Discover Palladio

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PALLADIO BEAUTY AND HARMONY OF AN ANCIENT WORLD

giunta regionale – 9^ legislatura

© Leo Maria Scordo

ALLEGATO A Dgr n. 418 del 31/3/2015

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PATRIMONIO

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First published un the United States of Anerica in 2017 by VIVI PRESS Corso Palladio 179 36100 Vicenza Copyright © VIVI PRESS All right reserved under International and Pan American Copyright Conventions No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any neans,electronic, or mechanical, including photocopyng, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing form the publisher. Inquiries should be sebt to VIVI PRESS. Tests . © CISA Centro Studi Andrea Pallladio Contrà Porti, 11 36100 Vicenza Photo by: Leo Maria Scordo Ruggero Acqua Riccardo Contarin Giorgio Marino Angelo Nicoletti Carmen Menguzzato Sergio Vezzaro Angela Semilia Antonio Tafuro Tiziano Casanova Aeral-photographer Stefano Maruzzo

PALLADIOMUSEUM

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PALLADIO

CONTENTS

PALLADIO AND VICENZA

p. 6

p. 15

PUBLIC BUILDINGS

THE CAREER OF A GENIUS 1530 - 1580 From stone mason to Chief Architec of Venice

Logge Basilica Palazzo del Capitanio Teatro Olimpico Arco delle Scalette

1537 - 1549 Productive rural villas

PRIVATE BUILDINGS

1540 - 1552 Palaces and villa for noble families of Vicenza 1552 - 1564 The Villas for the nobles venetian patricians 1564 - 1580 The arrival in Venice e la consecration p. 13

WORKSHOP PALLADIO PALLADIO - MANTUA Settembre 2018

p. 37

THE VILLAS IN THE PROVINCE OF VICENZA

BEAUTY AND HARMONY OF AN ANCIENT WORLD Villa Trissino Villa Godi Malinverni Villa Piovene Porto Godi Villa Valmarana Bressan Villa Gazzotti Villa Thiene

Villa Pisani Villa Saraceno Vilal Caldogno Villa Pojana Villa Agugliaro Villa Chiericati

Palazzo Civena Palazzo Garzadori Palazzo Thiene Palazzo Iseppo da Porto Palazzo Chiericati Loggia Valmarana Casa Cogollo Palazzo Schio Palazzo Pojana Palazzo Valmarana Palazzo Barbarano Palazzo Porto Breganze Palazzo Bonin Longare

Villa Trissino Villa Porto Pedrotti Villa Valmarana Villa Forni Villa Porto Villa Capra 3

VICENZA_ the City of Palladio Welcome to Vicenza, the city with the highest number of UNESCO protected sites, reflecting the very high quality of its cultural heritage, expression of a abundance of historical-artistic-humanistic contents which is unmatched in Italy and throughout the world.

The foundation of the town dates back to VISIT VICENZA the sixth century. BC, in 49 BC it became a province of the Roman Empire preserving several historical temonies; in the Middle Ages it was surrounded by fortified walls, from 1404 to 1797 it became part of the SeVicenza Unesco renissima Republic of Venice..

Throughout the sixteenth century the silk trade was thriving and aristocratic families entrusted Andrea Palladio with the task of building palaces and country villas, the creative genius capable to give shine to such a unique classical architecture model, Renaissence Museum which became the significant footprint of the so-called “Città Bellissima, i.e. Wonderful Town”, a name with which passing travellers used to describe the thrill of awe and wonder aroused by his works.

Palladio has left an indelible mark on the Palladio Museum city with its splendid buildings that have influenced successive generations of architects for at least another two centuries. After the Palladian Renaissance (1530 - 1580) the city continued to be modeled on principles and motifs of beauty and harmony transmitted by the great architect.

Cultural events In every corner of the city you breathe the essence of its teaching and it is impossible to remain insensitive to the beauty of its perspective views.

The chest of historical-artistic treasures opens slowly as we get immersed into the ‘Palladian dream’ and the perfect form of a Discover Vicenza precious jewel appears, rich with multiple Pinterest facets which will never cease to amaze.

PATRIMONIO

UNESCO

© Pettinà Giuseppe

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THE ANCIENT WORLD OF PALLADIO Architect of the Venetian Republic

Andrea Palladio, pseudonym of Andrea di Pietro della Gondola (November 30, 1508 - August 19, 1580), was the most important architect of the Venetian Republic in whose territory he designed several villas, what made him famous, as well as churches and palaces, these latter mainly in Vicenza.

In Vicenza the young stonemason was fully acquainted with ancient art, he trained as an architect and lived realizing the desire of the humanists to revive the harmony canons codified by Vitru6

vius, who inspired a dream of beauty which Palladio sought throughout his life.

According to Guido Piovene, famous critic of past century, Palladio’s genius lies in the visionary aspect of the Veneto people: “The authentic Veneto genius, in many of its greatest expressions, is visionary quality. The same thing is true for Magenta, who came before Palladio, and with Piranesi, who came later; they were all visionaries through the means offered to them, which was an idea of the ancient world.”

THE CAREER OF A GENIUS (1530 - 1580)

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From stonemason to Chief Architect of Venice

Palladio is an exceptional representative of 16th century architecture. His internship was also uncommon, because carried out not as a painter or sculptor as could have been expected, but as a stonecutter.

If it wasn’t for his contact in the second half of the thirties with the Vicenza nobleman and writer GianGiorgio Trissino (1478-1550), Palladio would probably have remained a skilled and intelligent craftsman, maybe able to design portals and memorials, but without the culture and intellectual ability that were demanded from a true architect of that period.

Andrea Palladio built his most important churches in Venice. Their extraordinariness is not just a result of their architectural aspect, but

also of their urban insertion: the Chiesa del Redentore (Church of the Redeemer), the church and monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore, the Le Zitelle church, are the most enchanting scenery flat in the world when observed from St. Mark’s Square.

The works that were admired most during the following centuries were those of Vicenza, because they were an expression of aesthetic-formal equilibrium that was perfectly suited to representing the image of a social class that could intensify, contain and finally elevate the individual ambitions inside that “democratic Palladianism” that had an extraordinary cultural influence throughout Europe and in the new American society.

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THE CAREER OF A GENIUS (1537 - 1549) Productive rural villas

Andrea probably meets Giangiorgio Trissino for the first time while the Pedemuro workshop is working on Trissiono’s villa at Cricoli and when Andrea leaves the Pedemuro workshop receives through them his first major commission, to design Villa Godi in Lonedo di Lugo.

From 1540 Andrea for the first time appears in some documents as ‘Palladio’ and to use the title architect begin to design numerous country villas that answered the need for a new type of rural residence.

His designs implicitly highlighted that a large villa in the countryside modelled directly on those of the city was not necessary: something smaller, often with a single inhabitable main floor, was fitting as a centre for controlling production, from which the majority of the owner’s income probably came, for making an impression on tenants and neighbours and also for entertaining important guests.

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These residences established a social and political presence in the countryside and were suitable for resting and hunting, as well as for escaping from the city, which was (and still is) always potentially unhealthy.

The façades, dominated by pediments usually decorated with the owner’s crest, announced a powerful presence in a vast, flat land.

Inside, Palladio distributed the services both vertically and horizontally. Kitchens, pantries, laundries and cellars were on the ground floor: the large space under the roof was used to preserve the most precious product of the estate: wheat, which also helped insulate the living quarters below.

The family and its guests lived on the main floor. The most public rooms (the loggia and the hall) were on the central axis, with rooms inserted symmetrically to the left and right.

THE CAREER OF A GENIUS (1540 - 1552)

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Palaces and villas for nobles families of Vicenza

From 1540 to 1552 Palladio dedicated himself completely to designing important city villas, all in Vicenza: Palazzo Thiene, Palazzo Porto and Palazzo Chiericati. If the economic base of the main Veneto city families derived from the countryside, the political life instead met in the urban centres, where the majority of those who built and owned villas controlled city business as councellors.

From among his most important villas, Palladio dedicated himself firstly to Palazzo Thiene. Work began in 1542 for Marcantonio Thiene and his brother, who at that moment were the richest people in the city.

Shortly after, Palladio designed the villa for Iseppo Porto, who had married the Thiene sister. It was with Palazzo Chiericati, however, that he indubitably “graduated� as an architect: he invented something that did not yet exist, a villa which blended in with the urban tissue, so much so that there was a public portico on the ground floor that took its inspiration directly from the large ancient architectural buildings, with

awe-inspiring columns that supported the floors above.

If Palazzo Chiericati represents an innovative type of urban dwelling, the loggias of the Palazzo della Ragione must surely be considered as Palladio’s most impressive public building in northern Italy.

He created a monumental scenery flat of particular magnificence around an already-existing nucleus (with workshops on the ground floor and the great hall for citizen advice above them).

In spite of its Roman aspect, the structure, made of solid stone, combines lightness and solidity in an almost Gothic style. he use of the serliana motif ensured that as much light as possible would enter the building and that the inevitable irregularities of the elevation were absorbed discreetly, almost imperceptibly, by the spaces between the lower floor and the pillars, leaving the main elements, pillars and arches, equal and regular.

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A CAREER OF A GENIUS (1552 - 1564)

The Villas for the nobles Venetian patricians

Following the realisation of the extraordinary villas in Vicenza, Palladio was ready to take a big step forward: to become the architect of the great Venetian aristocrats.

During all the years of the Fifties, Palladio created villas for the great patricians of the capital: Villa Cornaro in Piombino Dese, Villa Emo in Franzolo, Villa Barbaro in Maser, Villa Foscari in Mira, Villa Badoer in Fratta Polesine.

