The Perfect House: A Journey with Renaissance Master Andrea Palladio (7 page)

Palladio was following in the footsteps of quattrocento architects such as Filippo Brunelleschi, who was responsible for what is generally considered the first classical building of the Renaissance—the Ospedale degli Innocenti in Florence. Turning away from what he judged the rude disorder of Gothic, Brunelleschi went to Rome to study the monuments and adopted an elegant and spare architectural style loosely based on ancient precedents. The classical connection was later elucidated and given a theoretical underpinning by Brunelleschi’s friend Leon Battista Alberti, whose
Of Built Things
was a reworking—and updating—of Vitruvius. By the time Palladio visited Rome, Bramante and Raphael had produced bodies of work that were explicitly inspired by the ancient monuments of Rome. Or what was left of them. With notable exceptions, such as the Pantheon, most of the temples and bath buildings existed only in fragmentary form. Although several popes had begun excavating the ancient ruins during the preceding century, the remains were still largely covered by a thousand years of accumulated debris.

Palladio made his own detailed archaeological surveys using a measuring tape, a plumb line, and a circumferentor, a primitive
surveying instrument that consisted of a compass with a sighting device. He demonstrated a scholarly bent and ultimately acquired such an intimate knowledge of the ancient city that in 1554 he would publish two guidebooks, one on churches and the other on antiquities—
L’Antichità di Roma
—a standard reference that would go into more than thirty editions over the next two centuries.
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“Every great architect finds his own antiquity,” James Ackerman wisely observed.
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Palladio found his version climbing over ruins and poring over his field sketches, trying to decipher and comprehend this distant past. For the Renaissance, ancient Rome was chiefly an imagined re-creation, yet it was a potent fiction that encouraged architects to dream on a big scale. Palladio made ingenious, and sometimes fanciful, reconstructions. In the case of the Baths of Agrippa, for example, which were almost completely destroyed, he portrayed the building in frontal view and cross section. Although these drawings were a serious attempt to portray “what might have been,” the powerful, vigorous images are as much a reflection of Palladio’s architectural interests as they are of ancient Rome.

He made precise drawings of capitals, friezes, and entablatures, meticulously dimensioning each torus and fillet. He copied details. He sketched moldings, either drawing them by eye or modeling their outlines with a thin strip of lead that he used as a drawing template. The purpose of this activity was twofold. Drawing, which involves long periods of intense scrutiny, internalizes the subject (in a way photography does not begin to approximate); Palladio was schooling his eye and trying to better understand what he was seeing. He was also compiling a visual lexicon to which he could refer when he was working. Classical buildings of the type that Palladio designed depended on numerous details, especially moldings—around doors and
windows, surrounding fireplaces, at dados and cornices. His field sketches provided an invaluable catalog of models.

As an archaeologist, Palladio was concerned with accuracy, but as a designer he was looking for beauty. Describing the octagonal Baptistery of Constantine at St. John Lateran, an early Christian building in Rome, he wrote: “In my opinion this temple is modern and made from the spoils of ancient buildings, but, because it is beautifully designed and has ornaments that are exquisitely carved in a great variety of patterns that the architect could make use of on many occasions, I thought it essential to include it with the ancient buildings, particularly because everybody supposes that it is ancient.”
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The entrance loggia to the Baptistery was a long space with an apse at each end, which probably provided the model for the loggia at the Villa Pisani. Another reconstructed plan, also drawn during the 1541 visit, shows the Baths of Titus and includes a vaulted cruciform hall that reappears, in reduced form, as the Pisani
sala.
The point is not that Palladio was copying ancient precedents, but rather that in the process of documenting and re-creating the past he was discovering solutions for the present.

Rome also provided Palladio with the opportunity, no less important, to see the work of his contemporaries. These included Sanmicheli, Giulio, and da Sangallo, as well as their predecessors, Bramante and Raphael. Bramante had died in 1514 and Raphael in 1520, so their designs were, in a sense, somewhat old-fashioned. Yet Palladio was drawn to their architecture. He was definitely a provincial—a hayseed in the big city—but he was not swept up by the latest trends. Bramante’s bold rustication impressed him; so did his unusual exterior stair in the Cortile del Belvedere, whose semicircular (concave) steps rise to a circular landing, whence a second set of (convex) semicircular stair continue into the building. This and the succeeding
Roman visits were a crucial part of Palladio’s architectural training; Raphael had worked under Bramante, and Giulio under Raphael, but Palladio had no master to emulate. Like Michelangelo, he made his own way.

Trissino, who continued to take a lively interest in Palladio’s architectural education, introduced him to the most ambitious—if unfinished—private building project in Rome, a villa designed by Raphael for Cardinal Giulio de’Medici, later Pope Clement VII. The palatial retreat, today known as the Villa Madama, was Raphael’s idealized vision of an ancient Roman villa, and his design included garden loggias, terraces, water features, and an open-air theater. The centerpiece was to be a circular entrance court more than one hundred feet in diameter. Work started in 1518, and when Raphael died two years later, the vast complex was only half-finished. It was damaged during the Sack of Rome, repaired, but never completed. When Palladio saw it, the building had been standing unoccupied for two decades, the walls of the incomplete court forming a great semicircle, the immense apses and unfinished colonnades as forsaken and overgrown as their ancient models.

