The Perfect House: A Journey with Renaissance Master Andrea Palladio (6 page)

She smiles. “Come in. You can go wherever you like.”

The gate is at the edge of a compound whose centerpiece is
a large square lawn. Palladio referred to this space as a
cortile,
or courtyard. It was originally bounded on three sides by columned porticoes, which were destroyed in the Second World War. Today the house encloses one side of the courtyard, and a long, two-story stone barn the other.

I take a turn around the
cortile.
Reaching the far side, I look back at the house. The white stucco is freshly painted and sparkles in the sun. The grand building is almost as wide as the Villa Godi, with a similar red-clay-tile roof, but the resemblance ends there. The design is both simpler and more complicated. Simpler, because from this side the house resembles a shoe box with a hipped roof that slopes on four sides. The fenestration reflects the same tripartite organization as the Godi—a basement, the main floor, and an attic—although there are fewer windows and they are equally spaced, which gives the façade a calmer, more considered appearance. A broad stair leads to a central door. The complexity arises from several subtle refinements. The basement is partially buried, lowering the main floor and reducing the height of the house. Rugged stonework frames the small basement windows as well as the corners of the house. At the level of the main floor, about six feet above the ground, is a horizontal stone molding called a water table since its function is to throw water away from the foundations. It is echoed by a second stone molding at the level of the windowsills. The two horizontal bands, which girdle the house, give it the appearance of sitting on a base. They also accentuate the horizontal proportions of the façade, whose most distinctive feature is a large arched window directly above the door. The arched window, a semicircle divided vertically into three unequal parts, is a thermal window similar to the one that was originally in the Villa Godi.

I walk around to the side of the house facing the river. Palladio considered riverside locations to be advantageous for villas, “because the produce can be carried cheaply by boat to the city at any time, and it will satisfy the needs of the household and the animals; this will also make it very cool in the summer and will be a lovely sight, and is both useful and pleasing in that one can irrigate the grounds, the gardens, and the orchards, which are the soul and delight of the estate.”
¹
Unfortunately, the lovely sight is long gone. The view of the river is obstructed by a tall brick wall—a counterpart to the grassy embankment—built to contain spring floods. The Guà is one of many rivers that flows across the Veneto plain, fed by the melting snows of the Alps. In the process of controlling the level of water in their lagoon, the Venetians became master hydrologists whose canal and river system was the principal means of communication in the
terraferma.
The cinquecento owners of the villa traveled to their estate by boat—across the Venetian lagoon, up the Adige River, finally reaching the Guà. So, just as in many American plantation houses in Virginia, a Veneto villa’s front door faced the river.

P
ALLADIO’S SIGNATURE THERMAL WINDOW DOMINATES THE REAR OF THE STARKLY BEAUTIFUL
V
ILLA
P
ISANI.

T
HE RUSTICATED TEMPLE FRONT OF THE LOGGIA IS SURMOUNTED BY THE
P
ISANI FAMILY COAT OF ARMS.

The centerpiece of the front façade is a three-arch loggia made of heavily rusticated stone. Rustication refers to stonework that is rudely chiseled, and laid with deep V-shaped joints, to create a rough and coarse texture. This loggia is as massive and imposing as one of Sanmicheli’s monumental city gates, an effect that is accentuated by the flanking towers that resemble a medieval
castello.
Although the Villa Pisani, like the Villa Godi, was built on top of an older house, these towers were not a holdover from the past but were designed by Palladio.
^I
,
2

I go up a flight of semicircular steps and enter the loggia. No
frescoes this time, but the long narrow space is vaulted, and at each end there is a large apse, or curved niche. It is a curious solution and not, to my eye, an altogether successful one. The two curved ends emphasize the length of the loggia, drawing attention away from what should be the main focus: the front doors. The tall doors lead directly into the
sala.
And what a
sala!
The splendid room rises more than thirty feet, and extends all the way through the house, a distance of about thirty-five feet. This is a much more complex space than the
sala
of the Villa Godi. The ceiling is not flat but vaulted, and the plan is not rectangular but cruciform, the four barrel vaults of the unequal arms intersecting in a great groin vault in the middle. Light streams in through the thermal window on the far wall; the two arms of the cruciform likewise have thermal windows, which are indirectly lit by skylights in the roof; the fourth thermal window, on the loggia side, is blank.

When Palladio wrote
Quattro libri,
he devoted two chapters to villas, distinguishing the country houses of “noble Venetians” from those of “gentlemen of the
terraferma
” such as Girolamo Godi. The Venetian chapter opened with the Bagnolo house, home of “the magnificent Counts Vettor, Marco, and Daniele, the Pisani brothers.”
³
The Pisanis, Palladio’s first Venetian clients, belonged to one of the city’s leading families. Merchants and landowners, they had been an important presence since the twelfth century, and had long been members of the Gran Consiglio, the governing body of the Republic. The branch of the family that commissioned Palladio was known as the Pisani del Banco, since its members specialized in banking. The brothers were newcomers to Bagnolo. Their father had bought the estate, which had been confiscated from a turncoat Vicentine nobleman, after the war. The house had been badly damaged during the fighting, and in 1542, on the occasion of
Vettor’s betrothal, they decided to replace it with a grander structure.

