O 1508-1580

Andrea Palladio 1508-1580 1508-1580 ANDREA PALLADIO 1508-1580 First published in 2010 by The Embassy of .

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Photographer: Pino Guidolotti. Photographer Lucan House: Dave Cullen.

© The Embassy of Italy 2011.

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Lucan House, Co. Palladianism and Ireland

NDREA PALLADIO GAVE HIS NAME to a style of , Palladianism, whose most obvious Afeatures – simple lines, satisfying symmetry and mathematical proportions – were derived from the architecture of antiquity and particularly that of . From the seventeenth century onwards Palladianism spread across Europe, with later examples to be found as far afield as America, India and Australia. Irish Palladianism has long been recognised as a distinctive version of the style. Editions of Palladio’s Quattro Libri dell’Architettura were second in popularity only to editions of amongst the Irish architects and dilettanti of the eighteenth century but, fittingly, it was another Italian, , who may be said to have introduced the style to Ireland at Castletown, Co. Kildare (under construction from 1722). Thus began a rich tradition of Palladianism in Irish country house architecture, with notable examples at Bellamont Forest, Co. Cavan (c.1730), Russborough, Co. Wicklow (1742), and Lucan House, Co. Dublin (1773), now the Residence of the Ambassador of Italy. Ireland can also boast, in the facade of the Provost’s House, Trinity College Dublin, the only surviving example of a building erected to a design by Palladio outside his native Italy. The facade is closely derived from an unexecuted design by the master, previously used by Lord Burlington for the now demolished house of General Wade. John Smyth, the architect of the Provost’s House (see page 28), also directly modelled his St. Thomas’s Church, Marlborough Street, Dublin (destroyed 1922), on Palladio's church of the Redentore, . However, it was through the native genius of Sir that Palladianism received perhaps its most distinctive Irish manifestation. A discerning critic of Palladio, Pearce had toured the in 1724 with the Quattro Libri as his guide. In the advanced European of his Parliament House (now ), College Green, Dublin (1729), Pearce created a distinctive and superb interpretation of the style. Pearce’s Parliament House was in turn admired and imitated through the years, with echoes and reflections of his Palladian inspired classicism to be found in a range of buildings from Thomas Cooley’s Royal Exchange (now City Hall), Dublin (1769), to James Gandon’s Four Courts, Dublin (1785), and on to Sir Aston Webb’s florid Government Buildings, Upper Merrion Street, Dublin (1904). It is the very richness of the vein of Palladianism in Ireland that makes this Irish exhibition of the original source material – the buildings of Palladio himself – so relevant and exciting.

5 6 Biography of Andrea Palladio

NDREA PALLADIO (1508-1580) WAS ONE of the most influential architects in recent centuries. He was a central figure in architectural history who linked ancient Aarchitecture to the building skills of the late Middle Ages and to the growing demand for residential buildings representative of the modern age. Palladio looked at the Hellenistic and Roman worlds in his studies of ruins and ancient writings on architecture. But in his own buildings he transformed what he had learnt from antiquity into forms and types – such as the – that were capable of satisfying the needs of his own times and of the centuries to come. Palladio conferred a new dignity on domestic architecture, even on relatively economical town and country homes. He rationalized and refined his projects from a functional point of view. But he did more. His buildings changed the way their owners lived and represented themselves. The importance of his architecture and of his treatise, I Quattro Libri dell’Architettura (Venice 1570), was comparable to Baldassarre Castiglione's Il Cortigiano in defining a ‘gentleman’, a very different figure from the feudal landowner concerned essentially with feats on the battlefield or with hunting. With Palladio, the house, whether in the city or country, became the building in which the architect could best display his skill, not least by satisfying the owner's personal needs without neglecting the rules of good architecture.

Palladio’s work constituted a broadening of the architectural compass both from the social point of view and in terms of building types. His architecture reached out towards rich merchants and untitled landowners, anticipating the later expansion of an architecturally aware middle class in England and Holland. Palladio drew up plans for buildings with apartments in Venice and for farm outbuildings in the country. He was not a court architect and his living did not depend on one single patron unlike his immediate predecessors and contemporaries (Bramante, , , and Vignola) who mainly worked for popes and rulers. He designed buildings at the client’s request, especially churches and patrician homes. Palladio was an excellent designer of churches and of public buildings, but his day to day activity was always associated with designing houses.

Palladio’s fame and influence do not depend only on his built works but also on the Quattro Libri in which he explains and illustrates the essential grammar and language of his architecture, and in which he published many of his own works and commented on them. The presence of many of his drawings in England (since 1614 when brought them with him from ), including plans for buildings that were never realized, had a profound impact on British architecture.

