The Perfect House: A Journey with Renaissance Master Andrea Palladio

Praise for
The Perfect House

“Rybczynski learned firsthand what made Palladio’s houses so attractive, so imitated, so perfect—and so could you.”

—The Boston Globe

“Insightful, deft . . . an easy-to-follow tour of Palladio’s greatest legacy.”

—The Seattle Times

“[A] wonderfully informative and evocative guide to both the elegant rooms of Palladio’s villas and the fascinating history of how a humble stonemason from Padua became one of the most influential architects of all time.”

—Ross King, author of
Brunelleschi’s Dome

“[A] deeply able and aptly enchanted guide.”

—Publishers Weekly

“[Rybczynski] is one of our most original, accessible, and stimulating writers on architecture. . . . [
The Perfect House
] is a small but lasting gift to the reader.”

—
Library Journal

“Rybczynski leads us through Palladio’s beautiful villas, illuminating each room for its own sake and in the process helping us understand what Palladio thought ‘the perfect house’ was, and where so many of our own ideas on that subject have come from. He puts his great historical and architectural knowledge to work to explain private houses—the small, the intimate, the domestic. The result is a delightful and enlightening book, full of warmth and intelligence.”

—Cheryl Mendelson, author of
Home Comforts

“Rybczynski has applied all his usual grace, style, and curiosity to explore an important chapter of domestic history.”

—The Philadelphia Inquirer

“Evocative, compelling, charming,
The Perfect House
is the perfect traveling companion.”

—
The New York Times

“Undoubtedly, this book will be immensely useful as a guide and handbook for anyone planning to make a tour of Palladian villas in Italy. . . . Rybczynski’s clear descriptions of what he sees and his lucid explanations of Palladio’s ideas and methods enable the reader to see and understand the essence of this architect’s accomplishments.”

—Los Angeles Times

The Perfect House
“will doubtless serve as an amiable and knowledgeable companion for future pilgrims in search of [Palladio’s villas], providing the visitor an evenhanded historical introduction to Palladio and a thoughtful meditation on the extent and sheer complexity of the architect’s continuing presence in the cultural atmosphere.”

—Dave Hickey,
Harper’s

A
NDREA
P
ALLADIO
BY
G
IOVANNI
B
ATTISTA
M
AGANZA

(Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura)

FOREWORD

I Godi

II Che Bella Casa

III The Arched Device

IV On the Brenta

V Porticoes

VI The Brothers Barbaro

VII An Immensely Pleasing Sight

VIII Emo

IX The Last Villa

X Palladio’s Secret

AFTERWORD

THE VILLAS

GLOSSARY

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT WITOLD RYBCZYNSKI

NOTES

INDEX

To Shirley, once more

For one could not describe as perfect a building which was useful, but only briefly, or one which was inconvenient for a long time, or, being both durable and useful, was not beautiful.

—A
NDREA
P
ALLADIO

he Villa Barbaro in Maser, north of Venice, was my first Palladio villa. It faced south at the top of a gentle slope, overlooking cultivated fields and vineyards. The gable end of the central portion was a delicately modeled temple front consisting of four giant half-columns supporting a pediment filled with sculptural figures. Two long arcades terminating in pavilions adorned with fulsome scrolls created an animated silhouette against a dark tangle of trees. The golden yellow plastered walls glowed in the afternoon sun. Photographs had not prepared me for the real thing; Palladio’s design had the immediacy and freshness of something built the day before yesterday. “You have to see these buildings with your own eyes to realize how good they are,” wrote Goethe, who came upon this architecture when it was already more than two hundred years old. “No reproductions of Palladio’s designs give an adequate idea of the harmony of their dimensions; they must be seen in their actual perspective.”
¹

I, too, was smitten. That was in 1985. I wrote a short essay on Palladio, and two years later made some tentative notes for a book.
²
The notes were tentative because I was interested in the man as well as his buildings, and although he wrote a famous architectural book, the details of his personal life are sketchy. My editor was supportive but I was not sure exactly how to
proceed, and the idea languished. I filed the Palladio notes away under “Ideas for Books” and forgot about them.

Years later, rummaging through the Ideas file, I came across the Palladio material. It read in part:

The nineteenth-century discipline of art history applies the techniques of studying painting and sculpture to buildings, that is, it treats them primarily as works of art. But a building, even if it is designed with artistry, is also a product of clients’ demands and economic constraints, of a way of life, of building technology, and of its surroundings. When a Venetian patrician hired Palladio to design a villa, he did so because he wanted a home, and if Palladio’s career flourished, it was because he was specially skilled at fulfilling this requirement.

It seems to me that it would be possible to learn a great deal about Palladio by looking at his buildings, not with the eye of an art historian but with the eye of an architect, and not only as works of the imagination, but as products of a particular time and place. Such a study would necessarily be impressionistic and personal; it is not intended to turn up new historical evidence (although it would rely on recent scholarly work), but rather to give the reader new insights, a new way of looking at Palladio’s work.

My interest was rekindled. As it happened, I had just finished a book on architectural style, and style features in Palladio’s work. Also, having recently written a biography, I was more confident about dealing with his life. I was on sabbatical from the university, with a book completed and time on my hands. It was spring and the airlines were offering bargain fares to Europe. It was not a difficult decision; I would take Goethe’s advice, go back to Italy, and see the buildings with my own eyes.

I had already visited Palladio’s churches in Venice, as well as his palazzos and public buildings in Vicenza—this time I would concentrate on the villas. They dot the flat Veneto plain north of Venice, chiefly clustered around the city of Vicenza. The houses stand at country crossroads, beside rivers and canals, and at the ends of tree-lined drives. Many were built as the seats of country estates, and are still surrounded by farm buildings and agricultural equipment, albeit tractors rather than horse-drawn wagons. In some cases, the rural settings have been transformed into prosaic backdrops of apartment blocks, garages, and suburban gardens. Even in such inhospitable surroundings, the villas maintain their noble presence, their unremitting sense of order, and their beauty. Most are occupied and lovingly maintained, the wear and tear of centuries erased or, at least, concealed. Others, no less captivating, show evidence of careless upkeep: cracked and peeling plaster, broken steps, sagging shutters. A few are in advanced stages of disrepair with crumbling brickwork and gaping windows. Of the roughly thirty villas attributed to Palladio, seventeen have survived largely intact.
^I

To British and American visitors, Palladio’s villas are familiar objects in this foreign terrain. They recall country seats in Kent and Tidewater plantation houses in Virginia. Traces of Palladio are found in famous buildings such as Inigo Jones’s Queen’s House at Greenwich and Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, and in national symbols such as Buckingham Palace and the Mauritshuis in The Hague. The great portico of the White House in Washington, D.C., also owes a debt to Palladio’s villas, as do many American small-town banks and courthouses. That
a handful of houses in an obscure corner of the Venetian Republic should have made their presence felt hundreds of years later and halfway across the globe is extraordinary. It makes Palladio the most influential architect in history.

The villas of Palladio also mark an important moment in the history of the home: the beginning of domestic architecture—that is, the beginning of architects’ interest in the private house. An architectural language previously reserved for temples and palaces was introduced to residential buildings. Much of the potent architectural symbolism associated with the home, whether it is the grand porch of a stockbroker’s mansion in Connecticut or the modest pediment over the front door of an American Colonial bungalow, is derived from these sixteenth-century structures. It all starts with Palladio.