The Perfect House: A Journey with Renaissance Master Andrea Palladio (27 page)

T
HE
V
ILLA
R
OTONDA, ON A HILLTOP ON THE OUTSKIRTS OF
V
ICENZA, IS
P
ALLADIO’S MOST IMITATED HOUSE.

Climbing the wide stair between massive abutments on which stand heroic statues, I reach the portico. From up here the view of the Bèrici hills is even more spectacular. The front doors open into a wide vaulted passage. There are rooms on each side, but the focus is the arched entrance into the
sala.
And what a
sala
!—a circular space under a breathtaking hemispherical dome. Not large—about thirty-five feet in diameter—the dome rises to a height of fifty feet, higher than any Palladio
sala,
and has a round hole, or
oculus,
at the top. The most famous
domed space in the cinquecento was the Pantheon, then known as La Rotonda, which gave the villa its nickname.
⁷

The use of a domed circular space, normally associated with ancient temples and Renaissance churches, in a domestic setting has struck some historians as odd. Certainly, Palladio was aware that the ancient Romans did not use circular rooms in their homes, nor was the dome intended to have religious overtones. The domed
sala,
like his temple porches, is a reminder that he was first an architect interested in form, and second an archaeologist. Moreover, as the images of domed pavilions picturesquely perched on hilltops amply demonstrate, he was an architect with a romantic streak.

While undoubtedly aware of the similarity, Palladio did not play up the resemblance to the Pantheon. For example, he did not design the dome with coffers, like the Roman original, and although the plan of the
sala
is often described as round, it is really a cruciform, with four tall vaulted passages like the arms of a Celtic cross. The quadripartite theme abounds: four passages, four porticoes, four entrances, inside the
sala
four doors leading to four staircases, and above them four windows. Encircling the room, well below the springing of the dome, is a balustraded gallery, accessible from the attic.

Although the
sala
is not artificially lit, it is surprisingly bright. Daylight comes from the doors leading to the porticoes and streams in through the
oculus.
The seven-foot-diameter hole was originally open to the sky—Inigo Jones described a “Net to cover the top Hole to keep out the Flies”—and a perforated stone drain in the shape of a faun’s face in the center of the floor allowed rainwater to drop into the basement.
⁸
It is a shame that the
oculus
is now capped by a small cupola. Palladio once described an ancient Corinthian house as having an “unroofed space in the middle,” and the original Rotonda
sala
would have
recalled such an atrium, especially for the first thirty or forty years of its life when the dome was unfinished.
⁹

I regret that the
oculus
is not open, but in any case Palladio’s architectural intentions are somewhat obscured by the florid stucco decorations, plaster figures, and frescoes that cover the underside of the dome. These were carried out in the 1580s and represent different tastes and fashions. So do the showy, billboardlike eighteenth-century frescoes on the lower walls and in the passages. How much more beautiful this evocative space would be with white painted walls forming a neutral backdrop to the carved stone door and window frames.

Walking from room to room, I make a quick circuit of the house. The experience of the identical porticoes with their different views is delightful, a bit like being in a revolving restaurant; the view changes while the architecture stays the same. The round
sala
is surrounded by eight rooms, arranged in four suites. All the rooms have shaped ceilings: low flat-vaults in the small rooms (with
amezati,
or mezzanines, above) and high coved ceilings with elaborate stucco decorations in the larger rooms. Except for the domed
sala,
the interior is surprisingly intimate. “Far more space has been lavished on the stairs and porticoes than on the house itself,” wrote Goethe after visiting the villa, adding that the “hall and rooms are beautifully proportioned, but, as a summer residence, they would hardly satisfy the needs of a noble family.”
¹⁰
That is how it appeared to an eighteenth-century German aristocrat; in fact, with eight rooms and a generous
sala,
La Rotonda is larger than most Palladio villas.
^I
It just doesn’t feel overwhelming.

I return to La Rotonda three days later. It is Saturday morning and misty. Since today the interior is closed to the public, there are no other visitors. I sit outside and sketch. The overall conception of La Rotonda is straightforward, yet the exterior details are anything but simple. The cap of the abutments turns into a fascia that girdles the house at the level of the main floor. A very complicated molding, about four feet wide, runs around the house at the level of the architrave frieze. It consists of a cyma recta (or ogee molding), a flat fascia, a pulvinated (or cushion-shaped) molding, and three stepped bands of diminishing size. This molding, like the others, is made of plastered brick, except at the corners, where, to guarantee the sharpness of the profile, Palladio has substituted carved stone. Like the gently swelling tapering of the columns, this optical refinement is a reminder that Palladio’s style, however coolly rational and historical its roots, was ultimately concerned with perception and experience.