The expansion of the middle class in Europe and North America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries led to great demand for functional, comfortable and elegant houses. Palladio’s architecture – summarized in his book – offered guidelines and specific models for the new architecture.

7 Palladio in the Veneto

8 Palazzo - Vicenza

In October 1542, Marcantonio and Adriano Thiene began the renovation of the fifteenth-century family palazzo, with a grandiose project which was to cover an entire block measuring 54 x 62 metres, facing onto Vicenza’s main artery (today’s Corso Palladio). Rich and powerful, the sophisticated Thiene brothers were members of the Italian nobility and were at home in the main European courts: they therefore required an appropriate setting for their cosmopolitan status and for the nobility of their guests. At the same time, they wanted to underline their role in the city with a princely palazzo, a sign of indisputable patrician power. In 1614, during a visit to the building, the English architect, Inigo Jones, noted a piece of information given to him directly by and : ‘these plans were by Giulio Romano and executed by Palladio’. It is quite possible that the design of can be attributed to the mature and expert Giulio Romano (who had been in since 1523 at the Gonzago court with which the Thiene family maintained very close relations) and that the young Palladio was probably responsible for overseeing the erection of the building, especially after Giulio’s death in 1546. The elements of the building referable to Giulio and alien to Palladio’s language are clearly recognizable: the four-column is substantially identical to the one in (even if the vault system was definitely modified by Palladio). So too are the windows and the lower part of the façade on the road and in the courtyard, while the trabeations and capitals of the piano nobile were certainly by Palladio. Work on the building began in 1542. Giulio Romano was in Vicenza for two weeks in December in that same year for a consultation on the of the , and it was probably on that occasion that he provided his outline drawings for Palazzo Thiene. The work proceeded slowly: the date 1556 is carved on the outside façade while the date 1558 appears in the courtyard. Adriano Thiene died in France in 1552 and shortly afterwards, when Marcantonio’s son Ottavio became Marquis of Scandiano, the family’s interests moved to the area. Only a small part of the grandiose project was therefore completed, but it is probable that neither the Venetians nor the other Vicentine nobles would have accepted a private palace on this scale in the heart of the town.

9 - , Vicenza

This villa was commissioned from Palladio by the Vicentine, Bonifacio Pojana. The project probably dates from the end of the 1540s and the work was finished by 1563 when the internal decoration by the painters, Bernardino India and Anselmo Canera and by the sculptor Bartolomeo Ridolfi had been completed. Both in the Quattro Libri and in Palladio’s autograph drawings, the villa is always treated as part of a global project for the reorganization and regularization of the surrounding area with its extensive yards. The only part of this project to be built, however, was the long b archessa on the left of the villa, with Doric capitals but Tuscan intercolumns. It seems that here Palladio was seeking the utilitarian logic of the architecture of ancient baths, with an extraordinarily concise language in its forms, abstract and almost metaphysical. The absence of orders and worked stone (with the exception of the portals of the ) must have made the work as a whole quite economical to build.

10 Loggias of Palazzo della Ragione - known at the , Vicenza

In 1546 the town council approved Palladio’s project for the loggias of the Palazzo della Ragione. The solution proposed is a structure which may be called elastic, capable of taking account of the necessary alignments with the openings and passages of the pre-existing fifteenth century building. The system is based on the repetition of the ‘Serlian’ window, i.e. a structure composed of an with a constant span flanked by two lateral rectangular openings with a variable width and therefore capable of absorbing the difference in the widths of the bays: the way they work is clear in the corner where the openings with their architraves are almost reduced to zero. Palladio himself, using a certain rhetorical emphasis, defined the Palazzo della Ragione surrounded by the new stone loggias as a ‘basilica’, in homage to the structures of ancient Rome in which political affairs were discussed and business negotiated. The work proceeded slowly: the first order of arches on the north and west was completed in 1561 while the second level, begun in 1564, was completed in 1597 and the façade overlooking the Piazza delle Erbe in 1614.

