The Perfect House: A Journey with Renaissance Master Andrea Palladio (13 page)

We go back to the stairs and climb all the way to the attic.
Partway up is a low-ceilinged
amezato
built above the
camerino,
which has a lower ceiling than the larger rooms. There is a square window, almost at floor level. A few steps up is the attic’s counterpart to the square room. Since the heavy, brick walls of the villa are load-bearing, the plan of the main floor repeats on every floor. There is no floor above the Sala degli Imperatori; instead, the rough back of the coved ceiling swells up like a huge balloon. Palladio built ceilings in different ways. Flat ceilings that supported a floor were made of closely spaced wooden beams (as in the Villa Godi and the Villa Pisani) or of brick, if they were vaulted. The vaulted ceiling of a room that was not required to carry a floor was lighter, made of plastered cane lath supported on a structure of wood. That is the case here.

My redoubtable guide leads me downstairs, crosses the
sala,
and takes me up the second stair. Palladio villas often have two staircases, which were needed when the upper portion of the
sala
divided by the attic in two, or when the space below the
sala
was unexcavated. Walking around the attic is like being in a large barn, since the roof is supported by an open framework of crisscrossing wooden trusses, the huge timbers, about a foot square in cross section, banded together with wrought-iron straps. The large timbers came from forests high up in the mountains and were more expensive than stone, which is why masonry arches were used whenever possible. The wooden trusses carried purlins, smaller beams to which clay tiles were attached; the underside of the tiles is plainly visible since there are no ceilings.

Palladio described the attic of the Villa Poiana as a
granaro,
or granary.
²⁰
Agricultural productivity in the sixteenth century was low, less than ten bushels per acre of cultivated land. Since a part of the land was regularly left fallow—and land was also used for grazing, vineyards, and hay and vegetable production—a large
Vicentine estate of four hundred acres produced only four or five hundred bushels of wheat, rice, millet, and barley.
²¹
Such a valuable harvest had to be kept in a secure place, especially as the owner was not always in residence. When I later calculate the storage capacity of the Poiana attic, it turns out that filled to a height of four feet, it could easily accommodate six
thousand
bushels. Evidently, the attic wasn’t only a granary. It was also used as a box-room, a seasonal store for clothes and furniture, and not the least, as living quarters for servants. This explains the many windows and why country houses without agricultural lands, as well as town houses, had similar attics.

The basement and the attic of a villa are like the backstage of a theater: the delicate architecture of the owner’s rooms is supported on vaults as massive as catacombs, and covered by timberwork as hefty as a railroad trestle. The Villa Poiana is not just an achievement of Palladio the designer, it is also an accomplishment of Palladio the builder. “There are three things in every building that have to be considered,” he writes in the opening lines of
Quattro libri,
paraphrasing Vitruvius, “these are usefulness or convenience, durability, and beauty.”
²²
Usefulness related to planning, beauty to aesthetics, and durability to construction. Palladio took construction seriously. In his treatise, he devoted the first eleven chapters to such mundane topics as where to find good building sand, how to make lime, and the best way to build foundations. Like Alberti, Palladio followed Vitruvius’s lead in emphasizing technique, but unlike that patrician scholar, the ex-stonemason knew at firsthand what he was talking about. And he built well, as this 450-year-old house attests.

The tour over, I thank my guide profusely and bid her good-bye. There is time for one last stroll around the exterior of the house. The sun is higher than when I arrived, and the
architrave and the moldings throw sharp shadows on the wall. The deeply shaded
oculi
and dark loggia interior contrast sharply with the dazzling white walls. The masterly chiaroscuro effects attest to the lessons that Palladio has learned while designing the Basilica, just as the
serliana
entrance and the pediment refine themes that he has explored in earlier houses. The impression is of a mature architect fully in control of his medium. But what sort of architect? Thanks to the influence of
Quattro libri,
and the systematic analyses of Palladio’s villa plans, Palladianism has come to represent, at least in the public’s eye, a sort of architectural recipe: a central hall, a pediment, a couple of columns. In 1992, one enterprising Yale art historian, in collaboration with a Microsoft software engineer, devised a computer program that was capable of generating innumerable “Palladian” villa plans and façades according to predetermined geometrical rules.
²³
Despite the authors’ numerous caveats, this mechanical approach leaves the distinct impression that designing a Palladio villa was simply a matter of rigidly adhering to a few simple rules. Palladio himself contributed to the perception that he was a disciplinarian. “And though variety and novelty must please everybody, one should not, however, do anything that is contrary to the laws of this art and contrary to what reason makes obvious,” he wrote, “so we can see that the ancients also made variations, but that they never departed from certain universal and essential rules of this art, as we shall see in my books on antiquities.”
²⁴

Yet what is striking about the Villa Poiana is not how Palladio follows rules, but rather how he invents. The Villa Poiana is full of novel ideas such as the projecting wings, the extremely low basement, the stair windows looking into the loggia. Some of these features will reoccur in later houses, others will not. The chunky abstracted
serliana
appears only once more, in the Villa
Forni, a small house probably built in the 1540s. The
oculi,
for example, appear in the
sala
of the Villa Caldogno, which has circular and elliptical windows, but they are concealed within the loggia. The wonderful arc motif of Poiana is unique. Although the demands of the client, and the character of the site, influenced the distinct personality of each villa, the chief reason for the variety was Palladio’s restless imagination.