They were no longer the small villas of the Vicenza years, but aweinspiring complexes, decorated with lavish decorative campaigns entrusted to the greatest artists of the moments, such as Paolo Veronese

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or Battista Zelotti.

With his “villas for Venetians”, Palladio also moved closer to the capital: after having tested him with their own country residences, the Venetian aristocrats started involving Palladio in projects in Venice.

It must be said that the majority of them was part of a precise group of power aimed at rationalising the Venetian political and administrative life, even if it involved radical changes.

Palladio’s architecture was logical and based on reason, therefore he became the metaphor of a possible future Venice with reformed rights, and better administrative and military organisation.

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A CAREER OF A GENIUS (1564 - 1580) The arrival in Venice and the consecration

It was the powerful Barbaro brothers, Daniele and Marcantonio, who obtained the first Venetian projects for Palladio: restoration of the façade of San Pietro di Castello (never completed), but above all a full intervention on the Benedictine monastery on the island of St. George, which led to the realisation of the great Refectory, and then of the church and the cloister. Almost contemporaneously, the Canons Regular of the Lateran commissioned him to build their convent, which today holds the galleries of the Academy. Palladio therefore found himself having to work for two very powerful religious groups in the city. At this point he was an emerging figure in the capital, so much so that he managed to steal the job of producing the façade of the Church of San Francesco della Vigna from the powerful Jacopo Sansovino. Giorgio Vasari included the works of Palladio in the second edition of his Lives of Artists in 1568: it was his initiation. Two years later, it was Palladio

himself who had his own work “I Quattro Libri dell’Architettura” (The four books of architecture) printed, which played an important role in his international fame.

Even if Palladio could not obtain the formal office of salaried architect from the Veneto Republic, all the most important works passed through his hands: he was commissioned to build the Redentore church after the plague of 1576, and he renovated rooms in Palazzo Ducale. He was called to Savoy by Emanuele Filiberto and to Bologna for the façade of San Petronio. He also built various villas in Vicenza, and the grand loggia of the Capitaniato. Palladio died suddenly in August 1580: we do not know the exact date, nor where and not even why. It is not even clear where his body was buried, almost as if he wanted to eliminate trace of himself and live through the fame of his buildings and in the pages of his books.

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Vicenza - COntrĂ Porti, 8 phone +39 0444.323014 accoglienza@palladiomuseum.org www.palladiomuseum.org info workshop Palladio 2018 .

Form in the website The Palladio Museum has its seat in Palazzo Barbarano, it is the only one that Palladio could see completed supervising both the construction and the decoration items. The exhibition itinerary begins with the Hall of the book, boasting the huge editorial success of the Four Books and the Rotonda, replicated over three continents. Following the Hall of stone, showing the technologies that Palladio conceived to build with stone, or even without such material..

The Hall of silk, is devoted to Vicenza, because silk manifacturing and international trading 12

gave rise to such cosmopolitan mindset which was necessary to Vicenza to understand a revolutionary architecture like the Palladian one.

The the grain and glory Hall, is dedicated to the great villas and to the apogee of land reclamation that transformed the Veneto of sixteenth century, but also to the dreams of glory of Palladio’s patrons. Eventually the Sala di Venezia, i.e. Hall of Venice, dedicated to Chiesa del Redentore, in which each item is contrived on a golden ratio base in relation to the others and with the whole.

60th Course on Palladian Architecture

PALLADIO AND MANTUA Draft programme

Vicenza, 30 August - 5 September Guido Beltramini and Howard Burns Deadline: 20 August 2018, 12:00.

Palladio and Mantua In 2018, the historical annual course on Palladio’s architecture will be dedicated to “Palladio and Mantua”.

This is an effective way to flesh out and illustrate the intuition, widely held among specialists, of the key role of Mantua and its artists – especially Leon Battista Alberti, Giulio Romano, Mantegna and Bertani – in the great Veneto architect’s education.

Now in its sixtieth edition, since 1958 the Palladian course has attracted over 7,000 architectural historians, architects, engineers, art historians and students from 50 European, American, Asian and African countries to the Veneto region.

Thursday 30 August morning Lesson at Palazzo Barbarano, Vicenza: Guido Beltramini, The Life of Andrea Palladio Vicenza: Palladio Museum, Palazzo Iseppo Porto, Palazzo Chiericati, Loggias of Palazzo della Ragione, Palazzo Thiene, monument to Lavinia Thiene in Vicenza cathedral, Palazzo Gualdo afternoon Lessons at Palazzo Barbarano, Vicenza - Howard Burns, Palladio and Mantua - Francesco Paolo Fiore, Leon Battista Alberti in Mantua - Caroline Elam, Mantegna and Painted Architecture Amedeo Belluzzi, Giulio Romano and Giovani Battista Bertani in Mantua Friday 31 August Mantua: church of San Sebastiano; Mantegna’s House, church of Sant’Andrea, Palazzo d’Arco, Bertani’s House, Cathedral, Palazzo Ducale, church of Santa Barbara

The participants on the seven-day course are offered the opportunity to visit almost all of Andrea Palladio’s works in Vicenza, Venice and the Veneto.

This year, they will also spend two days in Mantua in the company of experts, visiting the works that exercised the greatest influence over Palladio’s architecture.

Saturday 1 September morning Mantua: Giulio Romano’s House, Palazzo Te afternoon Environs of Mantua: San Benedetto Po, Abbey of San Benedetto in Polirone, Villadei Vescovi at Luvigliano, Villa Pisani at Bagnolo

Scholars

1.How to request the admission

Sunday 2 September morning Villa Godi at Lonedo Villa Valmarana at Vigardolo Villa Caldogno afternoon Villa Thiene at Quinto Vicentino PalladioLab (workshop) in Villa Gazzotti at Bertesina with Mario Piana and Damiana Paternò Monday 3 September Villa Foscari “La Malcontenta” at Mira, Villa and Tempietto Barbaro at Maser, Villa Emo at Fanzolo, Villa Cornaro at Piombino Dese Tuesday 4 September Venice: morning Boat trip on the Grand Canal, Church of the Redentore, Monastery complex of San Giorgio Maggiore, Monastery of the Carità Palladio lab (venue to be decided) Wednesday 5 September morning Villa Poiana at Poiana Maggiore Villa Capra, “La Rotonda”, Vicenza afternoon Teatro Olimpico, Loggia del Capitaniato, Palazzo Valmarana, Palazzo Da Schio

2. Registration form 13

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MAP OF THE PUBLIC

1. Logge della Basilica

1. Palazzo Civena

5. Palazzo Chiericati

10. Palazzo Valmarana

AND PRIVATE

2. Loggia del Capitanio

2. Palazzo Garzadori

3. Teatro Olimpico

3. Palazzo Thiene

6. Loggia Valmarana

11. Palazzo Barbarano (1569)

BUILDINGS

7. Casa Cogollo

12. Palazzo Porto Breganze

4. Arco delle scalette

4. Palazzo Iseppo da Porto

8. Palazzo Schio 9. Palazzo Pojana*

13. Palazzo Bonin Longare 15

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BASILICA PALLADIANA (1546)

From 1481 to 1494 Tommaso Formenton girded a doublestorey loggia around the antique Palazzo della Ragione, seat of the public Magistrature of Vicenza and, on the ground floor, of a busy group of shops. Two years after works had concluded the south-west corner collapsed, and for over forty years the Vicentines debated how it should be reconstructed. As the decades passed, the most celebrated architects working in the region were employed on the problem: Antonio Rizzo and Giorgio Spavento in 1496, Antonio Scarpagnino in 1525, then Jacopo Sansovino in 1538, Sebastiano Serlio in 1539, Michele Sanmicheli in 1541, and finally Giulio Romano (1542) who drew up a singular proposal to raise level of the Piazza delle Erbe and isolate the edifice in the centre of a grand symmetrical piazza.

Despite such illustrious advisors, in March 1546 the Citizen Council approved the project of a local architect, barely thirty-eight years old and then decidedly obscure: Andrea Palladio. The commission to his own protégŽ was without doubt one of the greatest victories of Giangiorgio Trissino, who was able to marshal a major consensus around his choice.

Even if the expert and trustworthy Giovanni da Pedemuro figured beside the young architect, as if guaranteeing the operation, to dispel any doubts the Council requested that a wooden model of one of the new arches be constructed and submitted to the scrutiny of the Vicentines.

In May 1549, after another three years of discussions which had even seen Rizzo-Spavento’s and Giulio Romano’s projects reappraised, Andrea Palladio’s scheme — with the forceful public backing of Gerolamo Chiericati and Alvise Valmarana, Palladio’s patrons for their own familial palaces in later years — received definitive approval. Various autograph drawings survive documenting the gradual honing of the project concept, from a primitive version of 1546 to the structure eventually realised.

The solution that Palladio proposed was, so to speak, an elastic structure, capable of accommodating the requisi-

te alignments with the openings and passageways of the pre-existing Quattrocento palace.

The system is based on the repetition of the so-called “serliana”, that is to say a structure composed of an open, true arch flanked by two lateral rectangular openings, the latter of variable breadth and thus capable of absorbing the differences in bay widths. This functionalism is evident in the corner arches, where the architrabeated openings are reduced almost to zero, but is present in all the bays, whose width always varies ever so slightly. The serliana (which Sebastiano Serlio published in Book IV of his treatise, published in Venice in 1537) is in reality a translation into the classical language of the Gothic polifora, utilised for the first time by Donato Bramante at Santa Maria del Popolo in Roma and, in the Veneto, already employed by Jacopo Sansovino at the Libreria Marciana in 1537.