11 Villa Pisani - , Padova

Starting from 1552, in the neighbourhood of the medieval town of Montagnana, Palladio designed a building for his friend, , which is both a city palazzo and a villa at the same time. A powerful and influential Venetian patrician, Pisani was the patron and friend of artists and men of letters, from Veronese to Giambattista Maganza, to and to Palladio himself, these last two involved in the construction and decoration of his house at Montagnana. The works were certainly in progress in September 1553 and were completed in 1555, including the interior stucco decoration. With no parts intended for farming activities and with the abstract beauty of its virtually cubical volume, Villa Pisani well reflects its owner's sophisticated tastes. A double order of demi-columns and a double gallery crowned by tympana – already encountered in – make their first appearance here in a villa. The whole is bordered by an uninterrupted and elegant Doric frieze on white plaster and ashlar. The bi-dimensionality of the wall on the garden side is animated by the recess of the and upper loggia. While there are no autograph drawings of the building by Palladio, it is possible to state that the plate with the description of the villa in the Quattro Libri is the result of an a posteriori re-elaboration of the structure. A rare case in Palladio’s oeuvre, the villa has two storeys: the upper one for the family apartments and the lower one for the everyday activities such as business dealings and receiving tenants, and not just in the summer as can be seen from the number of fireplaces. The layout of the internal spaces is identical on both floors. The ceilings are different, however: those on the ground floor are vaulted, starting from the extraordinary room with the demi- columns, halfway between an atrium and a reception room. This is clearly the most important room in the house with sculptures of the Four Seasons by Alessandro Vittoria, who had been at work a little earlier in the Palazzo Thiene. The vertical connections are provided by symmetrical oval spiral staircases at the sides of the loggia towards the garden.

12 - , Padova

Along with the virtually contemporary Villa Pisani at Montagnana, the residence built at Piombino Dese for another Venetian potentate, Giorgio Cornaro, marks a clear leap of scale in the prestige and spending capacity of Palladio’s clientele who until this point had been essentially Vicentine. Work was already in progress in 1553, and in April the following year the building – though incomplete – was sufficiently habitable for Palladio to mention ‘the evening at dinner’ there with the master of the house. In June that same year, the latter, with his new wife Elena, took formal possession of the villa, or rather of the building site: in fact on that date only the central block had been completed without the wings or the second order of loggias. These would be erected in two subsequent stages, in 1569 and in 1588, the second directed by Vincenzo Scamozzi who was probably also responsible for the involvement of in the realization of the statues in the reception room. The Pisani and Cornaro are linked by much more than a simple chronological coincidence and by the high status of the client. Villa Cornaro, in fact, has a structure and decoration which is very similar to a palazzo and it is more a residence than a villa. Isolated from the farm estate and outbuildings, its pre-eminent position on the public road highlights its ambivalent character. Moreover, the presence of fireplaces in all the rooms shows that it was not just for summer use, and it is no coincidence that quite a similar structure would be replicated a few years later for Floriano Antonini's ‘suburban’ palazzo at . As in the case of Villa Pisani, the plan of Villa Cornaro is organized around a large room with four free-standing columns, placed here further to the centre of the house, however, so as to effectively constitute the main reception room accessed through the loggia and a narrow hall. The two levels of the villa are connected by two elegant twin staircases which clearly separate the ground floor, for receiving guests and customers, from the two apartments above, reserved for the Cornaro family. The extraordinary projecting pronaos with its double order reflects Palladio’s solution for the loggia of the Palazzo Chiericati in Vicenza, completed during the same years, with the lateral curtaining which gives the structure rigidity, as in the Portico of Ottavia in Rome. It should also be borne in mind that the double loggia on the façade is to be found in in Venice as are free columns supporting the halls in the great Venetian Scuole: what we get, therefore, is a sort of ‘Latin translation’ of traditional Venetian themes.

13 - Maser,

The realization of the villa for the Barbaro brothers at Maser at the beginning of the 1550s constitutes an important point of arrival in the definition of a new type of country building. For the first time (even if there are precedents for the solution in fifteenth century buildings), the main house and the barchesse were aligned in a compact architectural unit. This is probably due at Maser to the particular location of the villa on the slopes of a hill: the linear arrangement guaranteed greater visibility from the road below, while the lie of the land would have imposed expensive terracing if the b archesse had been arranged in the direction of the slope. If it is true that in many ways the villa reveals marked differences compared with other Palladian works, this is unquestionably the fruit of the interaction between the architect and his exceptional clients. Daniele Barbaro was a refined man, a profound scholar of ancient architecture and mentor of Palladio after Trissino’s death in 1550. They were together in Rome in 1554 to complete the preparation of the first translation and critical treatise of Vitruvius, edited by Barbaro and illustrated by Palladio, which was published in Venice in 1556. , an energetic politician and administrator, played a key role in many of the Republic’s architectural decisions and, along with his brother, Daniele, was a tireless promoter of the introduction of Palladio into the Venetian environment. An architectural official himself, he received an explicit tribute from Palladio in the Quattro Libri for the design of an oval staircase. Palladio intervened skillfully in the construction of the villa, managing to transform a pre-existing house and connect it to the rectilinear barchesse. He also excavated a nymphaeum in the side of the hill with a fish pond from which, thanks to a sophisticated hydraulic system, the water was transported to the service areas and then reached the gardens. In the caption on the page of the Quattro Libri regarding the villa, Palladio expressly highlights this technological exploit which recalls ancient Roman hydraulics. It is evident that, rather than the villa-farms in the Veneto, the model for the Villa Barbaro came from the great Roman residences such as the Villa Julia or the villa that Pirro Ligorio designed at Tivoli for Cardinal d’Este (to whom, Barbaro dedicated his Vitruvius). Inside the villa, painted what is considered to be one of the most extraordinary cycles of in the sixteenth-century Veneto. The power and the quality of the painting superimposed on Palladio’s space gave rise to the perception of a conflict between the painter and the architect, to the point that Veronese is not mentioned in the caption of the plate in the Quattro Libri dedicated to this villa. Besides, it is probable that Palladio, evidently influenced (and probably intimidated) by the taste and personality of the Barbaro brothers, reserved a technical and general coordination role for himself and left his clients – if not indeed Veronese, according to some – plenty of space for invention: proof of this is the fanciful design of the façade which it is difficult to attribute to him.