This restlessness makes Palladio curiously modern. He is not modern like Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who really was disciplined and whose later work, typified by the Seagram Building in New York, consisted of a rigorously controlled number of architectural elements: I-beam mullions, plate glass, travertine slabs. Nor is Palladio like Louis I. Kahn, who laboriously developed his own architectural vocabulary of brick and precast concrete, which was sometimes brilliant but often cramped and confining. Rather, Palladio resembles the Swiss-French genius Le Corbusier. Le Corbusier, too, published his architectural ideas and formulated many architectural rules, but his fecund creativity periodically drove him in new architectural directions, bending and often breaking his earlier pronouncements.

It sounds farfetched to compare Palladio, who was constrained by traditional building methods and by his admiration for the past, with a modernist firebrand such as Le Corbusier, who embraced new technology and wanted to rewrite, if not destroy, history. But Palladio was part of an architectural revolution that was more profound—and of considerably longer duration—than its twentieth-century counterpart. It is true that he lived at the end of that revolution—Brunelleschi’s seminal Ospedale degli Innocenti was already almost a hundred years old when Palladio was born. Yet Palladio occupied a unique position in the Renaissance. Working in Vicenza, far from the architectural centers of Florence and Rome, he had to discover
the
all’antica
style for himself. He built on the achievements of his predecessors and shared some of the romantic outlook of his contemporaries, but his architecture was neither jaded nor mannered; it had the fresh first blush of discovery—of true Rinascimento—which is probably why it proved so influential.

^I
Poiana never enlarged the house, although in 1606 a descendant completed the east wing.

^II
Adriano Thiene died in 1550 and Marc’antonio a decade later. Marc’antonio’s son continued construction, but neither the villa nor the palazzo were completed.

^III
The fact that Palladio could not command a large salary no doubt influenced the Great Council’s deliberations.

^IV
Palladio was influenced by Sebastiano Serlio, whose treatise suggested a hierarchy among the five orders. Serlio seems to have invented this “rule”—Vitruvius has nothing to say on the matter—based on the façade of the Colosseum.

^V
The Pope, perhaps hearing of the Basilica project, wanted advice on the design of St. Peter’s, but he died as Palladio was en route to Rome and nothing came of the request.

any of Palladio’s villas are in out-of-the-way places and my directions are sketchy. Getting back to Vicenza, where I am staying, is easy—I just follow the road signs. It’s only once I arrive in the city that I run into trouble. My hotel is in the historic center, a medieval maze of narrow, winding streets further complicated by a frustrating profusion of one-way signs, so if it’s dark by the time I get back, I usually get lost. The ride becomes increasingly nerve-racking as I juggle glancing at my map, peering at street names, and keeping abreast of the rush-hour traffic. Vicentine drivers are polite but relentless—and fast. Eventually I give up trying to navigate, and instead look for a familiar landmark near my hotel. Once I see the floodlit façade of the Museo Civico, I know I’m home.

The municipal museum is a converted Palladio building, originally a nobleman’s residence. The impressive structure occupies a conspicuous site at the eastern edge of the historic center, where the Corso crosses the Bacchiglione River and joins the old Venice highway. In the sixteenth century, the open space between the palazzo and the river was called the Piazza dell’Isola and housed an outdoor cattle market. Adjacent to the market was the town wharf, where barges from Padua, Venice, and elsewhere unloaded their cargoes. People as well as goods
traveled by water in the Republic, and in many ways, this was Vicenza’s front door.

The Palazzo Chiericati was one of several commissions that came to Palladio following his appointment as architect of the Basilica. The client was Count Girolamo Chiericati, a leading citizen who, as a member of the Basilica building committee, had backed Palladio. In 1550, after inheriting three small houses facing the Isola, Chiericati commissioned Palladio to build a grand residence in their place. A cattle market might seem an unwelcome neighbor, but Chiericati guessed—correctly—that new construction would transform the area; it was up to Palladio to expedite the change. This was a challenge. The building plot was awkwardly shaped—more than a hundred feet wide facing the piazza but only about fifty feet deep. To overcome this constraint—and gain extra space on the upper floor—Palladio shrewdly suggested that Chiericati petition the city council to permit the building to encroach on the piazza in the form of a public arcade “for the comfort and ornament of the whole city.”
¹
Covered pedestrian arcades were a familiar feature of Veneto towns, and the proposal was accepted.

The shallow plot could not accommodate the deep, courtyard type of town house that Palladio had designed for Thiene and da Porto. Yet the site had other benefits. While these earlier palazzos were on narrow, cramped streets, hemmed in by their neighbors, Chiericati’s house would be freestanding, its broad façade fronting a piazza and with a fine view to the lazy Bacchiglione River and water mills on the far bank. The prospect was almost countrylike. Perhaps that is why Palladio planned the town house like a villa, not introverted but outward-looking. He elevated the main floor by raising the basement partially aboveground. On each side of the entrance
hall he placed suites of small, medium, and large rooms, as well as staircases. He repeated the plan on the upper floor, adding a large
sala
above the entrance hall; the third floor contained the attic. All these features were adapted from his villas, but on the exterior Palladio created something new: the entire hundred-foot façade overlooking the piazza was a commanding two-story loggia.

This loggia was not supported by arches and piers but by freestanding columns. In his early villas, Palladio had only
suggested
columns. Since a house consists chiefly of walls, if an architect wished to use the grammar of classical architecture—that is, columns—he could do so only by attaching flat pilasters or half-columns to the walls’ surfaces. This was not a satisfactory solution, for, as Goethe shrewdly observed: “[Palladio’s] major problem was that which confronts all modern architects, namely, how to make proper use of columns in domestic architecture, since a combination of columns and walls must always be a contradiction.”
²
The Palazzo Chiericati neatly resolved the contradiction: Palladio simply separated the columns and the walls, juxtaposing the columned loggia with the house proper. Put that way, it sounds simple enough, but it had taken him almost a decade to arrive at this fortuitous solution.