The Pisanis’ status on the five-hundred-acre estate (soon to be expanded to fourteen hundred acres, chiefly devoted to growing rice) was that of feudal lords, with all the accompanying privileges. Their exalted position was reflected in Palladio’s design. The
sala
was not only a social area, it was where the Counts received their tenant farmers (who owed their lords one day of labor a week), where they listened to petitions and grievances, dispensed justice, and presided over public ceremonies. Hence the imposing vaulted space that resembles a Roman basilica. It is likely that the frankly monumental entrance loggia and the twin
castello
towers—age-old symbols of the feudal aristocracy—were also chosen because Palladio considered them suitable for the residence of such “magnificent” clients.

Vettor Pisani was the oldest brother and head of the family. He was only twenty-one when he commissioned Palladio, whom he had met three years earlier in Padua while a student at the university.
⁴
Vettor was an unusual young man, who had not yet reached his majority (which in Venice was twenty-five years) but clearly knew his own mind. While he was presumably acquainted with Sanmicheli and Serlio, he chose an unknown and relatively inexperienced architect. For Palladio, a novice from the
terraferma
hinterland, the Pisani commission represented a remarkable opportunity.

Palladio was lucky. Although he missed the golden age of the Venetian Republic by more than a century, in some ways he could hardly have lived in better times for an architect. For hundreds of years Venice had been a maritime powerhouse, the commercial intermediary between western and central Europe, and the Middle East and the Orient. During the fifteenth
century, the island city emerged as one of the important land powers of the Italian peninsula, holding sway over an area that stretched as far west as Bergamo, northeast into Friuli, and south to the Po Valley. The chief reason to conquer these territories was to control the overland trade routes from Venice to northern Europe, but starting in the 1540s, exactly the time that Palladio embarked on his architectural career, the role of the
terraferma
changed. Wealthy Venetians began to invest heavily in mainland agriculture—land reclamation, irrigation canals, and drainage schemes. Historians do not agree about the exact reason for this newfound interest, but it was probably a combination of factors. Thanks to the growth of the Turkish empire, the discovery of alternative trade routes, and the growing naval power of the Baltic states, England, and the Low Countries, Venice was no longer dominant in international trade, and wealthy Venetians needed new vehicles for their investments. As Venice grew, the demand for food increased and so did its price, and the flat, rich lands of the
terraferma
—drained and irrigated—were ideally suited to agriculture.
⁵
Land also provided a good hedge against inflation. Finally, there is no doubt that the merchant elite of Venice were attracted by the image of spending part of each year on country estates in suitably grand villas.

 • • • 

Palladio began the Villa Pisani only five years after the Villa Godi, yet its design is far more ambitious and accomplished than his first commission—and much more original. The most important experience a beginning architect can have is to build, for it is on the building site that he sees his ideas realized, gains self-confidence, and learns from his mistakes. The prominence of the Villa Godi, and the continuing patronage of Count Trissino, quickly led to other Vicentine commissions. The first was a large town house for the Civena family. The
Palazzo Civena, today a nursing home, is a handsome two-story structure, facing the Retrone River, with a covered arcade at street level for pedestrians.
^II
The following year, the Da Monte family likewise commissioned a residence in town, a small building with a rusticated base and a second floor with a central
serliana.
These two commissions were followed by a pair of villas on the outskirts of Vicenza, one for Giuseppe and Antonio Valmarana, cousins who had inherited an estate at Vigardolo outside Vicenza, the other for Tadeo Gazoto, a merchant who owned land in the nearby village of Bertesina. Neither house was as big or as prominent as the Villa Godi, but both would offer Palladio an opportunity to take his architecture in a new direction. The catalyst for this development was, again, Giangiorgio Trissino.

In the summer of 1541, Palladio accompanied the Count on a two-month visit to Rome. Rome was the site of the greatest concentration of antiquities in Italy: the crumbling remains of the Roman Forum, triumphal arches and temples, the hulking remains of several Imperial baths, the Colosseum, and the best preserved of the ancient monuments, the Pantheon, an enormous circular temple capped by a great dome. The importance to Palladio of experiencing these sites firsthand was immense. Later, it was common for budding architects to visit Rome, but in the sixteenth century this was not the case, particularly for Venetians. Although Palladio had studied Vitruvius and other secondary sources, and visited antiquities in Padua and Verona, the architecture of Rome was a revelation. “I set myself the task of investigating the remains of the ancient buildings that have survived despite the ravages of time and the cruelty of the barbarians,”
he recollected, “and finding them much worthier of study than I had first thought, I began to measure all their parts minutely and with the greatest care.”
⁶
His admiration for Roman architecture was unbounded: “It will be obvious to anyone not entirely devoid of common sense that the methods by which the ancients built were excellent because the ruins of so many magnificent buildings survive in and outside Italy after such a vast amount of time and so many changes and falls of empires; because of this we have absolute proof of the extraordinary virtue of the Romans which otherwise, perhaps, nobody would believe in.”
⁷