The Perfect House: A Journey with Renaissance Master Andrea Palladio (9 page)

The three villas—Valmarana, Gazoto, and Pisani—Palladio built after his heady Roman summer show a definite evolution, from interrupted pediment, to pediment, to full temple front. The next logical step would have been that most characteristic of Palladian features: the columned portico. However, architecture is not biology; ideas in design do not develop according to simple determinism. Palladio did explore the temple theme further—a few years after starting the Villa Pisani, he designed the Villa Thiene, a country house that incorporated a flattened temple front with giant pilasters rising the full height of the house. But in other villas he continued to use pediments without pilasters. A country house of this period that Palladio designed for Biagio Saraceno has a three-arch loggia as plain as the Villa Godi.

The symbolic use of a temple pediment on the front of a house was not, strictly speaking, Palladio’s invention. It had been suggested a century earlier by Alberti, who, while cautioning that “the pediment to a private house should not emulate the majesty of a temple in any way,” allowed that “the vestibule itself may be ennobled by having its façade heightened slightly, or by being given a dignified pediment.”
²⁹
Alberti’s suggestion was taken up by the Florentine architect Giuliano da Sangallo (the uncle of Antonio da Sangallo, who had worked with Sanmicheli), who included a complete
all’antica
temple porch with freestanding Ionic columns on the front façade of Lorenzo de’Medici’s villa in Poggio a Caiano. Completed by 1492, this is the first temple-fronted villa of the Renaissance. The porch, however, is awkwardly related to the house—it appears stuck onto the façade—and it did not inspire other architects. During the 1530s, just before Palladio started his architectural career, three prominent villas were built in the Venetian Republic. Sanmicheli, who knew da Sangallo well, built the Villa La Soranza in Castelfranco, not far from Vicenza. The simple structure (which no longer exists) had a central arcaded loggia but no pediment. Falconetto, perhaps with Cornaro’s collaboration, built a villa for the bishop of Padua inspired by the Villa Madama, but did not include a pediment either. Nor did Jacopo Sansovino, who built only one villa in the Veneto, also near Padua, an impressive, palazzolike structure surrounding an inner courtyard. So when Palladio added a temple front to the Villa Pisani, he was neither following a current fashion nor copying something he had seen elsewhere.

V
ILLA
V
ALMARANA

V
ILLA
G
AZOTO

V
ILLA
P
ISANI

 • • • 

Of all the applied arts, architecture is the least progressive—that is, while engineering and technology evolve, architecture itself, its forms and spaces, is constant. A Renaissance fireplace is not as efficient as a modern gas furnace, but a Renaissance building, judged purely architecturally, can be as good as, or even better than, a modern one. Architecture, especially great architecture, does not become obsolete. That is why Palladio looked at Bramante, and I am looking at Palladio.

When Palladio visited Rome, he experienced the antiquities both as archaeology and architecture. The Villa Pisani is a relic of a distant time, yet it is also a house in which I could imagine living. This impression is no doubt heightened by the fact that the villa is somebody’s home. In 1976, the Countess Cornelia Ferri de Lazara, a Pisani descendant, began an ambitious project to restore the architectural integrity of the house. Not only was the building in a dilapidated state, during the eighteenth century it had suffered multiple indignities such as the infilling of the arches of the loggia, which was subdivided into small rooms, the addition of a catwalk across the
sala
linking the two sides of the attic, and the crude infilling of ground-floor windows to minimize a Napoleonic fenestration tax. These
changes were undone. When the basement, which had flooded and was full of silt, was excavated, it was discovered that over the years, perhaps in an attempt to control the flooding, the ground around the exterior of the building had been raised more than two feet. With the original levels reestablished, the house regained its base, and the façades their original proportions.

Palladio’s architectural intentions have been restored, yet the house does not feel like a museum. The furnishings are, for the most part, contemporary—tasteful but unpretentious sofas and easy chairs, coffee tables, sisal mats, a Heitzmann grand piano. The rooms, while commodious, are not overwhelming. After the uniform room sizes of the Villa Godi, Palladio developed an arrangement that he would follow for the rest of his career. “There should be large, medium-sized, and small rooms,” he recommended, “one side by side with the next, so that they can be mutually useful. The small ones should be divided up to create even smaller rooms where studies or libraries could be located, as well as riding equipment and other tackle which we need every day and which would be awkward to put in rooms where one sleeps, eats, or receives guests.”
³⁰
In the Villa Pisani there is a small-medium-large suite of rooms on each side of the
sala.
The large rooms face the courtyard and are entered directly from the
sala.
One is furnished as a living room, the other as a kitchen (the kitchen was relocated here in the eighteenth century when the basement flooded). The medium-sized rooms are next, the one adjacent to the kitchen furnished with a dining table and chairs, the other used as an informal sitting room—a collection of old maps hangs on the walls. The small rooms are within the corner towers, and because they are entered directly from the loggia, probably served as antechambers or reception rooms. Unlike the other rooms, they have domed ceilings.