However, the direct source of Palladio’s idea for Vicenza may be found on the interior of the church of the monastery of San Benedetto in Polirone, remodelled from 1540 onwards by Giulio Romano, who also exploited serlianas to accommodate the differences in width of the Quattrocento bays of the old church. With a certain rhetorical flourish, Palladio himself defined the Palazzo della Ragione a “basilica”, surrounded by new loggias in stone, in homage to the structures of ancient Rome where politics were discussed and business dealt.

The building campaign on the Loggias constituted a definitive turning point in Palladio’s career. With this he officially became architect of the City of Vicenza, responsible for a grandiose work (entirely made of stone which at the final reckoning would cost the notable sum of 60,000 ducats) without equal in the Venetian Cinquecento. To obtain another commission of such importance he would have to wait until the 1560s and the construction of the church of San Giorgio in Venice. At the same time, the salary of 5 ducats per month constituted an indispensable and constant source of income for Palladio and his family, one which he would not renounce for his entire life. Building works proceeded slowly: the ground floor ranges of western and northern arcades were concluded in 1561, the second storey was begun in 1564 and completed in 1597 (seventeen years after Palladio’s death, and the façade onto the Piazza delle Erbe only in 1614.

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LOGGIA DEL CAPITANIO (1565)

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© Ruggero Acqua

When one compares the Gothic arches of the Palazzo Ducale in Venezia to the loggias of Palladio’s Basilica, inspired by the classical language of ancient Rome (and even more if one compares the Cinquecento palaces of Vicenza with those on the Grand Canal) the Vicentines’ desire to emphasise a cultural autonomy from the architectural models of La Serenissima becomes quite clear. Nevertheless, twenty years later, when the Citizen Council commissioned for the same piazza the refacing of the official residence of the Venetian Captaincy, the military head in charge of the city on behalf of the Venetian Republic, Palladio would still be the protagonist of the undertaking, and the contest, if any, was between two extraordinary architectures rising one in front of the other.It is extremely rare that any architect has the possibility to intervene twice in the same place, with an interval of twenty years.

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The young architect of the Basilica, then still under the supervision of Giovanni da Porlezza, was by now the celebrated author of several important buildings: churches, palaces and villas for the dominant élite of the Veneto. Palladio chose that the two buildings not converse: confronting the purism of the Basilica’s double-storey arcades (in white stone and devoid of decoration, if one ignores the design of architectural elements like the frieze, keystones and statues) are the Loggia’s colossal engaged Composite columns stemming the tide of very rich stucco decorations.Both the use of the giant order and this decorative richness are twin traits peculiar to Palladio’s language in the last decade of his life. However, the chromatic contrast between the white of the stone and the red of the brick (even though desired by Palladio in the Convento della Carità in Venice) is only the product of the original © Ruggero Acqua

© Giorgio Marino

surfaces’ degradation: ample remains of the light stucco which once covered the bricks are still quite visible, just below the great Composite capitals.

The Palladian loggia substituted an analogous, structure which had stood on the same site from the Middle Ages, and which had already been reconstructed at least twice during the Cinquecento: a covered public loggia on the ground floor and an audience hall on the upper storey.

The new construction became economically viable in April 1571 and works began immediately. Palladio supplied the last drawings for the moulding templates in March 1572 and by the end of that year the building was roofed if Giannantonio Fasolo could paint the lacunars of the audience hall and Lorenzo Rubini execute the stuccoes and statues.

While the upper hall displays a flat, coffered ceiling, the ground floor loggia has a sophisticated vault covering, certainly to better sustain the weight of the hall. The overall design is extremely sophisticated, as for example the portals which open within the niches and follow their curvature.

It is fruitless to engage in the sterile and age-old debate on the hypothesised intentional extension of the loggia to five (or seven?) bays. What is altogether more interesting is Palladio’s compositional liberty, designing in a radically different manner the façade onto the Piazza to that on the Contra’ del Monte, thereby somewhat rupturing the building’s unitary logic.On closer observation, however, Palladio limited himself to applying an adequate response to different situations: the piazza’s broad visual frontage (also bearing in mind the dimensional constraints of the narrow façade) made necessary the powerful verticalising of the giant order; the reduced dimensions both of the building’s flank and of the Contra’ del Monte itself obliged the use of a more temperate order.

Moreover, the façade onto the Contra’ del Monte would be used as a sort of perennial triumphal arch recording the victory gained by the Venetian forces over the Turks at the battle of Lepanto in October 1571.

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TEATRO OLIMPICO (1565)

Founded in 1556, the Accademia Olimpica would have to wait over twenty years before it managed to construct a permanent venue to host the theatrical representations until then staged using ephemeral wooden structures in palace courtyards or inside the salone of the Palazzo della Ragione. Only in 1580, in fact, did the Accademia set in motion building works for the theatre (on a land near the Isola given up by the City Council of Vicenza), according to the project of their own academician, Andrea Palladio. However, in August of that year, the architect died without being able to see the outcome of his labours, finished by his son Silla.

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After Palladio, it fell to Vincenzo Scamozzi to intervene in the theatre, inserting beyond the proscenium the sets (prepared for the inaugural representation of 1585, The Seven roads of Thebes) which were thereafter destined to remain an integral part of the building. Recent studies have demonstrated that the original Palladian project made provision only for a single perspectival backdrop on axis with the central portal of the proscenium, while painted backdrops were intended to fill the two lateral openings.

The caesura of the two flanking walls, and the “soffitto [ceiling] alla ducale� above the stage, also date from the era of the Palladian project.

The Teatro Olimpico was the concrete realization of a dream, until then never achieved, of generations of Renaissance humanists and architects: to execute in permanent form one of the buildings that had become a symbol of the classical cultural tradition.

The Palladian project reconstructed the Roman theatre with an archaeological precision founded on the thorough study of Vitruvius’ text and the ruins of ancient theatrical complexes. In this sense it constitutes a sort of spiritual testament to the great Vicentine architect.

With the Teatro Olimpico was reborn the theatre of the Ancients, and in its creation Palladio attained an absolute consonance with the language of great classical architecture, a language in which, over an entire lifetime, “with long labours, and great industry and love�, he had sought to rediscover the laws of secret harmony.

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Juvenile, minor and unfinished works (1531 - 1548) 1531

PORTALE CHIESA S: MARIA DEI SERVI

1534

VILLA TRISSINO AI CRICOLI It is uncertain whether this villa was designed by Palladio, but it is one of the centres if not, in fact, the origin of his myth. For, tradition holds that right here, in the second half of the 1530s, the Vicentine noble Giangiorgio Trissino (1478-1550) met the young mason Andrea di Pietro at work on the building of his villa. Somehow intuiting the youth’s potential and talent, Trissino took charge of his future formation, introduced him into the Vicentine aristocracy and, in the space of a few short years, transformed him into the architect who bore the aulic name of Palladio.

Giangiorgio Trissino was a man of letters, the author of works for the theatre and on grammar. In Rome he had been received into the restricted cultural circle of Pope Leo X Medici, where he had met Raphael. An able connoisseur of architecture (his drawings for his own city palace and the draft of a treatise on architecture still survive), he was probably personally responsible for the remodelling of the family villa at Cricoli, just outside Vicenza, which he had inherited from his father.

Trissino did not demolish the pre-existing building, but redesigned it to give priority to the principal façade facing south. This gesture was a sort of manifesto of membership in the new constructional culture based on the rediscovery of ancient Roman architecture. Between the two existing towers Trissino inserted a two-storey, arcaded loggia which was directly inspired by Raphael’s façade of the Villa Madama in Rome, as published

by Sebastiano Serlio in the Terzo Libro dell’Architettura (published in Venice in 1540). Trissino reorganised the spaces into a sequence of lateral rooms, which differ in dimensions but are linked by a system of inter-related proportions (1:1; 2:3; 1:2), a matrix which would become a key theme in Palladio’s design method.

Building works were certainly concluded by 1538. At the end of the eighteenth century the Vicentine architect Ottone Calderari heavily modified the structure, and in the first years of the twentieth century a second campaign of works cancelled out the last traces of the Gothic building by accomplishing its belated “Palladianisation”.

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1537 1545

PORTALE DOMUS COMESTABILIS MONUMENTO A GIROLAMO SCHIO 2 PALAZZO GARZADORI Girolamo Garzadori between 1545 and 1563 initiated the renovations of houses inherited from his uncle Battista Graziani on Piancoli street.

Palladio was perhaps requested to provide a study on the matter.

1546

VILLA ARNALDI (unfinished) At a passing glance it might seem strange to include this modest and evidently incomplete building — today unfortunately also in bad repair — alongside the grandiose Palladian villas. But in reality, the Villa Arnaldi provides precious evidence of a process which is usually visible only from the final results: the transformation of a pre-existing building into a new architecture.

Indeed, in 1547 Vincenzo Arnaldi, one of Vicenza’s richest and most influential personages, commissioned Andrea Palladio to restructure the Quattrocento agricultural complex which he had just acquired.

A series of autograph drawings allow us to follow the architect’s ideas for remodelling the irregular Quattrocento complex, his attempts to regularise the buildings which defined its farmyard and find a symmetry within the new spatial layout of the house. The latter he organised around a loggia with three arches and minor, rectangular openings on its flanks (still extant though now blocked) — and, also, framed its windows with his usual mouldings.

1548

PALAZZO VOLPE At the end of the 1540’s, Antonio Volpe, in 1551 superintendent to the Basilica Loggia, decided to remodel the front of his Gothic home on contr’a Gazzolle. It is possible the design was done by Palladio.

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PALAZZO CIVENA (1540)

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© Ruggero Acqua

The first city palace that Palladio built in Vicenza was constructed for the brothers Giovanni Giacomo, Pier Antonio, Vincenzo and Francesco Civena.