How many visitors have sat here, marveling at this extraordinary building? Immediately on his arrival in Vicenza, Goethe hurried up Monte Bèrico to see the house, which he found to be “located just where such a building belongs, the view is unimaginably beautiful.” Yet he added a curious comment in his diary: “here the architect was free to do whatever he liked and he almost went a bit too far.”
¹¹

E
XTERIOR MOLDING AT THE
V
ILLA
R
OTONDA

A bit too far;
I can see what Goethe meant. At first glance the self-assured Rotonda, with its four identical temple fronts, appears slightly preposterous, a facile tour de force, an architectural parlor trick. “It is not done well,” said Samuel Johnson of a dog walking on its hind legs, “but you are surprised to find it done at all.” Yet after spending time in and around the villa, under its lofty dome, within its princely porticoes, there is little doubt that, surprising as it may be, the domed house
is
done well. If it’s a parlor trick, Palladio the magician is too fast for me. La Rotonda exerts a strange allure, which is why I’ve come back to look at it again. Goethe, too, was entranced, and returned the following evening; “one more occasion for me to admire his towering genius,” he noted.

The most striking characteristic of La Rotonda is, of course, its extreme symmetry, both inside and out. In turning to this form of composition, Palladio, like all Renaissance architects, was influenced by the remains of ancient Roman buildings and by the writings of Vitruvius, who taught that “since nature has designed the human body so that its members are duly proportioned to the frame as a whole, it appears that the ancients had good reason for their rule, that in perfect buildings the different members must be in exact symmetrical relations to the whole general scheme.”
¹²
That is why La Rotonda is so baffling. It is not human at all. It is all fronts, like those spooky two-faced Venetian carnival masks, worn on the face and back of the head. If buildings are supposed to mirror the human body, what sort
of being has four faces? The projecting stair abutments of La Rotonda stick out like the paws of a great sphinx, the mythical creature with the head of a woman and the body of a lion. The analogy strikes me as particularly apt not only because the porches are Ionic—supposedly the female order—but also because the four-headed house really is sphinxlike—mysterious, enigmatic, and a little monstrous.

 • • • 

The very qualities that make La Rotonda a distinctly odd villa—it is not my favorite—have also made it the most influential Palladio building. This distinction has to do with the idealized geometry of a circle in a square, the domed room, its iconic pavilionlike quality, and its extraordinary rapport with its prominent hilltop site. While architects have copied various Palladian motifs, no single villa of his, indeed, no house anywhere, has had so many distinguished imitators. The first to have a go was Vincenzo Scamozzi, a young Vicentine who was Palladio’s student at about the time La Rotonda was built. Scamozzi, something of a prodigy, did not stay a pupil long but quickly struck out on his own, and though only in his early twenties was soon receiving commissions for villas and palazzos. In 1576, he was approached by Vettor Pisani, who wanted a country retreat on the dramatic hilltop site of La Rocca in the Bèrici hills. This was near Bagnolo, where years earlier Vettor had built a villa with Palladio (who by the 1570s was no longer accepting villa commissions). Scamozzi’s solution was a Rotonda-like house consisting of a round domed room set in a square block. Each side has a loggia, but the house is not symmetrical, for there is an Ionic portico on the front and
serliana
loggias on the back and sides. The handsome villa has the magisterial presence of its forerunner, and its domed central room, chaste and without distracting frescoes, is extremely beautiful. More than thirty years later, Scamozzi designed another domed villa, the Villa Molin near Padua, which recalls Palladio’s first drawing of a domed house. This time he used a square central
sala
that rises up into a lantern with four thermal windows. He again eschewed strict symmetry and provided but a single portico.

V
ILLA
R
OTONDA

Scamozzi’s relationship to Palladio was complicated. As far as we know, he was the only student to have been taken on by Palladio (other than his own son, Leonida). After Palladio’s death, Scamozzi was generally considered to be the great architect’s successor (Leonida having died some years before), and he was called upon to complete several unfinished Palladio projects, including the Teatro Olimpico, an extraordinary theater in Vicenza, which had been commissioned by the Olympic Academy, of which Palladio was a founding member. Scamozzi also completed the dome of the Villa Rotonda. During a long and successful career he designed many buildings: villas for Vicentines and Venetians, the beautiful Palazzo Trissino (now Vicenza’s city hall), and the sweeping Procurazie Nuove on the south side of the Piazza San Marco in Venice. He also published his own architectural treatise, ambitiously titled
L’idea dell’ architettura universale.
The treatise is notable for hardly mentioning Palladio. According to Inigo Jones, who met the sixty-five-year-old Scamozzi in Venice, the architect harbored bitter feelings toward his old master. This may be why he sold Jones and Arundel his entire collection of Palladio drawings, which he must have received from Silla, Palladio’s sole surviving son. Scamozzi, who was well-educated, considered himself Palladio’s social and intellectual superior, and while his own achievements were considerable, his reputation never equaled that of Palladio, who was always the one visitors like Jones wanted to hear about. In short, Scamozzi was jealous. Though he was an exceptionally gifted architect, like Antonio Salieri he had the misfortune to live in the shadow of a genius.