The Villa Madama made a strong impression on Palladio, who drew a measured plan of what had been built. He also must have copied details, for Raphael’s rusticated basement windows reappeared in the basement of the Villa Pisani. In a more general way, the Villa Madama showed Palladio how a modern building could be based on the study and creative interpretation of ancient precedents. Raphael, whose client was one of the most powerful men in Rome, was inspired by the luxurious pleasure-villas of the late Roman Republic. These sprawling complexes survived in ruins such as those of Hadrian’s villa at Tivoli, or in ancient texts, notably Pliny the Younger’s detailed description of his seaside villa at Laurentum. Such
pleasure-villas were characterized by a variety of partially enclosed outdoor spaces: atria, courtyards, porticoes, loggias, airy colonnades, sunny terraces, walled gardens with pools. The Villa Madama, even in its unfinished state, includes not only the semicircular forecourt but also garden walls and a garden terrace built above giant semicircular recesses that overlook a fishpond. These structures are not part of the house proper, but amplify its architectural impact, extending the villa into the landscape.

The idea of enlarging the architectural presence of a house by means of walls, garden structures, and outbuildings must have appealed to Palladio, who was familiar with Pliny’s writing. But the Roman imperial villas and the Villa Madama were much larger than anything Palladio was asked to build—Raphael’s circular courtyard alone could accommodate the entire Villa Pisani with room to spare. So Palladio turned to a passage of Vitruvius that described the typical Roman country house with “an atrium surrounded by a paved portico.” At the Villa Pisani, Palladio enlarged the atrium into a courtyard. His design for the porticoes was wonderfully simple: a continuous shed roof resting on a back wall and supported by columns. The structures were not completed until the 1560s, and it is unclear whether they followed the simple design that Palladio sketched in an early plan, the more elaborate design illustrated in
Quattro libri,
or some modified version. They were, in any case, impressive—Vasari singled them out as “most beautiful.”
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The porticoes enclosed a formal, ceremonial space. Despite Palladio’s claim that the courtyard was for “farm use,” it was hardly a barnyard with piles of manure, rooting pigs, and clucking chickens. A 1569 plan of the Pisani estate that hangs in the villa shows a second courtyard that is across the road from the villa and is obviously intended for agricultural use.
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The stables and storage rooms around the formal
cortile
were for the convenience
of the immediate household. The surface of the
cortile
was probably gravel, and it would have resembled a piazza, while the porticoes provided a protected space around the edge, just like the arcades of many Vicentine towns. The introduction of such urban features into a country estate is another aspect of Palladio’s delicate balance of sophistication and rusticity, of bringing city people—and city life—into the country.

When Palladio designed features like the
cortile,
he did so entirely on paper; Renaissance architects sometimes built wooden models of their designs, but only for large buildings such as churches. Palladio was a particularly able draftsman—neat, skillful, precise.
^III
Drawings were always made in ink since pencils were unknown, and graphite and graphite holders were not invented until 1565.
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Sometimes he started with a light underdrawing using a crayon or a piece of metallic lead. His chief drawing instruments were wooden rulers, set squares, metal dividers, and compasses. He sketched and drew with a quill pen, using purplish black iron gall ink made from oak apples; today, as the iron has oxidized, the ink has turned various shades of sepia and brown.
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There was no such thing as tracing paper. Palladio drew on heavy, hand-laid, watermarked paper that came in octavo sizes—about sixteen by twenty inches. Paper was not particularly rare or expensive, but he was frugal in its use and most of his drawings are small, no larger than a modern sheet of typing paper. The sheets tend to be crammed with drawings. He once covered a small sheet with no fewer than twenty plan variations for a palazzo.
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The freehand ink sketches are only postage stamp–size but include details such as staircases. In one variation
the stair is oval; in another, circular; in the third, rectangular; and the
sala
changes from a square to a rectangle to a cross. Slightly larger-scale plans include scribbled dimensions and details such as fireplaces. Palladio often made such preliminary sketches on the backs of his old drawings; the palazzo plans are on the back of a sheet containing a façade and cross section of a Roman temple.

Four surviving drawings by Palladio of the Villa Pisani offer an extraordinary glimpse into his working method. He recorded his first idea on the back of a sheet containing a preliminary version of the Villa Valmarana.
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The lightly drawn, freehand Pisani sketch is a floor plan, and shows the thicknesses
of the walls as well as the location of doors, windows, and fireplaces. There are four rooms on each side of a rectangular
sala
with apsidal ends; an
X
marks the cross-vaults of the ceiling. The most striking feature of the plan is a colonnaded semicircular loggia cut into the front of the house. Historians believe that this unusual device, called a hemicycle, was inspired by either the Villa Madama’s truncated circular courtyard or by Bramante’s Cortile del Belvedere, which Palladio had also seen in Rome. His version differs significantly from Raphael’s in its smaller size, its function (as the entrance to a house), and in being roofed.

P
ALLADIO’S FIRST SKETCH OF THE
V
ILLA
P
ISANI, 1541
(RIBA, XVII/2
verso
)

Palladio’s sketch is striking for its symmetry—that is, one side
of the plan is a mirror image of the other. “Rooms must be distributed at either side of the entrance and the hall,” he wrote, “and one must ensure that those on the right correspond and are equal to those on the left.”
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He went on to glibly explain that this was desirable for structural reasons, which is not actually true. In fact, like all Renaissance architects, Palladio favored symmetry for aesthetic reasons (and not only in plans, façades were symmetrical, too). “Look at Nature’s own works,” Alberti had pointed out, “if someone had one huge foot, or one hand vast and the other tiny, he would look deformed.”
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Palladio also often made analogies between buildings and the human body, once pointing out that “just as our blessed God has arranged our own members so that the most beautiful are in positions most exposed to view and the more unpleasant are hidden, we too when building should place the most important and prestigious parts in full view and the less beautiful in locations concealed as far from our eyes as possible.”
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Thus, in the Pisani plan, the “less beautiful” stairs are hidden in a leftover space behind the hemicycle.