The date “1540” engraved on the foundation medal, preserved in the Museo Civico di Vicenza, fixes the laying of the foundation stone to that year. The building was probably finished twenty-four months later, six months before the start of works on the great Palazzo Thiene.

The history of the palace, however, is unfortunate: heavily modified

by Domenico Cerato in 1750, it was half destroyed by bombardment during World War II and thence reconstructed only for its façade to be subjected to a recent, vulgar repainting which has rendered it a shadow of its former self.

Palazzo Civena was not included in the Quattro Libri, but various autograph drawings by Palladio exist to document the several alternatives he elaborated during the design stage. Today’s distribution of internal spaces does not replicate Palladio’s definitive idea but is the fruit of Cerato’s heavy interventions, which prolonged the atrium and modified the stairs.

The original plan, however, may be reconstructed thanks to a ninete-

enth-century survey published in 1776 by Ottavio Bertotti Scamozzi (according to whom it was obtained from the proprietors): the grouping of rooms in two nuclei placed to either side of the atrium, with a serliana providing the filter to the exterior, is very close to Palladio’s villa projects in the same years.

The very early date of the project makes Palazzo Civena precious evidence of Palladio’s youthful activity and his architectural culture before the decisive journey to Rome in 1541. As was already the case with the villa at Cricoli, this building marks a rupture with constructional praxis in Vicenza: the traditional polifora at the centre of the façade has been substituted with a regular sequence of bays, rhythmically articulated by paired pilasters.

In this respect Palladio was evidently inspired by the Roman palaces of the early Cinquecento, but it is clear that this did not result from direct acquaintance: the building’s façade is devoid of any real plastic substance and seems cut from a sheet of paper. Moreover, all the elements of his architectural vocabulary derive from Venetian models, not Roman ones, above all the buildings realised by Giovanni Maria Falconetto in Padua.

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PALAZZO THIENE (1542)

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© Giorgio Marino

In October 1542 Marcantonio and Adriano Thiene began to remodel their Quattrocentesco family palace to a grandiose project, which would have occupied an entire city block of 54 x 62 metres and faced onto Vicenza’s principal artery (today’s Corso Palladio). The rich, powerful and sophisticated Thiene brothers belonged to that great Italian nobility which could moved with ease between Europe’s most important courts: they therefore required a domestic stage adequate for the cosmopolitan nobility of their guests who might visit them. At the same time, as exponents of a well-defined, political faction in the city’s aristocracy, they desired a princely palace to emphasise their proper role in the city itself, as the sign of their true seigniorial power.

When, in 1614, the English architect Inigo Jones visited the palace he noted down information directly garnered from Vincenzo Scamozzi and Palma il Giovane: “this project was made by Giulio Romano and executed by Palladio”. Most probably, in fact, the original conception of the Palazzo Thiene should be attributed to the mature and expert Giulio Romano (from 1573 at the Mantuan court of the Gonzagas, with whom the Thiene enjoyed the closest rapport) and the young Palladio was responsible rather for the executive design and execution of the building, a role which became ever more essential after Giulio’s death 24

in 1546.

The elements of the palace which are attributable to Giulio and alien to Palladio’s vocabulary are clearly recognisable: the four-column atrium is substantially identical with that of the Palazzo del Te (even if Palladio indubitably modified its vaulting system); also Giulian are the windows and the ground storey façades onto the street and courtyard, while Palladio must have been defined the upper storey trabeation and capitals.

Works began on the building in 1542. In December of the same year, Giulio Romano visited Vicenza for two weeks as a consultant on the Loggias for the Basilica. Probably on this occasion he supplied the outline project for the Palazzo Thiene. But works proceeded slowly: on the external façade is inscribed the date 1556, and in the courtyard 1558.

In 1552 Adriano Thiene died in France and thereafter, when Marcantonio’s son Giulio became Marchese di Scandiano, family interests gradually shifted to Ferrara. As a result only a small portion of the grandiose project was ever realised, but probably neither the Venetians nor the other Vicentine nobles would have accepted such a private kingdom in the centre of their city.

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© Giorgio Marino

PALAZZO ISEPPO DA PORTO (1546)

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It is very probable that Iseppo (Giuseppe) Porto’s decision to undertake construction of a great palace in the Contrada dei Porti was taken to emulate the edifice that his brothers-in-law Adriano and Marcantonio Thiene had begun to erect, in 1542, only a stone’s throw away.

Allied with the Thiene, the Porto were one of the city’s rich and powerful families, and the palaces of the family’s various branches were ranked along the Contrada which today still bears their name. Iseppo was an influential personality, with various responsibilities in the public administration of the city, responsibilities which on more than one occasion were intertwined with the assignments entrusted to Palladio.

Relations between the two must very probably have been closer than between patron and architect, if we consider that thirty years after the project for Iseppo’s city palace Palladio designed and began to build a great villa for him at Molina di Malo, subsequently never completed. The two friends died in the same year, 1580. The palace was inhabitable from December 1549, though less than half the façade was standing and would only be completed three years later, in 1552.

Numerous autograph drawings by Palladio record the complex design process. They show that right from the beginning Palladio planned for two distinct, residential blocks, one to lie along the street and the other contiguous to the back wall of the courtyard.

In the Quattro Libri the two blocks are interconnected by a majestic courtyard with enormous Composite columns: this is quite clearly a re-elaboration of the original idea in the interests of publication. Compared with the Palazzo Civena, only built a few years earlier, the Palazzo Porto fully illustrates the extent of Palladio’s evolution after the journey to Rome in 1541 and his acquaintance with both antique and contemporary architecture.

The Bramantean model of Palazzo Caprini is here reinterpreted, with Palladio observing the Vicentine custom of living on the ground floor, which is higher as a result. The splendid, fourcolumned atrium represents Palladio’s reinterpretation of Vitruvian spaces, but one where traditional Vicentine typologies also survive.

The two rooms to the left of the atrium were frescoed by Paolo Veronese and Domenico Brusasorzi, while the stuccoes are by Ridolfi. On the palace attic, the statues of Iseppo and his son Leonida, in antique Roman garb, keep watch over the entrance of visitors to their house.

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© Ruggero Acqua

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PALAZZO CHIERICATI (1550)

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In November 1550, Girolamo Chiericati recorded a payment to Palladio in his own “account book” for the designs of his palace in the city, sketched out at the beginning of the year. In the same month, Girolamo was appointed to supervise the administration of the building works on the Loggias of the Basilica, inaugurated in May 1549.

This coincidence was not remotely casual: along with Trissino, Chiericati was among those who sponsored entrusting this prestigious public commission to the young architect, for whose interests he had personally fought in the Council, and to whom he would turn for the design of his own home. Moreover, a few years later his brother Giovanni would also commission from Palladio the villa at Vancimuglio.

In 1546 Girolamo had inherited a few old houses looking onto the socalled “Piazza dell’Isola”, an open space on the southern outskirts of the city, which owed its name to the fact that it was bordered on two sides by the Retrone and the Bacchiglione, whose courses flowed into each other.

As the city’s river port, the “Isola” was the seat of the timber and cattle markets. The tiny size of the old existing houses induced Girolamo to ask the City Council for permission to utilise a strip of roughly four and a half metres of public land in front of his properties in order to realise the portico of his house on the site, but guaranteeing its public use.

Once the request was accepted building work begun immediately in 1551, only to halt in 1557 on the death of Girolamo, whose son Valerio limited himself to decorating the internal spaces, employing an extraordinary équipe of artists which included Ridolfi, Zelotti, Fasolo, Forbicini and Battista Franco.

For more than a century Palazzo Chiericati remained a majestic fragment (similar to the present state of the Palazzo Porto in the Piazza Castello) interrupted half way along its fourth bay, as documented in the Pianta Angelica and voyagers’ sketchbooks.

Only at the end of the Seicento would it be completed according to the design in the Quattro Libri.

Several autograph drawings by Palladio survive to record the evolution of the project, from the first solution where the portico projects only at the centre of the façade (as well as being capped by a pediment, like that later executed on the Villa Cornaro) to the actual one. The plan

was determined by the site’s narrow dimensions: a central bi-apsidal atrium is flanked by two nuclei of three rooms of harmonically linked dimensions (3:2; 1:1; 3:5), each with its own spiral service stair and a further, monumental one to one side of the back loggia (another element which will return in the Villa Pisani and Villa Cornaro).

To endow the building with magnificence, but also to protect it from the frequent floods (and from the cattle sold in front of the palace on market days), Palladio raised the palace on a podium, whose central section displays a stairway clearly adapted from an antique temple.

The extraordinary novelty which the Palazzo Chiericati offers in the panorama of renaissance urban residences owes a great deal to Palladio’s capacity to interpret the site on which it rises: a great open space on the margins of the city, in front of the river, a context which rendered it an ambiguous building, simultaneously palazzo and villa suburbana.

It is no coincidence that many affinities exist with the Villa Cornaro at Piombino and the Villa Pisani at Montagnana, which were moreover constructed during the same years.

On the Piazza dell’Isola, Palladio set a façade with a two-storey loggia capable of visually holding the open space, and which also established one side of a hypothetical, ancient, Roman Forum.

Even though superimposed loggias are present in Peruzzi’s Palazzo Massimo in Rome and in the Antique Courtyard of the Bo by Moroni in Padua, the use to which Palladio puts them on the façade of the Palazzo Chiericati is absolutely unheralded in terms of its power and expressive awareness.

The Basilica and Palazzo Chiericati represent Palladio’s definitive passage from the eclecticism of his early years to the full maturity of a language where the stimuli and sources of both the Antique and contemporary architecture are absorbed into a system by now specifically Palladian.

This is the first occasion on which the loggia flank is closed by a wall section containing an arch: a solution adopted from the Portico di Ottavia in Rome which will thereafter become usual practice in the pronaos of his villas.

