The Perfect House: A Journey with Renaissance Master Andrea Palladio (14 page)

P
ALAZZO
C
HIERICATI

He made the discovery in a related project. The same inheritance that made Girolamo Chiericati owner of the Isola properties provided his brother, Giovanni, with an estate on the outskirts of the city. Giovanni, likewise an admirer of Palladio, commissioned a small villa.
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The house still stands, surrounded by open fields, still part of a working farm, somewhat neglected, its architectural presence crudely compromised by an attached modern farmhouse and barn. The plan is unremarkable: a square
sala,
flanked by two suites of small, medium, and large rooms. However, instead of a recessed three-arch loggia, there is a splendid freestanding portico whose classical pediment is supported by four giant Ionic columns, rising the full height of the house.

When I go to look at the Villa Chiericati, the friendly farmer who lives next door asks me if I am German. Many German architects come to look at the house, he explains. I can sense that he is puzzled why this rather decrepit structure attracts so much attention.

V
ILLA
C
HIERICATI

“There are porticoes descended from this one all over the world, even in the United States, where I live,” I say. “This is a historic building.”

I am not exaggerating. What started in 1485 as the mere suggestion of a temple pasted to the front of a Medici villa has grown into the real, three-dimensional thing. No Renaissance architect had ever done anything quite like this before; indeed, the Chiericati portico marks a great event in the development of Western architecture. For the next four hundred years, architects will design and build countless variations of the temple portico, adorning country houses, mansions, royal palaces, and presidents’ homes, not to mention churches, museums, and banks. In the seventeenth century, Claude Perrault will make it the centerpiece of the Louvre; in the eighteenth century, it will front E. M. Barry’s Royal Opera House in Covent Garden and Samuel Blodgett’s First Bank of the United States in Philadelphia; in the early 1800s, the great German architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel will use it on the Berlin Theater; and more than a hundred years later it will reappear in John Russell Pope’s imposing National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. It is likely that when twenty-first-century architects tire of titanium swirls and jagged metallic zigzags, they will return to find new inspiration in this ancient device.

 • • • 

Construction of the Villa Chiericati proceeded extremely slowly and only the basement and the bare outlines of the main floor were completed by 1558, when Giovanni’s death put a stop to construction. The house remained in this unfinished state for the next two decades; Palladio must have despaired of ever seeing
the villa finished, for he did not include it in
Quattro libri.
Yet he was obviously excited about the new portico since he immediately used it in another villa. That is my next destination: the Villa Foscari.

The house is better known as La Malcontenta, supposedly named after an unhappy—and allegedly unfaithful—wife who was locked up here by her suspicious husband. In fact, the hamlet was known as Malcontenta long before the villa was built, after the neighboring marshes that offered refuge for outlaws, or
malcontenti.
⁴
I’ve been looking forward to visiting this villa ever since I first read the evocative name and saw lyrical photographs of its imposing portico, surrounded by weeping willows and reflected in the still waters of the Brenta.

I look out of the car window, which is streaked with rain. Instead of the Brenta and weeping willows, all I see is the grimy industrial outskirts of Mestre, the port of Venice: factories and warehouses, interspersed with dreary apartment buildings. Can this really be the place? A sign announces the Ristorante Palladio, so the villa can’t be far away. I park the car in front of the restaurant and continue on foot. Around the bend, next to the road but separated by a low steel barrier, a narrow canal comes into view, its surface barely two feet lower than the pavement. The sluggish Brenta is exactly as John Ruskin described it 150 years ago, “a muddy volume of yellowish-gray water, that neither hastens nor slackens, but glides heavily between its monotonous banks.”
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Hardly a picturesque sight but it suits this ashen, overcast day.

The Brenta, which empties into the Venetian Lagoon a few miles away, was a key
terraferma
navigation route. The modern excursion boat that takes tourists for cruises up the canal covers the six miles from the city to Malcontenta in two hours. This is probably about the same length of time it took sixteenth-century
Venetians to make the journey in a
burchiello,
or luxury barge, pulled by mules. The owners of the villa must have made this short trip many times, for theirs was a special kind of country house, not the administrative center of a farm but a city dweller’s country getaway.

The concept of rural retreats was popularized by the fourteenth-century poet Petrarch, who had built a small house (which still exists) outside Padua, and spent the last five years of his life “surrounded by olive groves and a vineyard . . . far from alarms, noise and commotion.”
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A hundred years later, urban “noise and commotion”—not to mention the summer heat and pestilential atmosphere—had become intense and the countryside offered a popular alternative. By Alberti’s time, it was necessary to distinguish between country houses that were associated with agriculture and those that were intended for pleasurable escape. “The fortunate will own a villa as a summer retreat,” he wrote. “By this means they enjoy all the advantages to be found in the country, of light, breeze, open space, and views.”
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Many of Alberti’s wealthy Florentine neighbors built such villas in the hills overlooking the city. Associating the
villa suburbana
with antiquity, he quoted an ancient Roman poet on the pleasures of villa life:

How in the country do I pass the time?

