The Perfect House: A Journey with Renaissance Master Andrea Palladio (10 page)

Luigi and Paola Borgato, whose workshop this is, build pianos to order. Every year they produce three or four nine-foot grands. The Borgato piano is highly regarded—I later learn that the London-based concert pianist Radu Lupu owns one.

“Grazie mille,”
I say to Paola Borgato as I leave.

I want to tell her how much I’ve enjoyed my visit, and how much I appreciate the care with which the villa has been restored and maintained, and what a magical place this is. But all I can manage in my rudimentary Italian is
“Che bella casa.”

^I
Years later, Palladio used similar twin towers in the Villa Valmarana at Lisiera, and the Villa Thiene at Cicogna.

^II
Although today grandly referred to as palazzos, in Palladio’s time the large town houses of the nobility were called simply
case della città.

^III
As far as is known, Palladio generally did his own drawing and rarely relied on assistants.

^IV
Modern architectural drawings are made to a small number of standard scales. In Palladio’s time, scales were a matter of personal choice and convenience.

oiana Maggiore is a hamlet about twenty miles south of Vicenza. It sits in the flat, lowland plain that was the Venetian Republic’s agricultural mainstay and is still farming country. It is a brisk morning, and the sun is shining brightly. The surrounding fields are freshly turned, ready for spring planting. The Villa Poiana is on the outskirts of the hamlet, plainly visible behind a long brick wall next to the road. I park the little rented Opel on the grass verge beside the wall and walk back to the gate.

The gate opens to a walled forecourt. The entire area seems to have been recently graded, and in many places the scrubby grass has been scraped away to reveal patches of raw earth. The building is hardly an obvious successor to the Villa Pisani—no triple arches, no rustication, no pilasters, no temple front. Instead, the most distinctive feature of the façade is a tall arched opening that leads to what I assume is an entrance loggia. The broad surround of the archway is punctuated by five round holes or
oculi
—literally, eyes. The arc of platter-sized
oculi
is like a cartoon of a juggler’s act. Yet there is nothing whimsical about this sturdy building. The horizontal moldings of the façade, the square piers that support the loggia, the three arches, even the elaborate bracketed architraves over the windows, are plastered brick—only the windowsills are stone. Since everything is freshly painted white, the massive building appears to be carved out of a single block of chalk. No doubt the absence of even rudimentary landscaping exaggerates the effect, but the house has a no-nonsense soldierly presence that the five circles only underscore. Just let me catch you smiling, it dares.

A
T THE ENTRANCE OF THE
V
ILLA
P
OIANA IS A STATUE OF THE
R
OMAN GOD
N
EPTUNE; ABOVE IT IS AN ARC OF CIRCULAR OPENINGS, OR OCULI.

The client was Bonifacio Poiana, a
cavaliere,
or knight, of a long-established Vicentine family. The Poianas—the word means “buzzard” and the bird appears on their coat of arms—had a long history of military service, providing cavalry to the Venetian Republic. They also had a long history at Poiana Maggiore—their fifteenth-century fortified villa complex, including a medieval tower, stands across the road from the villa. Bonifacio Poiana bought the land for his new house in 1547, and soon after engaged Palladio. Palladio was still a stonemason when he first met the
cavaliere;
it was for his wife, Lady Angela, that Allegradonna had worked as a maid.

Seen close up, the façade is not what it appears to be. The
oculi
are not holes but deep recesses, nor are the plaster walls plain, they are incised with a masonry pattern. The entrance arch, whose simplified square piers seem to be a part of the wall, is actually the center of a highly stylized
serliana.
And
what look like two more windows on each side of the entrance, with identical pediments and surrounds, are really apertures opening into the loggia. The loggia is reached by a wide stair, a short climb since the basement is partially buried. Lowering the house is Palladio’s accommodation to the surrounding flat landscape site. The horizontal impression is accentuated by the water table, which neatly turns into a parapet at the stair abutments, and by a second flat molding that surrounds the building at the level of the windowsills. The panels below the windows protrude slightly, creating additional shadow lines.