14 Villa Badoer - Fratta Polesine,

Palladio designed a villa for the Venetian nobleman, Francesco Badoer, in 1554. Completed and occupied in 1556, it had to be suitable for managing the farm while also being a visible sign of the Badoer family’s ‘feudal’ presence on the land, Palladio used the in the barchesse. The visual focus of the complex is the axis dominated by the great triangular supported by Ionic columns, as the sides and rear of the villa are absolutely featureless. The distributive structure of the main block is organized on a vertical axis in the usual Palladian manner, with the floor for the service areas, the piano nobile for the owner’s residence and finally the granary. All the rooms have flat ceilings while, on the walls, Giallo Fiorentino designed complex webs of allegorical figures, the meanings of some of which are still obscure.

15 - Fanzolo di , Treviso

The definitive point of arrival of the Palladian villa as a consummately new architype, in which the practical needs of the farming life are translated into original forms and into a new language inspired by ancient architecture, can certainly be found in Villa Emo. The functional buildings for managing the land, which in the fifteenth-century villa were arranged randomly around the farmyard, achieved an architectural synthesis in the Villa Emo that had never been seen before, one that united the manor house, barchesse, and dovecotes in a linear unit. The dating of the building is disputed, but was probably 1558, after the Villas Barbaro and Badoer with which it shares the general layout. By now accepted by the great aristocratic families, Palladio built the villa for Leonardo Emo, whose family had owned property at Fanzolo from the middle of the Quattrocento. The area was crossed by the ancient Via Postumia, and the layout of the fields followed the grid of Roman centuriation. The villa is oriented in accordance with this ancient grid, as can easily be seen from the building entrances, aligned in a very long . The composition of the complex is hierarchical, dominated by the prominence of the manor house, which is raised on a basement and linked to the ground by a long stone ramp; the two rectilinear and symmetrical wings of the barchesse at the sides terminate with dovecote towers. The purity of the design is as surprising as it is measured: it is sufficient to note how one quarter of the diameter of the end columns of the loggia is absorbed by the wall and moderates the passage from the cavity in the shade to the walls in full light. The order chosen was the Doric one, the simplest, and even the windows have no . Corresponding to the stereometric logic of the exteriors is the extraordinary internal decoration by Battista Zelotti, who had already worked in Palladio’s and the Malcontenta.

16 Villa - known as the Malcontenta, Venezia

The villa Palladio designed for the brothers Nicolò and Alvise Foscari around the end of the 1550s rose as an isolated block without farm outbuildings at the edges of the Lagoon, along the River . Rather than as a villa-farm, it is therefore configured as a suburban residence which could be reached quickly by boat from the centre of Venice. The clients’ family was one of the most powerful in the city so that the residence has a majestic, almost regal character, unknown in all the other Palladian villas, to which the splendid internal decoration, the work of Battista Franco and Gian Battista Zelotti, contributes. Recent studies have documented an intervention by the on Palladio's behalf for the design of an altar for the church of San Pantalon in 1555 which reveals that their relationship predates the design of the villa. The building rises on a high basement which separates the piano nobile from the damp ground and confers magnificence to the villa, raised on a podium like an ancient temple. Many motifs derived from the building tradition of the Lagoon coexist with elements of ancient architecture: as in Venice, the principal facade faces the water but the pronaos and the great flight of steps are modelled on the temple at the mouth of the Clitumno, which Palladio knew well. The majestic twin access ramps imposed a sort of ceremonial path on visiting guests: after landing in front of the building, they ascended towards the proprietor who waited for then at the centre of the pronaos. The traditional Palladian solution of stiffening the sides of the projecting pronaos using sections of wall is sacrificed specifically to make it possible to connect the steps. The villa is a particularly effective demonstration of Palladio's skill in obtaining monumental effects using poor materials, essentially bricks and plaster. As can be seen because of the deterioration of its surfaces, the whole villa is made of brick, including the columns (except for the bases and capitals which are created more easily by cutting stone), with marbled plaster which imitates a smooth rusticated stone face as sometimes appears in the cellae of ancient temples. The rear façade is one of the highest achievements among Palladio’s works with a system of apertures which makes the internal layout readable; an example is the wall of the great vaulted central room rendered virtually transparent by the Diocletian window above another window with three lights. The reference to the perspective of Raphael's Villa Madama is extremely clear in the latter, documenting a debt of knowledge which Palladio would never admit directly.