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LOGGIA VALMARANA (1559)

Giacomo Valmarana, owner of vast plot of land outside Porta Castello, probably commissioned Palladio to design a loggia overlooking a garden.

The date shown on the loggia is 1552 with the name of Leonardo Valmarana, should refer to the opening of the park to the public as decided by Leonardo that year.

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CASA COGOLLO (1559)

DISCOVER PALLADIO Known as the “home of Palladio”, the building has indeed nothing to do with the home of the master artist from Vicenza. In fact, the renovation of the facade concerning his fifteenth century mansion was commissioned by the Maggior Consiglio to the notary Pietro Cogollo as a contribution to the “decorum of the town”, upon positive acceptance of his request to obtain the Vicentine citizenship.

The constraints resulting from a cramped space and the inability to open the windows in the middle of the main floor because of the presence of a fireplace (and its chimney) rod guide Palladio to focus on the facade axis, creating a structure consisting of a ground floor arcade complemented by columns and on the upper floor of a sort of tabernacle framing a fresco by Giovanni Antonio Fasolo.

The result is a composition of great monumental and expressive force, despite the simplicity of the available means.

In the absence of documents and autograph designs, the attribution to Palladio of this most elegant façade still divides scholars. Yet, because of the intelligence of the architectural solution proposed, as well as the design of all the details, it is difficult to refer the project to any other designer.

© Carmen Menguzzato

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PALAZZO POJANA (1560) 8

The palace we see today was created from two buildings separated by the alley known as Due Ruote, probably in 1566, following upon a request by Vincenzo Poiana to the Comune of Vicenza in 1561.

The attribution to Palladio is founded neither on documentary evidence nor on autograph drawings, but rather on the evidence of the architectural quality of the articulation of the piano nobile, with its order which embraces two whole floors, not to mention the design of various details, like the very elegant and fleshy composite capitals and the trabeation.

However, elements such as the pilasters devoid of “entasis” (that is to say the characteristic swelling which culminates at a third of the shaft’s height) conform so little with Palladio’s vocabulary in the 1560s, that one may hypothesize that the design of the left-hand portion of the palace was the product of a youthful project by Palladio, only later extended to include the neighbouring building during the 1560s, when Poiana decided to enlarge his own residence. This would also explain the differences in the configuration of the basement zone between the two halves of the building.

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PALAZZO SCHIO (1560) 9

In 1560 Palladio designed for Bernardo Schio the façade of his house in Vicenza, in the neighbourhood of the Ponte Pusterla.

Since Palladio was occupied in these years with a series of Venetian projects which required his almost permanent presence in the capital, his supervision of the building works on the Palazzo Schio became so distracted that the master-mason charged with its execution interrupted works for want of any clear instructions.

After Bernardo’s death his widow showed no interest in concluding the works, which were only completed by Bernardo’s brother Fabrizio, in 1574-1575, after the stones and other construction materials had long lain piled up in the villa’s courtyard.

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PALAZZO VALMARANA (1565)

DISCOVER PALLADIO The foundation medal was engraved with the date of 1566 and Isabella Nogarola Valmarana’s effigy, being the latter to sign the contracts for the construction with the builders for the construction in

© Giorgio Marino

December 1565.

The planimetric irregularity of the internal spaces doubtless derives from the oblique orientation of the façade and of pre-existing walls. In this sense it becomes quite evident just how much the Olympian regularity of the palace illustrated in the Quattro Libri was the product of Palladio’s usual theoretical abstraction, especially since not only was the extension of the palace beyond the square courtyard never realised, but nor does it seem it was even intended by Leonardo Valmarana, who bought up neighbouring properties rather than continuing the construction of the family palace.

Valmarana mansion facade is one of the most elegant Palladian achievements.

For the first time in a palace, a giant order encompasses the entire vertical perspective of the building: this is clearly a solution that stems from Palladio trials on the facades of religious buildings, such as the almost contemporary façade by San Francesco della Vigna.

As in the church, even on the Valmarana mansion facade there is a clear layering of two systems: the giant order of six composite pilasters seems to overlap on a minor order of Corinthian pilasters, in a way that becomes more evident at the edges, whereas the lack of the final pillar reveals the underlying setting, which supports the relief of armed man holding the insignia of Valmarana.

Rather than abstract geometrical constructions, the compositional logic of these civil and religious façades derived from Palladio’s familiarity with the techniques of draughting, in particular the orthogonal representations by which he visualised projects and reconstructed antique buildings, and which moreover allowed him a punctilious control over the relationships between the building’s interior and exterior.

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PALAZZO BARBARANO DA PORTO (1569)

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The sumptuous residence realised between 1570 and 1575 for the Vicentine noble Montano Barbarano is the only great city palace that Andrea Palladio succeeded in executing in its entirety. At least three different autograph projects survive, preserved in London, which document alternative hypotheses for the building’s plan, all quite different from the actual one and testimony to a complex design process. Barbarano, in fact, requested Palladio to respect the existence of various houses belonging to the family and already existing on the area of the new palace. Moreover, once the project was finalised Barbarano acquired a further house adjoining the property, which resulted in the asymmetrical positioning of the entrance portal. In any case, the constraints imposed by the site and by a practical patron became the occasion for courageous and refined solutions: Palladio’s intervention is magisterial, elaborating upon a sophisticated project for “restructuring” which blended the diverse pre-existing structures into a unified edifice.

On the ground floor, a magnificent four-columned atrium welds together the two pre-existing building lots. In realising the scheme, Palladio was called upon to resolve two problems: one statical, how to support the floor of the great hall on the piano nobile; the other compositional, how to restore a symmetrical appearance to interiors compromised by the oblique course of the perimeter walls from the pre-existing houses. Departing from the model of the wings of the Theatre of Marcellus in Rome, Palladio divided the interior into three aisles, placing centrally four Ionic columns which allowed the reduction of the span of the central crossvaults, set against lateral barrel vaults. He thus achieved a very statically efficient framework capable of bearing the floor of the hall above without any difficulty.

The central columns were then tied to the perimeter walls by fragments of rectilinear trabeation, which absorb the irregularities of the atrium plan: in this way he realised a sort of system of “serlianas”, a stratagem conceptually similar to that of the Basilica loggias. Palladio even adopted the unusual type of Ionic capital — derived from the Temple of Saturn in the Forum Romanum — because it permitted him to mask the slight but significant rotations necessary to align the columns and engaged columns.

To decorate the palace, in several campaigns Montano employed some of the greatest artists of his time: Battista Zelotti (who had already intervened in the interiors of Palladio’s Villa Emo at Fanzolo), Anselmo Canera and Andrea Vicentino; the stuccoes were entrusted to Lorenzo Rubini and, after his death in 1574, to his son Agostino. The net result was a sumptuous palace capable of rivalling the residences of the Thiene, the Porto and of the Valmarana, a palace which permitted its patron to represent himself to the city as an ranking member of the Vicentine cultural élite.

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PALAZZO PORTO BREGANZE (1571)

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Š Ruggero Acqua

The impressive mansion section that serves as scenic backdrop for the Castle Square is the obvious evidence of the unfortunate outcome of a Palladian building site.

On the left of the unit the old fifteenth century house of the Porto family, which was destined to be gradually demolished with the progress of the new mansion construction site, is clearly visible: given the results, one can not but appreciate the far-sighted prudence of the patron, Alessandro Porto.

The dating is uncertain, though undoubtedly after 1570, both because the Palazzo was not included in the Quattro Libri and also because Alessandro inherited the family properties in Piazza Castello after the death of his father Benedetto, at the time of the division of the family goods with his brothers Orazio and Pompeo in 1571.

Francesco Thiene, the owner of the homonymous Palazzo by Palladio at the other end of the Piazza, married Isabella Porto, Alessandro’s si-

ster, and just as in the cases of Iseppo Porto and his brothers-in-law Marcantonio and Adriano Thiene, it was perhaps really the rivalry between the two families which instigated the unusual dimensions of Palazzo Porto. On the other hand, the location of the Palazzo, as backdrop to the Piazza, made necessary an accentuated monumentality capable of dominating this great, open, fronting space: a logic with which Palladio had experimented a few years previously in the Loggia del Capitaniato, in the Piazza dei Signori.

In all probability the Palazzo was intended to grow to seven bays in length and have a courtyard concluding in an exedra, as analysis of the surviving walls demonstrates.

It is unclear what circumstances halted the construction, which Vincenzo Scamozzi declares he had personally carried to its present, partial, conclusion in 1615.

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PALAZZO THIENE BONIN-LONGARE (1572)

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© Giorgio Marino

There are more doubts than certainties surrounding the history of the villa that Francesco Thiene built on family properties at the eastern extremity of the Strada Maggiore (today the Corso Palladio), beginning with the exact date of its construction. In his treatise L’Idea della Architettura Universale (published in Venice in 1615), Vincenzo Scamozzi writes that he was responsible for completing the building’s construction on the basis of a project by another architect (without specifying whom) with certain revisions to the original design (which, he does not clarify).

The architect that Scamozzi does not name is certainly Andrea Palladio, because two autograph sheets survive which can be referred to Francesco Thiene’s palace: on these are traced two plan variants, substantially close to the present building, as well as a sketch for the façade which is very different from that executed. It is unclear when Palladio formulated his own ideas for the palazzo, but it is credible 34

that he did so in 1572, the year in which Francesco Thiene and his uncle Orazio divided up the family properties and the former obtained the very site where Palladio’s edifice would rise.

If one analyses the realised building, various elements stand out which favour a dating to the 1570s: for example, the many points of contact with the Palazzo Barbaran da Porto, both in the design of the lower part and in the great, double-storey loggia of the courtyard.

