Wren were not, strictly speaking, Palladians, but Palladianism did eventually return to Britain. It emerged first in Scotland with James Smith, an obscure Edinburgh stonemason turned architect who had spent five years in Italy. Starting in 1685 with his own house, Whitehill, Smith built a number of Palladian country houses in Scotland. His influence spread through Colen Campbell, another Scot, who built what is generally considered the first eighteenth-century Palladian house in England, Wilbury House. In 1715, Campbell published Vitruvius Britannicus, a compendium of architectural works in which he championed a stricter classicism based on the “Famous Inigo Jones,” and “above all, the great Palladio, who has exceeded all that has gone before him, and surpass’d his Contemporaries.”10 That same year Giacomo Leoni, a Venetian émigré, published the first complete English translation of Quattro libri. Leoni’s patron was the young Richard Boyle, third Earl of Burlington. Soon after, Burlington engaged Campbell to design a Palladian entrance court and colonnade for Burlington House, the family’s London residence.
Campbell encouraged the young earl’s interest in architecture. A few years later, Burlington went to Italy to see Palladio’s work for himself, retracing Inigo Jones’s journey to Venice and Vicenza. He returned to England with an unalloyed devotion to Palladio, and about sixty of the master’s drawings (he later acquired most of Webb’s Palladian collection, and this entire treasure trove is now at the Royal Institute of British Architects in London, where I saw it). Burlington, who was fabulously wealthy, became a great patron—Horace Walpole called him the “Apollo of Arts.” He underwrote a young architect, Isaac Ware, to translate Quattro libri (Leoni’s version, though also backed by Burlington, was notoriously unreliable), published a collection of Palladio’s reconstructions of ancient buildings, and engaged his lifelong friend William Kent, a painter, landscape gardener, and architect, to edit Designs of Inigo Jones. The “Architect Earl” was also a practitioner, designing and building a number of notable Palladian houses, some in collaboration with Kent, some on his own.
There are buildings inspired by Palladio in Italy, where a Palladian revival took place in the early eighteenth century, as well as in the Netherlands, Germany, and Poland, and to a lesser extent in France, but nowhere did Palladianism take stronger hold than in the British Isles. Thanks to Lord Burlington’s passion for architecture, the talented architects whom he attracted and encouraged, and the revival of interest in Inigo Jones, academic Palladianism flourished well into the nineteenth century. Ware’s new translation of Quattro libri, Vitruvius Britannicus, and Designs of Inigo Jones introduced Palladian ideas to architects who had never been to Italy, or even seen the buildings of Inigo Jones. In the process, Palladianism became fashionable. Between 1715 and 1745, prosperity, changing tastes, and a desire for newness led the landed gentry in England, Scotland, and Ireland to modernize and replace their country houses, producing a building boom not unlike the spurt of villa-building in cinquecento Venice. Palladianism, or rather its British reincarnation, was the preferred style. Sophisticated and elegant, it represented a revival of past glories—not only of ancient Rome but also of Inigo Jones and English royalty. British Palladianism was popularized by an impressive number of architectural manuals, builders’ guides, and so-called pattern books, which were intended for “such Gentlemen as might be concerned in building, especially in the remote parts of the Country, where little or no assistance for design can be procured.”11 Between 1724 and 1790, no fewer than 275 new architectural handbooks appeared—as well as 170 new editions of earlier works.12