17 Convento della Carità - Venezia

Three years after his unfortunate debut at San Pietro di Castello and a few months after starting the building work for the refectory of , Palladio got another opportunity to work with a Venetian ecclesiastical client. This was in March 1561 when he was paid for a model for the convent of the Lateran Canons. Palladio invented a grandiose plan for the monks with an atrium of monumental composite columns and two courtyards separated by a refectory, clearly inspired by his studies of ancient Roman homes. After 1569, however, the building work languished following the completion of the cloister and atrium, the latter destroyed by a fire in 1630. In order to understand this magnificent fragment it is necessary – with some caution – to rely on the illustrations in the Quattro Libri. The points of reference for the Carità convent project – which profoundly affected Giorgio Vasari when he visited Venice in 1566 – were Palladio’s reflections on the baths and, especially, on the homes of the ancient Romans, studied and reconstructed for the 1556 edition of Vitruvius. As conceived by Palladio, the home of the ancients could only be recreated in terms of a large organized structure (such as a monastic complex) or, in a lesser manner, in a private home such as the Palazzo Porto in Vicenza: something that was effectively very far from the disorganized reality of ancient Roman homes. Three architectural features from this extraordinary project survive substantially today: the oval staircase hollow in the middle, the sacristy of the church modelled like the tablinum in ancient houses and the large cloister wall with three superimposed orders. The tablinum is unquestionably one of the purest examples of Palladian classicism: the free columns and the apsed ends were probably inspired by the remains of similar rooms located around the frigidarium in the and used by Palladio in the reconstruction of other baths. The chromatic contrast between the elements of the order is unusual: the frieze along the wall, coloured red, is grafted onto a white stone trabeation sector which, in turn, is supported by a red marble column. The same accentuated double-colouring can be found again in the powerful cloister wall with superimposed orders which owes a great deal to the courtyard of the in Rome. The masonry work was carried out using shaped bricks designed to be left visible, protected by red paint, while the capitals, bases and arch keystones were made of white stone. This expressive freedom is one of the characteristics of Palladio’s mature period when his assimilation of ancient Roman architecture was such as to allow him the liberty to seek unusual effects, for example superimposing a Corinthian frieze with bucrania and festoons (on the model of the Temple of Vesta at Tivoli) on the Doric first order of the courtyard.

18 Villa - Santa Sofia di Pedemonte,

Isolated at the western limit of ‘Palladian geography’ in the Veneto and one of the last buildings designed by Palladio, Villa Sarego at Santa Sofia is exceptional in many ways. Unlike the typical Palladian villa, generally an extremely hierarchical composition dominated by the solidity of the main house itself, here Palladio prefers to break up the space around the great ‘vacuum’ of the central courtyard, probably taking his own reconstructions of the ancient Roman villa as his model. Instead of bricks and plaster, the great Ionic columns are made with blocks of limestone, superimposed to create irregular piers: the type of material used (from the Sarego family quarries not far away) and the gigantic dimension of the columns contribute to the generation of a sensation of power never achieved in any other villa he built. The client was Marcantonio Sarego from Verona who came into possession of the Santa Sofia property in 1552 but only decided in 1565 to radically renovate the building complex he had inherited from his father. Unfortunately the information regarding the construction of the complex is scarce and fragmentary, and only a small part of it was completed compared with the great scheme drawn by Palladio in the Quattro Libri: less than a half of the rectangular courtyard and its northern section in particular. In 1740, Francesco Muttoni was able to see the trace of the entire courtyard marked by the bases for the columns which were to have completed it. It is therefore quite plausible that the work was definitively interrupted by the death of Marcantonio in the 1580s, even if it seems certain that there was a desire to complete at least the part of the complex reserved for the family apartments. The building was considerably changed by the architect Luigi Trezza in the middle of the nineteenth century: new living spaces were added along the western side of the building, grafted on to the sixteenth-century original while an appearance of completion was given to the courtyard by the continuation of the trabeation and balustrade.