The answer to the question’s brief:

I lunch and drink, I sing and play,

I wash and dine, I rest. Meanwhile

I Phoebus quiz

And Muses frisk.
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Venice was larger than Florence, and being built on the water was more crowded and unhealthy. To temporarily escape such conditions, wealthy Venetians built summer houses on the island of Murano, next to the glass factories whose hot exhausts were curiously believed to be beneficial to one’s health. The island of Giudecca was another favorite location.
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Eventually, villa builders moved farther out, and the banks of canals such as the Brenta, which provided convenient access from the city, likewise filled up with summer retreats.

U
NUSUAL STAIRS LEAD TO THE TALL LOGGIA OF THE
V
ILLA
F
OSCARI, ALSO KNOWN AS
L
A
M
ALCONTENTA, WHICH OVERLOOKS THE
B
RENTA
C
ANAL.

Phoebus, the god of the sun, is not much in evidence today as I walk beside the murky Brenta. The villa comes into view, or rather a corner of its portico, behind a stand of weeping willows; a giant Ionic column and a glimpse of pediment announce “Palladio villa” as unmistakably as a billboard. Alberti advised that a suburban villa “will be most attractive, if it presents a cheerful overall appearance to anyone leaving the city, as if to attract and expect visitors.”
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As I observe La Malcontenta, “cheerful” is not the word that comes to mind—this is the most dramatic portico I’ve ever seen, with giant columns rising the full height of the house. The monumental effect of the portico is magnified since the house itself, while not particularly large, is raised on a story-high podium and looms over the narrow Brenta across a short stretch of lawn. The flooding at the Villa Pisani had taught Palladio to build riverside basements aboveground, but he also seems to have acquired a taste for verticality, for he has made the basement—and the attic—exceptionally high, producing a house that is even taller than the two-story Palazzo Chiericati. And just as that building faced a piazza, Palladio pushed La Malcontenta toward the canal, ensuring that the visitor stepping out of his
burchiello
experienced the full dramatic impact of the monumental portico.

The main floor is reached by two exterior stairs, one on each side. The frieze of the broad entablature carries a Latin inscription commemorating the men who commissioned the
house:
NICOLAUS ET ALOYSIUS FOSCARI FRATRES FEDERICI FILII
(The brothers Nicolò and Alvise Foscari, sons of Federico). The Foscari brothers were wealthy Venetian nobles, descended from a famous fifteenth-century doge. I can imagine them examining a drawing of Palladio’s latest design, the as yet unbuilt Villa Chiericati, and instructing him, “We like this plan, but make the portico larger. We want our friends and visitors to be impressed.” Palladio turned up the architectural volume; the Malcontenta portico is not only taller than the portico of the Villa Chiericati, it is supported by eight columns instead of four.

The column was the basic module of ancient Roman architecture, and its diameter was the dimensional module that determined the sizes of the other parts of the building, including the space between the columns, or the intercolumniation. Vitruvius described five types of intercolumniation, ranging from 1
¹
/
₂
to 3 diameters, but strongly recommended the so-called eustyle “with the intervals apportioned just right.”
¹¹

Eustyle, which required the space between the columns to be equal to 2
¹
/
₄
-column diameters, was Palladio’s favorite, too. Roman temple fronts always had an uneven number of bays—typically three, five, or seven—and the central bay opposite the entrance door was sometimes made slightly wider so that “a free passage will be afforded to those who would approach the statues of the gods,” according to Vitruvius.
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Palladio usually followed this practice, and the five-bay portico of La Malcontenta has a wider bay in the center. This serves no practical function, since one enters the portico from the side, but the larger space emphasizes the central axis of the house.

The tall house behind the portico is massive. The brick walls are faced with a Venetian type of stucco called
marmorino,
a mixture of powdered seashells and travertine marble dust mixed
with lime. This was plastered onto the walls, then pressed with a hot iron, which made an integrally colored, shiny surface that resembles soapstone. As in most of Palladio’s villas, the stucco is incised with a masonry pattern, the joint lines here conspicuously highlighted with reddish paint. The effect is almost crude, but it strikes me as authentic. The roof is crowned by a wide dormer window whose gable creates a second, smaller pediment above the portico. On each side of the dormer are exceptionally tall chimneys with characteristically bulbous Venetian caps. In fact, despite its rural surroundings, the imposing house distinctly recalls a Venetian palazzo. This grand—almost grandiose—façade is the work of a Palladio who is less interested in chiaroscuro and history than in solemn monumentality. Like some of Michelangelo’s works, the portico of La Malcontenta conveys a sense of
terribilità
—“sheer awe.”
¹³