V
ILLA
P
OIANA, THE FRONT

The large hipped roof has a gable over the loggia. Instead of a full triangular pediment, however, Palladio interrupts the horizontal entablature and merely hints at a temple front—the same device that he designed for the Villa Valmarana. At Poiana he accentuates the effect of a frontispiece by pushing the whole central section of the façade slightly forward (the reverse of what he did at the Villa Valmarana, where the central section is slightly recessed); it’s only a few inches, but the resulting shadow line makes a subtle but unmistakable separation. The Villa Poiana reprises a number of motifs from Palladio’s earlier houses: it has the Spartan plainness and massiveness of the Villa Godi; the
serliana
of the Villa Valmarana is here, although in highly abstracted form; the central pediment of Gazoto is repeated in the gable over the loggia; and the moldings recall similar devices at the Villa Pisani. Yet this is not a collage. Palladio combines the different parts seamlessly—the house is all of a piece.

The pediment of the Villa Poiana is accented by three life-size statues. The female figures represent drama, sculpture, and music. Two additional statues—Hercules and Neptune—stand on the stair abutments, guarding the entrance. These statues
were installed late, in 1658, but they followed the illustration in
Quattro libri.
Palladio generally embellished the exterior of his buildings with sculpted likenesses of human figures, although he was not the first Renaissance architect to do so; Sanmicheli placed sculptures on the roof parapet of the Palazzo Canossa in Verona in 1537. Like Sanmicheli, Palladio took his cue from the ancient Romans. Vitruvius mentions that the pediments of certain temples are “adorned in the Tuscan fashion with statues of terra-cotta or gilt bronze.”
¹
By the time Palladio saw the ancient ruins, the statues had long since disappeared—looted or simply fallen—but he surmised their presence from the empty niches and bare pedestals, and included statues in all his drawings of historical reconstructions. “Nobody should be surprised that I have put such a plethora of statues in these buildings,” he explained, “because one reads that there were so many in Rome that they looked like another population.”
²
Another population
is exactly what I think of as I look up at the figures on the roof of the Villa Poiana. The statues are not only allusions to antiquity, allegorical symbols, and attractive ornaments silhouetted against the sky, but also protective icons. Le Corbusier defined architecture as “the masterly, correct and magnificent play of masses brought together in light.” The Villa Poiana is all that, but the statues are a reminder that the masses are, literally, subordinate to the human presence.

I go around to the back. The design of the sides, which in the earlier houses is haphazard, is perfectly symmetrical. The rear façade is almost a mirror image of the front, although without a loggia. Between the piers of the
serliana
is a large set of solid doors, reached by an exterior semicircular stair similar to that of the Villa Pisani. The doors are surmounted by a miniature thermal window and an arc of five
oculi,
although here the circles are real windows. According to some historians, the
oculi
motif
may have been copied by Palladio from Bramante (who in turn copied it from early Christian churches); or it may have been inspired by the
oculi
and stylized
serliana
of Sansovino’s Loggetta in the Piazza San Marco, begun the previous decade.
³
The rear façade of the Villa Poiana represented an important stylistic development for Palladio. The earliest Renaissance architecture was urban, and walled towns and cities were extremely dense so that buildings, churches as well as residences, generally had but a single façade, facing the street. On the other hand, country houses were freestanding. Palladio’s first houses dealt awkwardly with this new freedom; I have the impression that he was not quite sure what to do. The backs of the Villa Gazoto and the Villa Valmarana, for example, were utilitarian and unresolved architecturally; the Janus-like Villa Pisani had handsome front and back façades, but they could have belonged to two different buildings. In the Villa Poiana, Palladio skillfully used variations on the
serliana
motif to create an interesting visual relationship between the front and the rear of the house while, at the same time, giving predominance to the former. Domestic architects have repeated this simple but original theme for centuries.

As often happens in architecture, the breakthrough design of
the Villa Poiana was actually the result of hasty improvisation. A few years earlier, around 1544, Palladio had been commissioned by a Vicentine nobleman named Bartolomeo Pagliarino to build a small villa. A rough draft of the plan has survived, showing the house surrounded on three sides by expansive walled courtyards.
⁴
The small house has a T-shaped
sala
flanked by two rooms and two
camerini
—small rooms—and fronted by a projecting loggia with a
serliana.
Before construction could begin Pagliarino unexpectedly died, and the project was shelved. When Palladio received the Poiana commission, he dusted off the Pagliarino drawings.
⁵
(This is not unusual; Frank Lloyd Wright frequently adapted unbuilt house designs; Mies van der Rohe’s National Gallery in Berlin started life as an office building in Cuba.) Palladio redrew the plan of the house using the same overall dimensions and the same cross-vaulted, T-shaped
sala,
although he simplified the projecting loggia and changed the configurations of the walled courtyards to fit the new site in Poiana Maggiore.
⁶