The Perfect House: A Journey with Renaissance Master Andrea Palladio (8 page)

P
ALLADIO’S DRAFTED PLAN, 1541
(RIBA, XVII/18
verso
)

Palladio obviously made this hurriedly scrawled sketch for his own use, but the next surviving plan was probably intended for his client, since it is carefully drafted.
²⁰
Drafted drawings required two steps. A contemporary of Palladio described the process: “For the fair copy of buildings we draw the line with an ivory nib, and then with a pen.”
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The ivory or ebony nib was used to score invisible guidelines into the paper. There are signs that Palladio frequently modified these ghostly preliminary drawings before the final inking. The ink lines were drawn using a ruler; decorative elements on façades such as wreaths, statues, or rustication were drawn freehand. Palladio often applied a diluted ink wash to accentuate the thickness of the walls in plans, to pick out loggias and windows in elevations, or to add shadows.
The results are drawings of great clarity—and striking severity. Rooms are rarely labeled and furniture is never shown, though key room dimensions are included; there are never titles and rarely notes; there are no decorative borders. Occasionally, Palladio added a scale bar.
^IV
These do not appear to be construction drawings in the modern sense. They may have been shown to the foreman to establish the main dimensions of the foundations, but it is likely that illiterate artisans depended on verbal instructions and sketchy overall directions. In any case, such drawings were too precious—and fragile—to leave on the building site.

The design of the Villa Pisani was considerably simplified in the drafted plan. Palladio changed the apsidal ends of the
sala
to small niches and reduced the number of rooms from eight to six. At the same time, he added a square vaulted space, a sort of large vestibule, between the loggia and the
sala.
The sequence of small, medium, and large rooms, each with a different proportion (a small rectangle, a square, a large rectangle), was an exact copy of the arrangement in Trissino’s villa at Cricoli.

The third surviving plan, likewise drafted in ink, is drawn at a smaller scale and includes not only the house but the entire
cortile,
with columned porticoes on two sides and a wall across the end.
²²
Palladio drew the river with fanciful curlicues (and redundantly labeled it
fiume
). The house plan is further refined. In the previous versions, the rooms on each side of the
sala
are simply placed one behind the other; now the largest rooms are ingeniously turned ninety degrees so that their long side faces the courtyard. Presumably at Pisani’s request, the public rooms have been drastically simplified: the
sala
has lost its apses, and the square vaulted vestibule has been entirely eliminated. On the other hand, the hemicycle is now more elaborate, with a semicircle of columns defining the Bramantesque stair.

P
ALLADIO’S SITE PLAN, 1541
(RIBA, XVI/7)

P
ALLADIO’S FOURTH PLAN WITH A FRONT VIEW, 1542
(RIBA, XVII/17)

Palladio is not finished yet. Pisani must have demanded larger rooms, judging from the fourth surviving plan.
²³
Palladio adds complicated corner niches in the smallest rooms, making them hexagonal in plan. In the process of modifying the room sizes, he reconfigures the layout of the
sala,
making it T-shaped with a cross-vault in the center. He must believe the planning process is at an end, for now—and only now—he turns his attention to the exterior of the house. This sheet combines the floor plan with a drawing of the entrance façade—façade above, plan below. Two
castello
towers frame the hemicycle, which is overlooked by a large thermal window that brings light into the
sala.

This drawing corresponds exactly to what was built in all respects but one: Palladio took out the hemicycle and replaced it with a rectangular, three-arch loggia. We do not know exactly when this change occurred. Since no drawing of the plan with the redesigned loggia has come to light, some historians conjecture that the change was made after construction had begun (the area beneath the loggia and the hall has no basement, so it is impossible to verify if the foundations were altered).
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The shape of the roof on this side of the house is complicated, as if it were the result of a last-minute alteration. What prompted such a drastic revision? It has been suggested that the late change was demanded by the client, and may even have been made without Palladio’s authorization.
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But why would Vettor Pisani, who had approved the hemicycle in several preliminary versions, suddenly change his mind? Surely not to save money, for he was
fabulously wealthy, and the final loggia with its complicated apsidal ends and real stone facing—not a plaster facsimile—was hardly inexpensive. In any case, it is unlikely that the young nobleman second-guessed his architect on aesthetic matters.

It is not unusual for a novice designer to fall in love with an idea, only to suddenly discover—often late in the day—that he has made a mistake. Palladio’s design process for the Villa Pisani, as shown by the four surviving drawings, was one of both progressive refinement and trial and error. He may have come to the conclusion that while Raphael’s hemicycle looked impressive in a palatial structure overlooking the Tiber, it was ill-suited
to a relatively small country house on the tiny Guà. I think he was right. His fussy little hemicycle, with its niches and columns, risked not only looking pretentious but also detracting from the
sala,
which had become the focus of his design. The hemicycle had to go. (And it never returned; while Palladio sometimes incorporated a hemicycle as a garden feature, he never again used it in a villa.)