Instead, the side could be the work of Vincenzo Scamozzi, given its affinities with the Palazzo Trissino by the Duomo. The deep atrium, which is substantially indifferent to the grid of orders, could also be by Scamozzi and it is interesting to note that while the rooms on its right, as one enters, clearly reuse rather irregular, pre-existing walls, those on the left are perfectly regular and evidently rise from new foundations.

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ARCO DELLE SCALETTE (1595)

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Š Augusto Mia Battaglia

Both the origin and the authorship of the arch which gave start to the access path towards the Sanctuary of Monte Berico before the realization of the porticoes of Francesco Muttoni in the mid eighteenth century, appear indefinite. The date of construction, i.e. 1595, and the identity of the patron, the Venetian Captain James Bragadino, seem to be ascertained. The demands by the friars of the Sanctuary, dating back to 1574- 1576, who called for financial support from the Community for

restoring the entire path of the so-called Scalette (i..e. stairways) , are also documented, but there is no evidence that the arch was included in the overall renovation, which moreover concerned the Sanctuary as well. The original configuration of the arch, which in seventeenth-century pictures is featured by frontal niches, then placed in the intrados so as to allow room for the Annunciazione (i.e. Annunciation) by Orazio Marinali, remains equally uncertain.

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THE VILLAS

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MAP OF THE PALLADIAN VILLAS IN VICENZA

1534

0. Villa Trissino in Cricoli

1537

1. Villa Godi a Lonedo di Lugo

1539

2. Villa Piovene Porto Godi a Lonedo di Lugo

1542

3. Villa Valmarana a Vigardolo

1542

1542

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1549

10. Villa Agugliaro a Bassano del Grappa

1550

11. Villa Chiericati a Vancimuglio

1553

12. Villa Trissino a Meledo di Sarego (barchesse)

1554

13. Villa Porto a Dueville

1563

14. Villa Valmarana a Bertesina

1564

15. Villa Forni

1564

16. Villa Porto a Molina di Malo

1566

17 .Villa Capra a Vicenza

4. Villa Gazzotti a Bertesina

5. Villa Thiene a Quinto Vic.no

1542

6. Villa Pisani a Bagnolo di Lonigo

1548

7. Villa Saraceno a Finale di Agugliaro

1548

8. Villa Caldogno a Caldogno

1549

9. Villa Pojana a Pojana Maggiore

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DISCOVER PALLADIO VILLAS OF PALLADIO Andrea Palladio certainly had the humility to listen to the needs, especially economic, of his clients. He knew that the will of the acommittenza weighed and that, to some extent, it was force to support them and once confesses that he did “as much as he could” It was for his extraordinary ability to adapt the projects to the preexisting medieval buildings that the noblemen of Vicenza chose to remodel, expand or replace altogether those agricultural artifacts that had become obsolete, or that needed to be adapted to the new landowner’s needs of have ample space for the servants, the storage of tools and all those rooms to be used as kitchens and the indepensable processing for the estate of the agricultural fund.

Palladio had the opportunity to test his classic art with the different situations of the moment, so he designed large stairways to access the housing plan in order to preserve those rooms on the ground floor with vaults in the morning, built with great skill by the builders of the gorico period, also inducing a new model of “barchessa” able to connect and enclose in a semi-circle the production activity, dominated at its center by the imposing prospect of the manor house.

Apart from Villa Capra, designed to respond to the client’s need to withdraw a “sacred” space suitable for comtemplation and meditation, the design of country villas is based on a rational process of synthesis of several factors that have contributed to define the uniqueness of each specific solution.

The genius of Palladio consists not only in reproducing the hidden harmony of the architectural forms celebrated by Vitruvius in the first century. d. C, but to converge material aspects (economic needs, function, production of the client) with immaterial aspects (light, orientation, color, empty and full spaces) that still represent the language of Palladian architectural poetry.

The poetics of Palladio is a reality made of light and that lives in the light, it is a vision of colors and shapes that mix with emotions of harmony and perfection, it is an incessant search for unique solutions designed for a real site and an ideal site generated by creative imagination.

From this operation of conjunction between “Ratio and Experientia” emerges the unique and unrepeatable art of Palladio to be able to transfigure the material condition of the agricultural land in incomparable landscape, giving life to that event, unproductible for the rational-speculative intellect, to sublimate architecture in that intelligible light, capable of reinforcing, in those who perceive it, a rivivied faith in human genius.

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VILLA GODI (1537)

Palladio’s construction of the villa at Lonedo for the brothers Girolamo, Pietro and Marcantonio Godi began in 1537 and concluded in 1542. In all probability this was not an autonomous commission, but rather one obtained through the workshop of Gerolamo Pittoni and Giacomo da Porlezza, where the young Andrea enjoyed the position of architectural specialist. In reality, the work of restructuring the family estate had already begun in 1533, when a Doric barchessa was built in the left courtyard at the behest of Enrico Antonio Godi.

This is Andrea’s first certain work (he declares his authorship in the Quattro Libri) and marks the first step in his attempt to construct a new residential typology for the countryside. Here is first evident Palladio’s desire to interweave themes from local building tradition with those newly and gradually discovered thanks to Trissino.

The outcome is a severe building from which all the precious decorations typical of the Quattrocento tradition have been © Carmen Menguzzato 40

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banned. Clearly symmetrical, the building is arranged around precisely defined volumes, an arrangement obtained by recessing the central part of the façade which becomes a loggia with three open arches. The same strong symmetry characterises the building’s plan, organised around the long central axis from loggia to salone, hierarchically flanked by two apartments of four rooms each.

From the end of the 1540s decorative campaigns began on the interiors, initially under Gualtiero Padovano, who frescoed the loggia and the right wing of the building, and later on (the early 1560s) under both Battista Zelotti, who was active in the salone and in the rooms of the left wing, and Battista del Moro, who decorated the last room before the loggia. Contemporaneously with this decorative campaign, Palladio returned to work on the building, modifying the back opening of the salone and designing the back garden as a hemicycle and executing the splendid well parapet.

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VILLA PIOVENE PORTO GODI (1539)

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A more doubts than certainties surround Andrea Palladio’s Muttoni constructed the actual lateral barchesse, laid out the involvement in the execution of the Villa Piovene, which rises garden and probably executed the double-ramp stairs which only a few hundred metres from the Villa Godi. First of all, lead to the loggia. The scenographic stair by which one accethe building was not included in the Quattro Libri, although des to the villa, however, was certainly realised some years other certainly autograph villas were also excluded (such as prior together with the handsome gate of 1703. the Villa Gazzotti or the Villa Valmarana at Vigardolo). But it is the characteristics of the building itself which are most perplexing: the plan is hardly sophisticated, the windows pierce the façade without any particular order, and the pro© Augusto Mia Battaglia naos is awkwardly joined to the building block.

The villa is certainly the product of three campaigns of work: documents demonstrate the existence of a manorial house, smaller than the present one and certainly constructed before 1541, which was enlarged at a later stage by the addition of the pronaos bearing the inscribed date 1587. Finally, in the first half of the eighteenth century, the architect Francesco 41

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VILLA VALMARANA BRESSAN (1541)

In the early 1540s Palladio designed a small villa for the cousins Giuseppe and Antonio Valmarana, at their commonly inherited estate in Vigardolo. The necessity of lodging two familial groups within the building may explain the layout of the rooms here, which are organised into two autonomous and symmetrical apartments, accessible from the posterior salone rather than the front loggia which the two cousins held in common.

The extremely precocious date of the Villa Valmarana places this project amongst the architect’s first autonomous trials, and is documented by a rich group of autograph drawings. One of these (RIBA XVII/2r) is quite evidently the preparatory project for the actual building. The differences between the drawing and the executed building may be explained by the difficulties which arose in the construction phase: the high podium for housing the semi-basement service quarters is missing in the realised building (it was impractical because of the presence © Carmen Menguzzato of numerous water courses), as is the broken pediment, and 42

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a mezzanine was added in construction. Likewise, the loggia ceiling is actually flat rather than vaulted. Fragments of wall decorations demonstrate that originally the villa was completely frescoed. This building is a transitional project, but one in which we find the characteristic traits of Palladio’s architectural language completely formulated for the first time. In fact, elements proper to the local Vicentine building tradition are noticeable in this villa, like the room disposition — which reproduces that of the Villa Trissino at Cricoli — and particularly the linking of the lateral rooms by precise proportional consonances (2:3:5, and precisely 12.18 and 30 Vicentine feet). Coexisting with these are formal motifs derived from the great, antique, thermal structures which Palladio had experienced directly on his first journey to Rome in 1541. These are quite evident in the loggia, in the vaulted structures of the rooms and in the serliana which if used to filter the external environment.

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VILLA GAZZOTTI GRIMANI CURTI (1542)

Andrea Palladio designed the Villa for Taddeo Gazzotti between 1542 and 1543. Taddeo was not of aristocratic birth, but was a cultivated man, passionate for music, with family ties (acquired by marriage) to Antenore Pagello, a celebrated member of the Vicentine nobility, and a proponent — together with Giangiorgio Trissino — of the city’s architectural renewal. Unfortunately, an ill-advised speculation on the salt duty led to Gazzotti’s ruin and in 1550 he was constrained to sell his villa, still in construction, to the Venetian patrician Girolamo Grimani, who completed it within the space of a few years.

In designing the villa, Palladio had primarily to come to terms with the necessity of absorbing a pre-existing tower-house — cited in the documents and still easily visible on the executed building’s right corner — within an up-to-date and coherent ensemble. In the end, Palladio duplicated the tower at the building’s other extremity and created two symmetrical apartments of three rooms each, connected by a barrel-vaulted log-

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gia to the great cross-vaulted stair.