19 Chiesa di San Giorgio Maggiore - Venezia

In essential continuity with the design of the refectory, a few years later Palladio tackled the construction of the convent’s great church, without doubt his most complex and difficult building project since the Loggias of the Basilica in Vicenza. The great wealth of the monastery and of the powerful Congregation of St. Justina dictated the scale of the operation; the precise liturgical indications and the Order's traditions determined the choice of the longitudinal plan, as well as the presence of the choir, presbytery, cross, nave and . Between November 1565 and March 1566, Palladio's project was transposed into a model that made a profound impression on Giorgio Vasari during a visit to Venice. In January the following year, contracts were signed with the stone-cutters and masons who were to follow the profiles and measurements indicated by Palladio. The general structure was finished in 1576. The current façade was erected many years later, between 1607 and 1611, though recent studies reveal it to be far from Palladio’s original intentions. Like Leon Battista Alberti one hundred years earlier, Palladio took the great edifices of the ancient Roman baths as his model. The floor plan clearly shows the four spatial entities Palladio used to compose the body of the building. The main nave with its and three cross vaults – just like the frigidarium in Roman baths – is followed by the sudden lateral expansion of the apses and the vertical thrust of the great dome on a drum. Alongside this, Palladio placed the extremely studied space of the presbytery from which can be seen, through a transenna of columns, the choir with the transenna acting as the pronaos of a villa through which the landscape could be observed. The sequence of spaces runs along a very marked central axis which provides continuity as one passes from one part of the church to another. Palladio sought the maximum variety in the details of the order and rejected easy and predictable solutions. He gave great emphasis to the power of the individual elements: the half-columns are swollen beyond their diameter and the project considerably. The result is a grandiose building which allows us to experience the spatial feeling of ancient Roman complexes.

20 Villa Almerico Capra - known as the Rotonda, Vicenza

The universal icon of Palladian villas, in reality its owner considered the Rotonda to be an urban, or more accurately, suburban residence. Paolo Almerico actually sold his palazzo in the town to move just outside the walls, and in the Quattro Libri Palladio included the Rotonda among the palazzi and not among the villas. Moreover it is isolated on the summit of a little hill and originally had no farm buildings. The canon, Paolo Almerico, for whom Palladio designed the villa in 1566, was a man of alternating fortunes who finally returned to Vicenza after a brilliant career in the Papal court. The villa was already habitable, though incomplete, in 1569, and in 1591, two years after Almerico's death it was sold to the brothers Odorico and Mario Capra who completed the building works. Taking over from Palladio after 1580, Scamozzi essentially completed the project with some changes that recent studies suggest were very limited. Certainly not a villa-farm, the Rotonda is rather a villa-temple, an abstraction, the mirror of a superior order and harmony. Oriented with its corners facing the four cardinal points, it is intended to be read as a volume, cube and sphere, almost as if recalling the basic figures of the Platonic universe. There can be no doubt that there are different sources for a residential building on a central plan but the fact remains that the Rotonda is unique in the architecture of all time as if, by constructing a villa perfectly corresponding to its own self, Palladio wished to erect 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 stucco decoration of the ceilings and fireplaces), and Anselmo Canera, Bernardino India, and, later Ludovico Dorigny (paintings).

21 Bridge at Bassano - , Vicenza

A powerful flood on the River Brenta in October 1567 overwhelmed the historical bridge, a wooden structure on piers and covered by a roof, which was a crucial means of communication between Bassano and Vicenza. Involved in its reconstruction right from the months immediately after the collapse, Palladio initially proposed a bridge that was completely different from the previous one, with stone arches in the style of old Roman bridges. But the town council turned the project down and ordered the architect not to deviate too much from the traditional structure. In the summer of 1569 Palladio presented the definitive project for a bridge which effectively recalled the previous structure, though radically renewed in terms of the technical and structural solutions, and with great visual impact. The sole reference to an architectural language is the use of Tuscan columns as supports for the architrave that bears the roof. Confirming the technological efficiency of the Palladian structure, the bridge survived for almost two hundred years; it was rebuilt in accordance with Palladio’s design after a destructive flood in 1748 and once again after its demolition by German troops during the Second World War.

22 Bridge on the Tesina - , Vicenza

The beautiful stone bridge which crosses the Tesina at Torri di Quartesolo is very probably the fruit of a 1569 idea of Palladio’s, but only realized eleven years later when the works were carried out under the direction of Domenico Groppino, one of the architect's regular collaborators. The model is clearly that of the Bridge of Tiberius in Rimini, particularly appreciated by Palladio, from which the elegant niches against the pilasters derive. Though considerably modified later, the crossing of the Tesina remains the only masonry bridge by Palladio which has survived to the present day.

