The Perfect House: A Journey with Renaissance Master Andrea Palladio (25 page)

P
LAN OF
V
ILLA
E
MO, FROM
Q
UATTRO LIBRI

The large room on the west side of the
sala
is frescoed with scenes from the life of Hercules. Like all the rooms, it has a flat ceiling supported by closely spaced beams. Next is a small room with a proportionately lower ceiling, decorated with grotesques. This anteroom leads to a square room whose decorative theme is the arts. This room is assumed to have belonged to the original owner, since his portrait is included in a lunette over the door. Palladio’s client, Leonardo Emo, is also called Leonardo the Younger, to distinguish him from his illustrious grandfather. The formidable Leonardo the Elder was a victorious general in the war, governor of the province of Friuli,
podestà
(mayor) of Verona, and the moving force behind the agricultural development of the Trevigiana. He reclaimed land, dug canals, and built mills. He also introduced the cultivation of
granturco
—corn—recently brought from America, which replaced millet as the Venetian staple and, incidentally, led to the invention of polenta. At the age of sixty-two he retired to his estate at Fanzolo. When he died, he left half of the farm to his namesake and grandson, Leonardo, then seven, who had been living with him since his own father had died. Twenty years later, in 1559, Leonardo commissioned Palladio to design a new country house.

A
THRESHING FLOOR LEADS UP TO THE SIMPLE
D
ORIC PORTICO OF THE
V
ILLA
E
MO.

It is always interesting to speculate how a client chooses an architect, whether by a social connection, a recommendation, or a chance encounter. In this case the connection was familial: Leonardo the Younger’s mother, Andrianna, was the sister of Francesco Badoer. Since Leonardo was still only twenty-seven—one year beyond his majority—it is possible that his mother not only recommended Palladio but also played a role in the building process. If so, she was a better client than Lucietta Badoer, for Palladio delivered a flawless design. As so often happened, the house was built on the occasion of a marriage—a particularly propitious marriage; Leonardo was betrothed to Cornalia Grimani, a member of a most eminent Venetian family and the direct descendant of a famous doge. Hence the new villa had to proclaim the Emos’ own distinguished heritage, not least Leonardo’s grandfather’s military exploits. This may explain the soldierly appearance of the house, and the martial atmosphere of the
sala
with its war trophies, mailed fists, and manly themes. At the same time, a marriage was a joyful occasion, and Zelotti introduced festive motifs such as the gay floral decorations and the grape arbor in the entrance vestibule. The
west rooms were for Leonardo, the east side was for Cornalia, the love story of Venus and Adonis forming a pendant to Hercules, and the myth of Jupiter and Io balancing the Arts. In the first room, a gilded bust of Venus—perhaps also a likeness of Cornalia—looks down from above the door. Distracting loud sounds come from a television monitor in the corner of the cavernous room. It is playing a video recording about the villa, and showing a fireworks display. The flickering little image on the screen is a paltry thing compared to Zelotti’s magnificent frescoes.

A small room decorated with grotesques leads to a corner room that serves as the ticket office. An elderly woman sits at a table. I bid her good-bye—this is my second visit in two days—and step outside.

The Emo portico is impressive. It rises the full height of the house, including the attic—about thirty feet. The ceiling, like that of the
sala,
consists of deep wooden coffers. The four—only four—giant columns across the front have puzzled scholars since Bertotti-Scamozzi, for they are Doric but with a plain Tuscan entablature, and their proportions and intercolumniation are neither exactly Doric nor Tuscan. Once more, Palladio is bending the rules. In any event, this is the simplest order of any of his villa porticoes, and it gives the house a moving, austere dignity. The walls of the loggia are richly frescoed with corresponding columns and frescoed door and window frames, draped with festoons of flowers. Zelotti’s cheerful depictions of gods and goddesses, including Ceres, the goddess of plenty, soften Palladio’s severe architecture.

In place of the usual monumental stair, the Villa Emo has a broad ramp. Although Sansovino used a gently ramped entrance at the Villa Garzoni, ramps were uncommon in Veneto country houses, and the purpose of the Emo ramp has been a matter
of conjecture. One historian has suggested that a ramp made it easier to roll casks or drag bundles into the house; another has surmised that the south-facing ramp was used for drying newly threshed grain; yet another guesses that it was an equestrian ramp, allowing riders to dismount at the front door.
⁵
None of these explanations is convincing; kitchens and cellars were in the basement, not on the main floor, and the flat landing halfway up the ramp would be superfluous for both drying grain and for riding. I think the ramp was intended for entering the house on foot, and was another of Palladio’s continuing experiments with ceremonial entrances. After trying ramped stairs in the Villa Cornaro, he built a true ramp at Emo, which both complements the villa’s hard, Roman appearance and provides a particularly regal way of ascending to the portico.

At the foot of the ramp is a large paved area that is usually referred to as a threshing floor. Palladio recommended that threshing floors should be close enough to a villa so that the work could be overseen, but he also specified that they “must not be too close to the owner’s house because of the dust.”
⁶
The Emo threshing floor seems a little close, on the other hand the paved area also serves as a grand entranceway leading up to, and visually balancing, the wide ramp.