One of the most popular handbook authors was Robert Morris. While he published pattern books for houses and villas, he was also a polemicist. “Gaiety, Magnificence, the rude Gothic, or the Chinese unmeaning Stile, are the Study of our modern Architects,” he complained, “while Grecian and Roman Purity and Simplicity, are neglected.”13 In Select Architecture, Morris adapted Palladio’s designs to the needs of the eighteenth-century English landowner. A “Plain Villa,” for example, was a simple rectangular block.14 A recessed pedimented portico, supported by Ionic columns, marked the entrance. The exterior recalled the plainness of the Villa Poiana, with a molding at the level of the windowsills, a pronounced water table, and modillions under the eaves. The symmetrical plan was recognizably Palladian: in the center was a large entrance hall leading to a public room, and on each side were smaller rooms. Like a Palladio villa, the Morris villa had three levels: a basement containing kitchens and servants’ quarters, a main floor, and what looked like an attic on the façade but was really a bedroom floor. The plan lacked Palladio’s geometrical finesse, for although the entrance hall was square, the proportions of the other rooms were haphazard. On the other hand, utility was well-served: each room had a fireplace; there were two stairs, a large one for the owners and a smaller one for the servants; and to facilitate heating, ceiling heights were kept low, only eleven feet on the main floor, and nine feet on the upper floor. A serliana lit the main staircase. Altogether it was a handsome design that supported Morris’s claim that “a Building, well proportioned, without Dress, will ever please; as a plain Coat may fit as graceful, and easy, on a well-proportioned Man.”15
Select Architecture, which was published in 1755 and reprinted only two years later, was particularly popular in the British colonies of the New World: Jamaica, Barbados, the Bahamas, and particularly the thirteen colonies of North America. That period coincides with what one historian has called “the refinement of America,” when gentility first appeared, in manners, comportment, dress—and houses.16 Colonials looked to the mother country for the latest architectural fashion, which has been loosely termed Georgian but was basically Palladian. Since there were few trained architects, gentlemen regularly designed their own homes. When Bishop George Berkeley remodeled his house near Newport, Rhode Island, and produced what is generally considered the first Palladian house in New England, he used Kent’s Designs of Inigo Jones as a guide. The rusticated, three-arch loggia of Mount Airy, in Virginia, recalls the Villa Caldogno and was copied from James Gibbs’s A Book of Architecture. Shirley Plantation, another riverside house in Virginia, was based on a plate in Vitruvius Britannicus. Armed with Campbell, Gibbs, or Morris, gentlemen built Palladian houses up and down the Atlantic seaboard, from suburban Philadelphia to the Carolinas. Their Palladian features included pedimented porticoes, columned porches, serlianas (which Americans called Palladian windows), symmetrically composed façades, and regularly arranged fenestration.
The overmantel of the fireplace in the entrance of Drayton Hall is copied directly from Designs of Inigo Jones, so it is likely that the pedimented double portico on the exterior is also based on a published example. In that case, Judge John Drayton, or his builder, must have had a copy of Quattro libri, for there are no double porticoes in Campbell, Gibbs, or Morris; indeed, the English Palladians never adopted Palladio’s double portico. The Drayton double porticoes—as at Piombino there are two of them, one facing an entrance court, the other the river—are sec
ond cousins of the double porticoes of the Villa Cornaro. Subsequently, similar two-story porticoes, often called galleries, appear in many houses, not only on plantations but in suburban villas as well as town houses.
The best-known double portico in the American colonies was that of the capitol in Williamsburg, Virginia. It was built in 1752, more than a decade after Drayton Hall, following the destruction by fire of the original capitol.IV The portico was an ungainly affair, judging from a contemporary description.