23 Palazzo Barbaran da Porto - Vicenza

This splendid residence, erected between 1570 and 1575 for the Vicentine nobleman Montano Barbarano, is the only great city palazzo which Andrea Palladio managed to complete in its entirety. At least three hand-drawn plans (conserved in London) exist and document alternative proposals for the building's layout. Quite different from the solution actually built, they testify to the complexity of the planning procedure. Barbarano had asked Palladio to take account of the various houses belonging to his family already present on the area of the new palazzo and, when the plan had already been drawn up, he acquired another adjacent house with the result that the position of the entrance door became asymmetrical. In any case, the constraints imposed by the site and by a demanding client provided an opportunity for courageous and refined solutions: Palladio’s intervention is masterful with the drafting of a sophisticated ‘renovation’ project which merges the various pre-existing buildings into a single unit. A magnificent four-column atrium on the ground floor links the two pre-existing buildings together. Palladio was required to solve two problems when creating it: the structural one of supporting the floor of the great reception room on the piano nobile, and the compositional one of restoring a symmetrical appearance to a space compromised by the oblique course of the perimeter walls of the pre-existing houses. On the basis of the model of the wings of the Theatre of Marcellus in Rome, Palladio divided the space into three naves, arranging four Ionic columns in the centre: this allowed him to reduce the width of the opening of the central crosses, braced by lateral barrel vaults. In this way he erected a system that is structurally very efficient, capable of supporting the floor of the room above without difficulty. The central columns are then linked to the perimeter walls by fragments of rectilinear beams which absorb the irregular plan of the atrium: the result is a sort of ‘Serlian’ system, a stratagem which is conceptually similar to the one on the loggias of the Basilica. The unusual type of Ionic capital – deriving from the temple of Saturn in the Roman Forum – was also used because it made it possible to mask the slight but significant rotations necessary for aligning the columns and demi-columns. Montano involved some of the great artists of the time for the decoration of the palazzo in several stages: Battista Zelotti, who had already worked in the Palladian spaces in Villa Emo at Fanzolo, Anselmo Canera and Andrea Vicentino; the stuccoes were entrusted to Lorenzo Rubini who had produced the external decoration of the Loggia del Capitanio that same year and, after his death in 1574, to his son Agostino. The outcome is a sumptuous palazzo capable of rivalling the homes of the Thiene, Porto and Valmarana families, which permitted its owner to represent himself in the city as a leading member of Vicenza’s cultural elite. In his Historia di Vicenza published in 1591, Iacopo Marzari recalls Montano Barbarano as ‘well read and an excellent musician’. The 1592 inventory includes several flutes, confirming the existence of intense musical activity in the building.

24 Palazzo Porto in Piazza Castello - Vicenza

The striking fragment of palazzo which provides the backdrop in Piazza del Castello provides manifest evidence of the unsuccessful conclusion of a Palladian project. Clearly visible on the left of the fragment is the old fifteenth-century house belonging to the Porto family, intended to be demolished progressively with the progress of the work on the new building: having seen the results, one can only appreciate the farsightedness of the client, Alessandro Porto. Its dating is uncertain, but undoubtedly after 1570, both because the palazzo is not included in the Quattro Libri (published in Venice that same year) and because Alessandro inherited the family property in Piazza Castello following the death of his father, Benedetto, when the family assets were divided up with his brothers Orazio and Pompeo in 1571. Francesco Thiene, owner of the Palladian palazzo of the same name at the other end of the square, married Alessandro's sister, Isabella Porto, and as had already been the case with Iseppo Porto and his brothers-in-law, Marcantonio and Adriano Thiene, it was perhaps the competition between the two families that gave rise to the unusual dimensions of Palazzo Porto. In any case, the very position of the palazzo, the backcloth for the square, made it necessary to create accentuated monumentality, capable of dominating the great open space in front of it: the same logic attempted just a few years earlier with the Loggia del Capitaniato in Piazza dei Signori. It is quite probable that the building was intended to have seven bays and a courtyard bounded by an exedra as revealed by an analysis of the surviving masonry. It is not clear why the work was stopped, and Vincenzo Scamozzi stated in 1615 that he was personally responsible for completing it as it is today.