The arcaded wings are much longer than those of the Villa Barbaro and were intended uniquely for farm functions. Built in the form of
barchesse,
they perfectly evoke Palladio’s ideal of farm buildings in close proximity to the gentleman’s house. “The covered outbuildings for items belonging to the farm should be built for the produce and animals and connected to the owner’s house in such a way that he can go everywhere under cover so that neither the rain nor the blazing summer sun would bother him as he goes to supervise his business; this arrangement will also be of the greatest use for storing wood under cover and the infinite variety of other objects belonging to the farm that would be destroyed by the rain and sun,” he wrote, adding almost offhandedly, “besides which these porticoes are extremely attractive.”
⁷
And so they are. The arcades recall a cloister, the monastic effect heightened by the simplicity of the design: no
mascherone,
no keystones over the arches, and simple stone imposts. The flanking
barchesse
serve as foils to the only classical element of the entire house, the elevated portico, whose four columns support a simple entablature and pediment. The tympanum contains figural decoration: two winged victories holding a shield bearing the Emo coat of arms. Otherwise, the front has the same hard simplicity as the rear.

V
ILLA
E
MO

T
HE BARCHESSA OF THE
V
ILLA
E
MO PROVIDED A PROTECTED OUTDOOR SPACE FOR WORKING, UNLOADING WAGONS, AND STORING FARM IMPLEMENTS.

Palladio’s description of the Villa Emo in
Quattro libri
is terse, only seven lines. Indeed, he has less to say about this house than about almost any of the others, and although he mentions the back garden—and Zelotti’s frescoes—he is more closemouthed than usual about his own intentions. Yet his very brevity and the beautifully spare layout of the page are revealing. Emo is like a quickly drawn sketch, its basic elements distilled from two decades of practice, nothing extraneous allowed to interfere with the essence of the idea. This is the work of a confident master in full possession of his powers. In many ways, the Villa Emo appeals to me most of all the Palladio villas. It is neither a retreat nor a
villa suburbana,
but a true farm. Commodity, firmness, and delight are in perfect balance; truly, nothing can be added,
nothing taken away. The relationship between the arcades and the house is subtly controlled by the two perfectly proportioned dovecote towers, which emphasize the predominance of the central block. There is not even a hint of grandiosity; instead the sober architecture is sublime, calm, dignified. It is also extremely simple. Like Beethoven during his so-called third period, Palladio’s full command of his art allowed him to achieve his aims with utterly uncomplicated means. (In the last decade of his life, he developed a rich and ornate style, but that was after he stopped building villas.) In the Villa Emo he returned to the minimalist classicism of his youth, further enhanced by his profound knowledge of antiquity. Rather than simply mimic classical forms, however, he did something more subtle, and more affecting: he evoked an intangible whiff of the Roman past, the remembered fragrance of a distant time.

Leonardo Emo, who never became a soldier but served the Republic as an administrator in banking and public finance, clearly loved this house.
⁸
He died at only fifty-four in one of the great plagues that decimated the Veneto at the end of the sixteenth century. In his will he had taken the unusual step of authorizing his wife to dispose of any of his property if the need arose, “But I beg that no part of the villa in Fanzolo be sold.”
^II
,
9

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In 1565, Zelotti completed the frescoes, and Leonardo and Cornalia were married. The 1560s saw Palladio’s practice expand, finally, to Venice. His first Venetian commission was modest enough. The abbot of the Benedictine religious order, whose church and monastery were on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore
opposite the Piazzetta di San Marco, asked him to complete an unfinished refectory and its vestibule. Palladio added lofty vaults and thermal windows, creating a dramatic setting for a painting by Veronese. The severe, white space impressed Vasari, who met Palladio in Venice in 1566, and thought the refectory “very large and most beautiful.”
¹⁰
At about the same time the order of Lateran canons commissioned Palladio to enlarge the convent of Santa Maria della Carità (today the Accademia di Belle Arti). For this large project, Palladio designed something unusual: “I endeavored to make this house like those of the ancients.”
¹¹
The new convent was based on his reconstruction of a Roman town house, with a Corinthian atrium ringed by colossal Composite columns, connected to a three-story cloister and a refectory. It is not clear exactly how much of this ambitious scheme was realized since only a few fragments, including one side of the cloister and a splendid spiral staircase, survived a 1630 fire. The first two stories of the cloister are open arcades (today glazed), with half columns—Ionic over Doric; the third, which contained the monks’ cells, is enclosed and has flat Corinthian pilasters. The beautifully built arcades are unplastered brick with stone trim—these are the brick columns that so impressed Sir Henry Wotton. The effect is at once sensuous and severe. Goethe, who saw the Carità in 1786 during his tour of Italy, revisited the cloister several times and considered it the best of Palladio’s buildings. “The funniest thing is the way I expound all this to my hired servant,” he wrote in his diary, “because when you’re full of a thing, you can’t stop talking about it, and you keep looking for some new angle from which to show how wonderful it is.”
¹²