The building structure, which is long but not very deep, bound by a full-height Composite order and sporting a central loggia, strongly reflects the influence of Giulio Romano’s Palazzo del Te in Mantua and the contemporary project for the great villa of the brothers Thiene at Quinto. The emphasis on the crossshaped hall and the presence of three-unit apartments belong to a design language which will become gradually ever more refined.

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VILLA THIENE (1542)

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© Carmen Menguzzato

The Villa Thiene at Quinto, like the family palace in Vicenza, was probably built for Marcantonio and Adriano Thiene according to a project by Giulio Romano then modified by the director of the building works, Palladio. Overlooking the river Tesina, it is situated at the centre of the Thiene’s two great agricultural courts. The project proposed a solution quite different from that in other Palladian villas: the structure is dominated by a great barrel-vaulted loggia much higher than the rest of the building, while the exterior is articulated with Doric pilasters which are doubled-up on the shorter sides. The structure is executed in brick — now visible but originally rendered — with the use of white stone limited to the bases, capitals, window-sills and the angles of the cornice and pediment. The remaining moulded parts were carried out in terracotta.

The project was drawn up between 1542 and 1543, contemporary with that for the Palazzo Thiene, and construction halted 44

most likely in the 1550s: the death of Adriano (at the French court where he was in the service of François III) and the shift of the family interests to Ferrara, after the acquisition of the fief and title of Count of Scandiano by Marcantonio’s son Ottavio, probably account for the building’s incompletion.

In 1614 Inigo Jones recorded in his copy of the Quattro Libri the incomplete state of the building, whose loggia was unvaulted.

A campaign by Francesco Muttoni, certainly earlier than 1740, heavily modified the building: although he preserved the executed apartments, he eliminated the great loggia and created a new main façade towards the south. What were originally intended to be the building’s flanks, therefore, were rotated 90 degrees to become today’s façades. Frescoes executed by Giovanni Demio in the early 1550s remain in the two left-hand rooms.

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VILLA PISANI BONETTI (1542)

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The execution of the Villa Pisani at Bagnolo, from 1542 on, would a wide thermal window: this space differs radically, in dimenconstitute a true turning point in Palladio’s career. In the project sions and formal qualities, from the halls of pre-Palladian vilfor the Villa Pisani, Palladio’s objective was an ambitious one: las, which are traditionally smaller and covered by a flat ceiling to realise a country residence catering to the refined tastes of with wooden beams. The rich, pictorial decorations in fresco, the Pisani brothers and at the same time capable of providing with scenes taken from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and probably a concrete, rational and organising focus for the entire complex executed by Francesco Torbido (1482/84-1561), initiate a dialoof agricultural annexes. In fact, Palladio succeeded in inserting gue with the architectural space and exalt its monumentality. A the manorial block, stables, barchesse and dovecotes all within rich dossier of autograph drawings, today preserved in London, a unified design. That is, he disposed all the elements which in document the evolution of Palladio’s project. The early designs the Quattrocento villa had faced the farmyard in©aAugusto casualMia ar-Battaglia are crowded with ideas drawn from the architecture, ancient rangement devoid of functional and formal hierarchies. At the and modern, that he had just seen on his Roman visit (from Rasame time, he translated the practical necessities of agricultural phael’s Villa Madama to Bramante’s Belvedere, even the Caplife into innovatory forms, articulated in a language inspired by pella Paolina by Sangallo) cheek by jowl with more specifically ancient architecture. Like a Roman temple, the villa rises on a Venetian elements: the layout of the rooms, the loggia bracketed high basement, which emphasises the building and conceals the by two small towers (as in the Villa Trissino at Cricoli) or the service areas. The great T-shaped, central hall is barrel-vaulted powerful, Sanmichelian, bossed masonry on the river frontage. like ancient bath buildings, richly decorated and illuminated by 45

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VILLA SARACENO (1543)

At the end of the 1540s Andrea Palladio was called upon by Biagio Saraceno to redesign an existing agricultural farm at Finale di Agugliaro, long the property of his family. Possibly, Palladio’s project originally anticipated the overall remodelling of the complex: in the Quattro Libri Palladio shows the building clamped between two great, right-angled barchesse. However, no such global restructuring was ever effected and Palladio’s intervention was confined to the manorial block: on the right side of the farm-yard the buildings are still today Quattrocento, while the barchessa was constructed at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Whatever the case, the villa block is among the most felicitous of Palladio’s creations from the 1540s. The building displays an extraordinary, almost ascetic, simplicity and is a pure volume realised in brick and render from which every decorative element has been banned. The sparing use of carved stone is limited toMenguzzato the most significant architectural elements (like the © Carmen 46

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windows and portals) and to the structural parts. It is only the design itself which infuses the building with magnificence, despite its reduced dimensions, as it derives its proper elements from the ancient Roman temple: the piano nobile is elevated from the earth and sits on a podium (which quarters the cellars); the façade loggia is crowned by a triangular pediment.

Small windows light the attic where the grain was normally stored.

Even in plan the villa is of disarming simplicity: two minor spaces designed to accommodate the stairs result in the “T”-shape of the salone, to whose sides are set twin coupled rooms interlinked by proportional consonances.

The outset of works may be dated to the time period falling between the two cost estimates: in the first (dated 1546) the preexisting manorial block is still mentioned, but in the second (of 1555) the new Palladian villa is described. Possibly, the construction itself dates to 1548

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VILLA CALDOGNO (1545)

In 1541 Losco Caldogno, a Vicentine aristocrat and busy silk merchant, inherited a farm complex and numerous fields at Caldogno, a few kilometres north of Vicenza.

Since he was bound by close family ties to patrons of Palladio such as the Muziani and (later) the Godi, Caldogno quite likely commissioned Palladio to remodel the farmyard complex. We have no precise information on the dating of the intervention: it is only possible to fix the beginning of works to 1542, to note that the house was certainly habitable in 1567, and that the date “1570” inscribed on the façade probably indicates the end of the decorating campaign.

There are no documents to prove Palladio’s paternity of the

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villa, nor is it included in the Quattro Libri. The plan is very simple and the rooms are not perfectly proportioned, but very probably this results from the reuse of pre-existing walls.

However, analogies with works like the Villa Saraceno or Villa Muziani, especially for the back façade, are decisive in attributing the Villa Caldogno to Palladio. In the seventeenth century a terrace and two corner towers were added to the back elevation. Around 1570 Giovanni Antonio Fasolo and Giovanni Battista Zelotti painted frescoes in the two larger left-hand rooms, transforming the interior spaces into a splendid architectural stage-set.

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VILLA POJANA (1549)

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© Carmen Menguzzato

The villa was commissioned from Palladio by the Vicentine Bonifacio Poiana, of a family most faithful to the Republic of Venice which, from the Middle Ages, had exercised a type of feudal jurisdiction over the territories which bore their name.

Moreover, in the area where the villa would rise there already existed a Quattrocento farmyard dominated by a tower, where the family arms still stand. Palladio probably designed the villa towards the end of the 1540s, but works proceeded slowly. They concluded only in 1563, when the internal decoration was completed by the painters Bernardino India and Anselmo Canera, and the sculptor Bartolomeo Ridolfi.

Set far from the road, within a deep court, and flanked by gardens, the villa rises over a basement designed for its various service rooms. The principal floor is dominated by a great rectangular hall covered by a barrel vault, on whose sides are symmetrically arranged the minor chambers, all covered with differing vaulting. Evidently, Palladio’s source of inspiration 48

was the ambience of the antique baths, and this holds for the elevations too: the great cornice, which describes a sort of interrupted tympanum on the fa�ade, derives from the perimeter wall of the Baths of Diocletian in Rome, as does the serliana, though this also reflects Bramante’s experiments with the configuration of a double arch and five oculi.

More generally, it seems that Palladio sought the utilitarian logic, so to speak, of antique thermal architecture through an extraordinarily synthesized and abstract, almost metaphysical, language of forms. Devoid of capitals and trabeations, the order is only just hinted at in the essential articulation of the pilaster bases. The absence of orders and of parts in draughted stone (excluding the portals of the loggia) must have assured an overall economy in the realisation of the work. This aspect is also confirmed by the use of rendered brickwork and profiled terracotta, on which a recent restoration has discovered traces of polichromy.

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VILLA ANGARANO (1549)

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© Augusto Mia Battaglia

Of the villa that Palladio designed for his great friend Giacomo Angarano in the environs of Bassano del Grappa very little remains: only the two barchesse which flank a manorial house of clearly seventeenth-century aspect.

The plate in the Quattro Libri (II, p. 63) gives us the plan of the complex according to the architect’s original intentions: two barchesse folded into a “U” which grip a emphatically protruding manorial block.

We know from documents that Giacomo inhabited a building pre-existing on the site: it was probably for this reason that works began on the barchesse, and were then suspended before the older house could be remodelled, which happened later and certainly not according to Palladio’s design.

In truth, not even the date of the villa’s design is certain. Tradi-

tionally, and with solid argumentation, it is dated to the end of the 1540s, but it is also possible that its design was contemporary with the sudden inheritance Giacomo received from his brother Marcantonio in 1554, especially if one considers that two years later he would also acquire important public offices in Vicenza. Angarano was a passionate enthusiast for architecture and a close friend of Palladio, and in 1570 the latter dedicated to him the first half of the Quattro Libri.

Unfortunately, eighteen years later, Giacomo was forced to return the entire dowry of his daughter-in-law, who had been left a widow, to her family. T his action provoked the financial collapse which would constrain him to sell his villa to the Venetian patrician Giovanni Formenti.