The Capitol is a light and airy structure, with a portico in front of two orders, the lower of which being Doric, is tolerably just in proportions and ornaments, save only that the intercolonations are too large. The upper is Ionic, much too small for that on which it is mounted, its ornaments not proper to the order, nor proportioned within themselves. It is crowned with a pediment, which is too high for its span.17
The severe architectural critic was Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson’s interest in architecture was aroused while he was still a student at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg. With the characteristic obsession that he applied to all intellectual pursuits, he read widely on the subject: Gibbs’s treatises, Morris’s Select Architecture, Quattro libri. He was drawn to Palladianism, partly because it appealed to his rational nature and partly because, as a provincial, he sought the stamp of authority. “Palladio is the Bible,” he once advised a friend, “stick close to it.”18 When Jefferson turned twenty-one and achieved economic independence, he started building his own house. He copied the plan from Select Architecture but added a double portico. Although the immediate inspiration was probably the Williamsburg capitol, in the handsome drawing (Jefferson learned to draw early—his father was a surveyor), he corrected the proportional inadequacies, probably following the drawings of the Villa Cornaro in Quattro libri.V
Jefferson visited northern Italy, including Milan and Genoa, but he did not go to Venice. Few colonial builders ever saw a real Palladio villa, or even a building by Jones or Lord Burlington. So American Palladianism is thirdhand, far removed from its British precedents, and even more distant from its Vicentine roots. American Palladian houses are generally unplastered brick, with accents of wood moldings painted white in the characteristic Georgian fashion. The wood trim is delicate compared to Palladio’s sturdy stone and plastered brick. American houses rarely have tall basements or attic stories, which gives them a low-slung, close-to-the-ground appearance. Finally, the classical details, which are copied from books rather than from archaeological sites, are stiff and oversimplified. Yet, particularly in the southern colonies, American Palladianism has a curious authenticity. It is not easy to transplant Palladio from the Mediterranean to the rainswept dales of Oxfordshire, or to the Scottish moors. Sir Henry Wotton, who had met Jones during his Italian tour, wrote a handbook on Italian architecture in which he warned that “a good Parler in Ægypt would make perchance a good cellar in England.”19 Alexander Pope ridiculed English architects who “Shall call the Winds thro’ long Arcades to roar / Proud to catch cold at a Venetian door; / Conscious they act a true Palladian part.”20 But a Palladian house in Virginia or the Carolinas looks at home. The hot climate makes loggias and porticoes not merely decorative but useful. The strong sun picks out the modeled surfaces, much as it does in the Veneto. Even the presence of porticoes on two sides—one facing inland, another a river, as at Drayton Hall—echoes the situation of many Palladio villas.
American plantation houses, like Vicentine villas, were the administrative centers of vast agricultural estates. They were surrounded by fields, not, as English country houses, by manicured landscapes. Judge Drayton may not have stored his rice crop in his attic, but he lived in the same intimacy with his agricultural surroundings as Giorgio Cornaro. Drayton was not an aristocrat, of course, but like many planters he put on aristocratic airs—neighbors referred to his house as “Mr. Drayton’s palace.” And the Judge built his grand country house on the banks of the Ashley for much the same reason Cornaro built an imposing villa on the dusty main street of Piombino: to surround himself with the trappings of civilization in a place that was remote, backward, and rustic.
* * *
IThe Cornaro family were long-standing architecture buffs. Two of Giorgio’s uncles had built famous houses in Venice, the Palazzo Corner della Ca’ Grande, designed by Sansovino, and the Palazzo Corner Mocenigo on San Polo, designed by Sanmicheli; his Contarini ancestor Marin had built (and largely designed) the famous Cà d’Oro on the Grand Canal near the Rialto bridge.
IIThe dimensions of the sala in Quattro libri are 32 feet by 271/4 feet, not one of Vitruvius’s recommended shapes. The rooms at the Villa Cornaro are likewise oddly dimensioned—16 by 261/2, 11 by 32, and 10 by 16—another example of Palladio exercising his “judgment.”
IIIThe architectural competition between the two Cornaro villas was settled in the 1770s when Sanmicheli’s house was demolished.
IVThe double-portico building burned down in 1852; the present-day capitol at Colonial Williamsburg is a replica of the earlier building, which had no double portico.
VTwenty-six years later, after returning from his stay in Paris, Jefferson drastically altered the house, reducing it to one story and eliminating the double portico.
VI
The Brothers Barbaro
fter leaving the Caffè Palladio in Piombino, I head north about fifteen miles to the village of Maser, site of the Villa Barbaro. The villa doesn’t open to the public until three o’clock, so I have plenty of time. There is little traffic on this spring Sunday afternoon, and I enjoy the drive. The road passes Altivole, where Caterina Cornaro, the former queen of Cyprus, had her estate, and heads into the heart of the Trevigiana, a region centered on the city of Treviso. There are plowed fields on one side and vineyards on the other. The enormous ragged wall of the Dolomitic Alps looms in the distance. I must be on an old approach road to the villa, for directly ahead, a mile or so away at the base of the mountains, is a vivid splash of yellow. It’s fifteen years since I’ve seen the Villa Barbaro, but the colorful silhouette is unmistakable.