25 Chiesa del Redentore - Venezia

A terrible plague struck Venice in the summer of 1575 and caused 50,000 deaths in two years, almost one Venetian in three. In September 1576, when the disease seemed invincible, the Senate called for divine help and promised to build a new church, the Redentore, or Church of the Most Holy Redeemer. Sorting quickly through various options as regards the form, location and designer, the first stone of the Palladian project was laid in May 1577. On the following 20 July the end of the plague was celebrated with a procession which reached the church by means of a bridge of boats, giving rise to a tradition that still continues today. The church was assigned to the Capuchin Fathers who determined both the floor plan based on the model used by the Franciscans (of which the Capuchins are a branch) and the decision to reject the use of marble and costly materials, preferring bricks and terracotta even for the splendid interior capitals. Respecting the Capuchin’s functional scheme for the floor plan, Palladio reflected deeply on ancient bath structures as the source for the sequences of spaces which harmoniously succeed each other. (It is possible to find many of the characteristic elements of the plan in a drawing of the .) The plan in fact derives from the composition of four perfectly defined spatial cells which differ from one another: the rectangle of the nave, the side chapels which recall the form of the narthex, the tri-lobed chamber composed of two apses and the screen of curved columns, and the choir. Once these figures had been defined with precision, Palladio studied refined solutions to accompany the passage of one into the other, seeking the harmonic fusion of the whole. The trabeation of the main order, for example, runs around the entire internal perimeter of the church, and is particularly effective when passing the pilasters of the dome diagonally. The result is the fruit of consummate compositional skill and a particular sensibility for dramatic effects. The façade of the Redentore constitutes the most mature achievement of Palladio’s reflections on church fronts with intersected orders, derived from San Francesco della Vigna. Inspiration for this type of façade ranges from the Vitruvian Basilica in Fano to Bramante at the beginning of the century. In the specific case of the Redentore, Palladio assembles several solutions, also found in the Quatrro Libri, such as the Temple of Peace or the Temple of the Sun and of the Moon.

26 - Vicenza

Founded in 1556, the Accademia Olimpica had to wait for over twenty years before it managed to provide itself with a permanent theatre structure that could host the performances previously staged in ephemeral wooden structures in the courtyards of the palazzi or in the great hall of the Palazzo della Ragione. It was only in 1580, in fact, that the Accademia started to build the theatre to a plan by its own academician, Andrea Palladio, on a piece of land provided by the Commune of Vicenza. The architect died in August that same year without seeing the conclusion of the works which were completed by his son, Silla. After Palladio, Vincenzo Scamozzi was employed on the theatre and not only created the stage but also the scenery for the inaugural performance in 1585, with the seven streets of Thebes, destined to become an integral part of the building. Recent studies have revealed that the original Palladian project only envisaged a single perspective developed in correspondence with the middle door of the stage, while painted backdrops were intended to be placed in the two side openings. At the same time, the aperture provided by the two wing walls and the ‘ducal’ ceiling above the proscenium can be traced to the Palladian plan. The dream of generations of Renaissance humanists and architects, until then unrealized, became true with the Teatro Olimpico: the erection of one of the symbolic buildings of the classical cultural tradition in a stable form. The Palladian project reconstructs the Roman theatre with an archaeological precision founded on the painstaking study of Vitruvius and of the ruins of ancient theatre complexes. As such, it constitutes a sort of spiritual testament of the great Vicentine architect. The theatre of the Ancients was reborn with the Olimpico, and in designing it Palladio achieved absolute consonance with the language of the great in which he had sought for his whole life to rediscover the laws of secret harmony ‘with a considerable effort and great diligence and love’.

27 Index of Buildings

Basilica Palladiana - Vicenza 11 Provost’s House - Dublin, Ireland 28 Bridge on the Tesina - Torri di Quartesolo,Vicenza 23 Rotonda - Vicenza 21 Bridge at Bassano - Bassano del Grappa, Vicenza 22 Teatro Olimpico - Vicenza 27 Chiesa di San Giorgio Maggiore - Venezia 20 Villa Almerico Capra - Vicenza 21 Chiesa del Redentore - Venezia 26 Villa Badoer - Fratta Polesine, Rovigo 15 Convento della Carità - Venezia 18 Villa Barbaro - Maser, Treviso 14 Loggias of Palazzo della Ragione - Vicenza 11 Villa Cornaro - Piombino Dese, Padova 13 Lucan House - Co. Dublin, Ireland 4 Villa Emo - Fanzolo di Vedelago, Treviso 16 Malcontenta - Malcontenta di Mira, Venezia 17 Malcontenta di Mira, Venezia 17 Palazzo Barbaran da Porto - Vicenza 24 Villa Pisani - Montagnana, Padova 12 Palazzo Porto in Piazza Castello - Vicenza 25 Villa Pojana - Pojana Maggiore, Vicenza 10 Palazzo Thiene - Vicenza 9 Villa Sarego - Santa Sofia di Pedemonte, Verona 19

Provost’s House, Dublin, engraving from Walter Harris, , 1766.

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