Several features add to the domestic atmosphere. The rooms are bathed in light. The large amounts of glass are not unusual by modern standards, but they were exceptional in sixteenth-century European houses whose “glazing” was generally oiled paper or canvas. It was only in the Venetian Republic, which led Europe in glassmaking, that glass was plentiful and relatively inexpensive.
³¹
Palladio took full advantage of this material, and provided many large leaded-glass windows, which accounts for his uniformly bright interiors. The walls of the Villa Pisani are white. With the exception of a single decorated vaulted ceiling, there are no frescoes in the rooms. As in the Villa Godi, the window niches are fitted with two little seats composed of stone slabs supported on delicate columns. The medium and large rooms have fireplaces, the small square rooms have none, suggesting that they were not used for sleeping, at least not in winter. The fireplaces are important decorative elements, with elaborate stone mantels, differently carved in each room. The interiors have a simple charm and are not so very different from those of a modern house, although the sixteen-foot ceilings of dark stained wooden beams are much taller.

Combining rooms of different sizes within a rigidly rectangular plan requires skill, all the more so when the plan also has to accommodate extraneous elements such as stairs. In the Villa Pisani, two stairs, one on each side of the
sala,
are hidden within the fabric of the walls. Palladio went to some lengths to explain why he had not bothered to provide these stairs with natural light, since they “serve only the rooms at the bottom and at the top of the house, which are used for either granaries or mezzanines.”
³²
Mezzanines, or
amezati,
were distinct from the attic spaces, and despite their name were not balconies but second-floor rooms with lower ceilings, usually used as servants’ quarters. In the Villa Pisani,
amezati
were located in the two
castello
towers. Today, these rooms, like the attic spaces, have been converted into bedrooms.

T
HE SALA OF THE
V
ILLA
P
ISANI IS A GRAND RECEPTION ROOM WITH A THIRTY-FOOT CEILING THAT RISES THE FULL HEIGHT OF THE HOUSE.

After visiting the villa I sit down on a wooden bench in the
sala
and write in my notebook. The house is absolutely still. This is a remarkable room. The overhead vaults are fully frescoed, possibly by Bernardino India, a Veronese who worked regularly with Sanmicheli, or by Francesco Torbido, a pupil of Giulio—the attribution is unclear. The walls, on the other hand, are painted white. The architectural décor consists of giant Doric pilasters with carved stone capitals and bases and a stone frieze supporting the vaults. The presence of actual, rather than frescoed, interior architecture, as well as the complicated vaulting, attests to Vettor Pisani’s magnanimous building budget. The
sala
is largely unfurnished, as it was in Palladio’s day. Nor are there any fireplaces—the cavernous space would have been impractical to heat. The absence of such domestic features, as well as the tall vaulted ceilings and the bright light, make me feel that I am outdoors. It is almost as if Palladio were underlining the difference between the domestic rooms and the grand
sala.

The doorways leading to the rooms beside the
sala
have elaborate stone surrounds and architraves that make them resemble exterior doors. It is known that the Pedemuro workshop was involved in the construction of the villa, and it is likely that Palladio himself did some of this carving. Despite Trissino’s support, and an encouraging string of commissions, he was not yet a full-fledged architect; the fees for designing two town houses and three villas over five years would hardly have supported his family. Like most Renaissance architects, Palladio needed official patronage—a secure position with an annual salary—and that seemed far in the future. For the moment, he prudently kept his day job.

 • • • 

The afternoon is coming to a close and it’s time to go. Reluctantly, I make my way to the gate, which is locked. There is a car parked next to mine, so there must be somebody still here. The small room that functions as an office is empty. I call out, but no one answers. Going around the corner, I knock on a small door, but no luck. Partway down the length of the barn, arched openings lead into an arcaded loggia. The dark space beyond is empty except for a parked minivan. Continuing along the building, I approach a second arcade. Hearing a buzzing noise from somewhere inside, I go into the dark interior. The noise is louder here, the familiar high-pitched whine of an electric table saw, an anomalous modern sound in these old surroundings. There is a light at the far end of the cavernous space. Behind a partition is a carpentry shop, or rather a musical instrument maker’s shop; a man and the young woman who earlier let me in are leaning intently over a burnished piano case. They are wearing ear-protectors and are obviously engrossed in their work. Sheepishly I ask if someone could unlock the gate.