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VILLA CHIERICATI (1550)

Despite the scanty attention which the critical literature has accorded it, the Villa Chiericati at Vancimuglio marks a fundamental stage in the evolution of Palladio’s architectural language. Here, for the first time, a true and proper antique temple pronaos was applied to the body of a villa, creating a motif which would become a classic solution for succeeding projects (for example, the Rotonda and the Malcontenta). The villa’s patron was Giovanni Chiericati, the brother of Girolamo, for whom Palladio was simultaneously building a palace on the “Isola di Vicenza”. In all likelihood the project for the villa was virtually contemporaneous with that for the Palazzo Chiericati, and should therefore be dated to the early 1550s, even though building works had still not begun in 1554. In 1557, a year before the death of the patron, the villa was still largely incomplete, since in 1564 it was roofed but still without floors and windows, and still not inhabited. Acquired by Ludovico Porto in 1574, the villa was completed in 1584 at the hands of Domenico Groppino, 50

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a habitual collaborator of Palladio. Some autograph drawings and sketches preserved in London document Palladio’s original project for the villa, notably modified in the executive phases: in fact, the original, central bi-absidal salone would disappear in favour of a simple cubic space.

This change of program led to the closing of the thermal window still visible in the later project.

The latter guaranteed the rigidity of the structure and followed the antique example of the Portico di Ottavia.

However, Palladio seems to have had very little control over the villa’s execution. He surely would never have realised columns devoid of entasis, as they in fact are.

Furthermore, the internal distribution of two frontal rooms obliged the location of windows near the corners of the building: a disposition against which the Quattro Libri advises because it excessively weakens the corners of the building which, in fact, reveal visible signs of settlement.

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VILLA TRISSINO (1553)

In the Quattro Libri Palladio affirms that he had begun the construction of a villa at Meledo for the brothers Ludovico and Francesco Trissino, ranking figures in the aristocracy of Vicenza and Palladio’s patrons not only at Meledo but also at their city palace in the Contra’ Riale (1558) and at a small suburban casino. The treatise engraving restores to us a view of an imposing structure, arranged on several levels, obviously inspired by the disposition of ancient Roman acropolis complexes. It is not possible to affirm whether this project had any practical outcome.

On the other hand, evident traces of the beginning of the a Palladian project do exist in the imposing stone foundations of

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buildings along the river and in the two barchesse with Tuscan columns of fine workmanship.The most economic hypothesis would be that a project by Palladio existed for the Villa Trissino, although not necessarily identical to that presented in the Quattro Libri. The latter seems rather to be the development of a theoretical scheme hypothetically conceived for the real site of Meledo. T he dovecote tower was furnished with fireplaces and frescoed with grotesques by Eliodoro Forbicini (a Veronese painter who had already worked in Palladio’s Palazzo Chiericati and Palazzo Thiene), an evident sign that the building’s function was not just utilitarian.

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VILLA PORTO (1554)

In 1554 Paolo Porto and his brothers divided up their father’s inheritance, Paolo acquiring an estate at Vivaro, north of Vicenza. Here, during the subsequent four years, he realised a villa which tradition holds was designed by Palladio.

The Conte Paolo Porto, one of the most powerful canons of the Cathedral (in 1550 he was on the point of becoming bishop) was a sophisticated and cultured man, who passed much time in Rome where he could count on the friendship of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese. Porto also numbered among his Vicentine friends and relatives Palladio’s foremost patrons, men like Giangiorgio Trissino, Biagio Saraceno, Bernardo Schio and Girolamo Garzadori. It is perhaps this network of friendships which most easily placed him in contact with Palladio, although in this regard careful inspection of the villa’s architecture raises more doubts than certainties. For one discerns various successive constructional phases, which render the identification of an original Palladian scheme, if any, most difficult.

The pronaos, for example, is grafted onto the main block with manifest discontinuity. Moreover, the two lateral wings are without doubt nineteenth-century, and actually the product of a belated “Palladianization” of the villa at the hands of the architect Caregaro Negrin.

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VILLA VALMARANA (1563)

The villa which we see today is very different from that designed

by Palladio for Gianfrancesco Valmarana, around 1563. Some idea of Palladio’s project is given by the engraving in the Quattro Libri, which shows a structure with double-storey loggias, enclosed by small towers on both fronts, but in this case — much more than elsewhere — the drawing betrays several uncertainties and inexactitudes.

In any case, building works at the villa were interrupted in 1566 by the death of Gianfrancesco and were probably concluded, economically, by his nephew Leonardo Valmarana (son of Gianfrancesco’s brother, Giovanni Alvise), the patron of the Cappella Valmarana in Santa Corona and heir of the great family palace also designed by Palladio. The second storey of loggias was never constructed and the middle section was terminated with a sort of attic. Almost destroyed by bombardment during World War II, the villa has recently been reconstructed.

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VILLA FORNI (1565)

The Villa Forni Cerato, as with the Casa Cogollo, represents an exemplary case of Palladio’s alteration of a pre-existing building, transformed through really quite modest means into a significant monumental event. As with the house of the notary Cogollo, this villa is also the only one that Palladio designed for a patron who was certainly rich, but not noble. Girolamo Forni was a well-to-do merchant of lumber . It is quite possible that the dry minimalism of this precise building was in harmony with the bourgeois status, so to speak, of the owner.

It is exactly the abstract language of the Villa Forni which has generated so many doubts concerning Palladio’s authorship, as has the extremely simple plan which is devoid of the usual dimensional correspondences between rooms, as well as the presence of certain proportional disharmonies among the building’s parts. In reality the villa is the result of the restructuring of a pre-existing “old house” and, if anything, opinion should be reversed to acknowledge Palladio’s intelligence in transforming situational constraints into expressive opportunities. Evidence of this is the crisp design of the serliana, where the columns are reconceived as clipped, stereometric pilasters because of the loggia’s limited width

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VILLA PORTO (1572)

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The extraordinary ten brick-column shafts which dominate the great Quattrocento farmyard of the Porto family at Molina mark the first stage of a grandiose project which Palladio conceived on behalf of Iseppo (Giuseppe) Porto: in fact, the patron’s name is inscribed on the plinths of the splendid stone column bases, next to the date 1572. The rich protagonist of one of Vicenza’s most important families, and brother-in-law of both Adriano and Marcantonio Thiene (patrons of the homonymous palace by Palladio), Iseppo Porto already owned a grandiose city palace which Palladio had designed him over twenty years earlier.

From archival documents one realises that the enormous columns are not the fragments of a monumental barchessa, like that for the Pisani at Bagnolo, but rather of the façade of a true and proper country residence. The enormous Corinthian colonnade, a direct quotation from the pronaos of the Pantheon, would have reached an overall height of over thirteen metres. Lower porticoes, on a quarter-circle plan and still visible in the nineteenth century, would have tied the manorial house to agricultural annexes to left and right.

Giuseppe’s death in 1580 put paid to the building works, which were never completed.

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LA GRANDE BELLEZZA

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VILLA CAPRA (1566)

Although the Villa Rotonda is the universal icon of the Palladian villa, in reality its owner considered it an urban residence, or — more appropriately — a suburban one.

Paolo Almerico in fact sold his own palace in the city in order to move just beyond its walls, and Palladio himself publishes the Rotonda amongst the palaces, not the villas, in the Quattro Libri. Otherwise the villa is isolated on the crest of a small hill and originally there were no agricultural dependencies.

The canon Paolo Almerico, for whom Palladio designed the villa in 1566, was a man of shifting fortunes, who had returned to Vicenza after a brilliant career in the Papal court.

The villa was already inhabitable by 1569, but still incomplete, and in 1591, two years after Almerico’s death, it was ceded to the brothers Odorico and Marco Capra who carried it through to completion. Scamozzi, who succeeded Palladio as architect after 1580, substantially completed the project with some deviations which recent studies tend to consider very conservative.

Certainly not a villa-farm, the Villa Rotonda is rather a villa-temple, an abstraction, a mirror of a higher order and harmony. Its corners oriented to the four compass points, and it wishes to be read above all as a volume, cube and sphere, almost as if it recalled the basic solids of the Platonic universe.

Certainly the sources for such a centrally planned residential building were various, from the projects of Francesco di Giorgio inspired by the Villa Hadriana or the “Study of Varro”, to Mantegna’s own house in Mantua © Ruggero Acqua (or the “Camera degli Sposi” in the Palazzo Ducale), to Raphael’s project for the Villa Madama. Nevertheless the Villa Rotonda remains unique in the architecture of any epoch almost as if, by building a villa which corresponded perfectly unto itself, Palladio had wished to construct an ideal model of his own architecture.

The decoration of the building is sumptuous, with works by Lorenzo Rubini and Giambattista Albanese (statues), Agostino Rubini, Ottavio Ridolfi, Bascapè, Fontana and perhaps Alessandro Vittoria (the plastic decorations of the ceilings and fireplaces), Anselmo Canera, Bernardino India, Alessandro Maganza and much later Ludovico Dorigny (pictorial decorations).

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VICENZA

ANDREA PALLADIO (1508 - 1580) Andrea Palladio distilled his architectural principles from personal examination of the ruins of classical Rome, from study of the works of Vitruvius, Alberti and other writers who preceded him, and from interaction with older architects of his own time, such as Jacopo Sansovino, Michele Sanmicheli and Giulio Romano.

This process enabled Palladio to design a remarkable collection of villas, palaces, churches and other buildings for the noble families of the Venetian Republic, especially those of the small city of Vicenza which, thanks to its wonderful works, became the brightest pearl of the Renaissance.

Palladio’s greatest achievement, however, was in conceptualizing the principles which guided his work and articulating them in his masterwork, ‘Four Books on Architecture’.

This was the step which made possible the dissemination of his architectural style, known as Palladianism, throughout continental Europe, England and America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, establishing Palladio as the most influential figure in the history of architecture.

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