T
HE FINAL PLAN AND COURTYARD FAÇADE FROM
Q
UATTRO LIBRI

Palladio replaced the hemicycle with a more conventional rectangular loggia, but couldn’t resist adding apsidal ends recycled from his first sketch-plan. Since the shallow loggia required less depth than the hemicycle, he enlarged the
sala,
adding a short arm and turning the T-shaped room into a cruciform. On the exterior, he returned to a theme that he had begun to explore in two earlier villas. The Villa Valmarana, which still stands, is a solid little building covered by a simple gable roof. Palladio transformed the gable into a schematic pediment—the shallow triangular gable of an ancient temple—by outlining the eave with a molding that became a short, interrupted entablature cornice, similar to one he had seen in Rome on an ancient temple.
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(Or at least that was the way he drew the façade—the builders of the villa left out the cornice, just as they did not follow his complicated design for the window surrounds.) In the Villa Gazoto the pediment motif is more pronounced. The façade, modeled on a palazzo by Bramante, is divided into seven bays separated by flattened columns, or pilasters. The three central bays have arches opening into a loggia, above which is a large triangular dormer. It is perched rather tenuously on top of the simplified frieze that extends the full length of the house, but it is unmistakably a pediment.

Palladio designed the pilasters of the Villa Gazoto according to the rules laid down by Vitruvius. The so-called architectural orders, whose origin is Greek, are the foundation of classical
architecture. The main elements of an order are the entablature, or beam, and the supporting columns. The entablature has three parts: the architrave, or lowest section; the frieze in the middle; and the cornice immediately under the eaves. The column consists of a base (often defined by moldings), a shaft (which can be plain or fluted), and a capital, or headpiece. Vitruvius described three orders—Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian—whose chief distinguishing feature was their capital: Doric capitals had simple moldings; Ionic capitals had volutes, or spirals, like the horns of a mountain ram; Corinthian capitals incorporated stylized acanthus leaves. Alberti identified an additional ancient Roman order that came to be known as Composite since it combined Ionic volutes and Corinthian leaves, while Serlio added the Tuscan order (a sort of simplified Doric), which Vitruvius had mentioned but did not describe. The five orders were often given human attributes: Doric was considered manly, Ionic womanly, and Corinthian maidenly. The undecorated Tuscan order was often used for utilitarian buildings, elegant Ionic in houses, rich Corinthian in ceremonial buildings, and Composite when an extra degree of luxury was called for. Palladio favored Ionic in the porticoes of his villas and rarely used Composite columns, but that is what he gave Gazoto, who had become wealthy speculating in salt in Treviso and probably wanted a showy house.

Palladio believed that in using a temple pediment on a house, he was following a Roman custom. “The ancients also employed [pediments] in their buildings, as one can see from the remains of temples and other public buildings,” he wrote, “it is very likely that they took this invention and its forms from private buildings, that is, from houses.”
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He was careful to write “likely,” since, in fact, there was no hard evidence for his supposition. Characteristically, he also saw practical advantages to
pediments. “In all the buildings for farms and also for some of those in the city I have built a tympanum [the triangular panel inside the pediment] on the front façade where the principal doors are,” he explained, “because tympanums accentuate the entrance of the house and contribute greatly to the grandeur and magnificence of the building, thus making the front part more imposing than the others; furthermore, they are perfectly suited to the insignia or arms of the patrons, which are usually placed in the middle of façades.”
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Gazoto, being a commoner, had no armorial crest.

Palladio took the Villa Gazoto’s three-arch loggia and pediment as his model for the Villa Pisani, but instead of the Composite order, he used the plainer Doric, and added heavy rustication to the piers. He had already tried this motif, which he adapted from Sanmicheli’s Verona city gates, in the portal of the Palazzo Civena. He placed the Pisani coat of arms in the center of the tympanum. At first glance the loggia appears unexceptional; however, Palladio was not merely repeating an earlier solution. He replaced the schematic frieze with a full Doric entablature, including an architrave, a frieze with triglyphs and metopes, and a cornice. The result is a complete representation of a Roman temple: columns, entablature, pediment. Or rather the ghostly shadow of a temple front, since the flattened pilasters and stylized capitals almost disappear into the heavy rustication. It is as if Palladio was not quite sure that he was doing the right thing. Yet this tentative design marks a historic moment, not only in his architectural development but in the history of Western architecture. It already holds the promise of numerous English country houses and Georgian plantation houses. All colonnaded entrance porticoes and pedimented house fronts share an architectural DNA that can be traced to the Villa Pisani.