The road veers to one side and the house passes from view. After more twists and turns I bear along the edge of an escarpment. The Villa Barbaro pops up on the left, several hundred feet away at the top of a gently rising slope. I brake hard and pull off the pavement onto a walled semicircular gravel area surrounding a fountain. Atop the dry basin a bearded Neptune holding a trident gazes across the road at the villa, seemingly transfixed by the view.
The yellow hue is not uncommon in Veneto country houses, but here, freshly painted and juxtaposed against white trim, it makes Palladio’s architecture appear delicate, quite different from the severe monumentality of his first houses. The villa is broken into several parts: a central block, which he called the casa del padrone, or the master’s house, flanked on each side by arcaded wings terminating in ornate pavilions. The wings are extremely long, the entire building stretching out more than two hundred feet from end to end. The pavilions, which resemble huge bookends, have their gables decorated with colossal curved brackets. In Quattro libri, Palladio showed a walled courtyard in front of each pavilion, which would have effectively shortened the house and created a formal entrance court in the center. This would also have made the pavilions less prominent, bringing the architectural focus back to the central block. But no matter, the villa is magnificent, and ever so confident, sounding a joyful fanfare across the Trevigian plain.
The central block is two stories high, like the Villa Cornaro, but it does not have a portico; instead, the entire end of the house resembles an ancient temple. The illusion is twofold, for the four giant, white-painted Ionic columns, which from this distance appear to be freestanding, are half-round and attached to the façade. As he did often, Palladio explored a new motif in several houses at once; he built another two-story temple-fronted villa in nearby Bassano for Count Giacomo Angarano, a Vicentine friend. To complete the temple effect, he dispensed with the attic and ba
sement in both houses, and placed the service functions—kitchens, wine-making rooms, granaries—in flanking outbuildings. He put the main rooms on the upper floor, to take advantage of views and cooling breezes.
VILLA BARBARO
The clients at Maser were also Palladio’s friends: Daniele Barbaro, whom he had met years before and who had helped him in Venice, and his brother Marc’antonio. Like Giorgio Cornaro, the Barbaros belonged to the upper reaches of the Venetian aristocracy. Their father, Francesco, who had been governor of Verona as well as a senator, had sent both of his sons to the University of Padua. Marc’antonio went into the diplomatic service and subsequently held various important governmental posts. Daniele, the older brother, had a scholarly bent and stayed in Padua studying philosophy, mathematics, and astronomy. This was during the late 1530s, and as an academic humanist he naturally participated in Alvise Cornaro’s intellectual circle, which is where he met Andrea di Pietro, soon to be Palladio.
Daniele remained in Padua for a decade. In 1549, his father died and left his estate at Maser, which had belonged to the family for two hundred years, to his two sons, then both in their thirties. The brothers did not divide their inheritance, and decided to jointly enlarge the medieval house that was on the site. Palladio’s earliest sketches for the villa date from this time, although it wasn’t until almost a decade later that construction began.1
Palladio was a natural choice as architect, since for at least two years previous he had been collaborating with Daniele on a new edition of Vitruvius. Daniele was translating the Latin text into Italian, while Palladio drew the accompanying illustrations. The project was interrupted by Daniele’s departure, three months after his father’s death, to serve as Venetian ambassador in London. Two years later he was recalled to Venice and appointed patriarch-elect of Aquiléia, an important religious office (he never married but it is unclear if he was ordained). He was not required to live in Aquiléia, at the eastern borders of the Republic, so for the next few years, as the translation of Vitruvius, and the design of the villa, took shape, he and Palladio were often together. Daniele was seven years younger than Palladio, but he seems to have assumed Trissino’s role of patron and intellectual mentor. The pair traveled to Venice, where the Barbaros had a house; in 1552, they went to Trento, where Daniele was the official Venetian delegate to the final session of the great religious council. Two years later they visited Rome.
The Perfect House: A Journey with Renaissance Master Andrea Palladio Page 12
