Palladian Days Read online

  “How could anyone have entered the park to get them?” I wonder aloud. “The gates are always locked.”

  “Non lo so. I do not know,” Silvana replies, with the gravity that Charlie Chan would bring to a perplexing murder investigation. “But they are all gone.”

  In our early years at Villa Cornaro, our electrician Giancarlo is a frequent visitor as we try to understand and simplify the burglar alarm system and intercom, change the older Italian electrical outlets for others that meet the new European Union standard, and upgrade some of the indirect fluorescent lighting fixtures.

  Giancarlo arrives one morning to complete another assignment. He is a small man, with a long nose, bristly mustache, recessed chin, and twinkly eyes. As usual, he brings two helpers with him, ensuring that no job will be a small undertaking. When the task is completed, I say good-bye and unlock the south door of the villa for them to leave. Within several minutes I realize I have left my keys on the central table of the grand salon and walk back to retrieve them. Through the large windows facing south, I witness a scene like a druid ritual. Giancarlo and his assistants are scurrying around the poplars, bending and weaving in quasiballetic moves, dancing rapidly from tree to tree as they scoop up the latest growth of mushrooms. Within minutes their work is accomplished. They dash to their panel truck parked beyond the west gate and speed away.

  “Ah, so,” I murmur.

  27

  Harmony and Balance

  Carl claims the worst paper he ever wrote in college was the only one that he wrote earlier than the night before it was due. That has given him a nice rationale in life for completing things at the last minute, which offends my own compulsive nature. Carl is unrepentant.

  “It was only the writing that I left for the last minute,” he protests. “I thought about the subject for weeks.”

  Whatever, I say to myself, perhaps rolling my eyes so he won't think I'm completely taken in by such sophistry.

  Now even Carl admits he is under the gun. He has rashly agreed to give a lecture on Palladio and his villas for the Harvard Club of Georgia. Just thinking about it in advance won't suffice. There is research to be done; there are slides to be taken, retaken, and sorted.

  I think he actually enjoys the incentive it gives him to digest all we have been reading, combine it with our own experience, and develop his own Palladian synthesis. Carl and I are both book junkies. For years we have been buying every book we find on Palladio or villas of the Veneto, most books on Venice, and many on Italy. At least once a year we have to reorganize our bookcases in Atlanta to expand the Italy section. Detective thrillers are the first to go, boxed and put in a closet. Plays we banish to shelves in the guest bedroom. Philosophy and sociology we push to shelves so high no one can read the titles, much less reach them. Only Carl knows why we don't “deaccession” some of these books that we will never read again. (Not my college lit books, of course; I may get back to those someday.)

  The first authority on Palladio is the man himself. In 1570 he published The Four Books of Architecture, which undoubtedly is one of the most influential books ever written on the subject. Four Books was a sensation, translated into dozens of languages and remaining in print almost continuously for over four hundred years. The success is not just testimony to his architecture. In Four Books Palladio cleverly produced a true how-to guide. The book is illustrated with meticulously prepared woodcuts depicting both Palladio's own structures and classical buildings that he drew and measured in Rome. The drawings of his own work are shown in elevation and floor plan with all the key dimensions marked. Most important, whereas Michelangelo and Raphael seem to have produced beautiful Renaissance buildings instinctively, Palladio distilled a series of clear, transferable rules that less skilled architects could follow in designing their own buildings on different terrain for patrons with different needs. How much space should be left between the columns of a portico? Two and one-quarter times the diameter of the columns is best. How tall should an Ionic column be? Including capital and base, nine times its diameter. Corinthian columns? Five and one-half times.

  Some of the modern books on Palladio are disappointing, basically just photo albums of the villas, full of angles, shadows, and sunsets, and with a preface that gives a nod to scholarship by rehashing a few truisms. Carl thinks the most useful and accessible book is Robert Tavernor's Palladio and Palladianism, a relatively short work still available in paperback.

  The booklet that Carl and I prepared in our first year to sell to tourists refers to the “internal harmony and balance” that Palladio brought to his villas. In fact, although we can feel the calm of the villa, we don't really understand what creates it. We set about trying to learn more, turning first to Four Books. Palladio begins Book II by saying that in a private home the parts must “correspond to the whole and to each other.” But what does that actually mean in looking at Villa Cornaro?

  Floor plan of Villa Cornaro's lower piano nobile, with frescoed rooms identified by the principal theme

  Obviously, the east half of the villa is reproduced in mirror image on the west. Palladio is always symmetrical. But he must have something more than symmetry in mind. Carl notes right away that the center, or core, of the villa—that is, without the east and west wings—is close to a square, which Palladio cites in Four Books as a preferred shape. Of course, the Tower of Babel and Egypt rooms—we refer to the frescoed rooms by the themes of their major frescos—are also square, but we can't make much of that, so we keep looking. We also see that the seven rooms of the core, together with the entrance hall, make up a rectangle with the long side equal to one and one-half times the short side—another of Palladio's preferred shapes. Concentrating on this rectangle, the core living area, we begin to make progress. We notice that the Babel and Jacob rooms together are the same size as the Noah room.

  Villa Cornaro's lower piano nobile, with Palladio's six repetitions of the “module” highlighted

  That pulls those rooms into a pattern but still does not account for the grand salon. We start thinking of the Noah room as a module for the villa design. This leads to our breakthrough: the grand salon, we realize, is equivalent to two of the modules (that is, two Noah rooms) placed side by side. What an epiphany! We feel like code breakers, because we have puzzled out a consistent pattern running through the core living area of the villa, a pattern dramatically illustrating Palladio's stated principle of having the parts of a home “correspond to the whole and to each other.”

  Still we are left without an explanation for the two wings standing to the east and to the west, that is, the guest bedroom and the kitchen. In fact, we learn that those two wings were probably not built in 1552-1554 with the rest of the villa. Doug Lewis has concluded that the wings were probably not finished until a second building campaign after 1588. For Carl and me, this seems to open a bizarre possibility perhaps not considered by Doug or other scholars who have written about the villa: maybe the wings were not part of Palladio's original 1551 design. Four Books, which depicts Villa Cornaro complete with wings, was not published until nineteen years later—plenty of time for Palladio to add the wings to his drawing in order to show his readers how the villa could have looked if it were not built on such a narrow site. Interesting thought, but how would we explain the fact that the wings are actually there, just as they are shown in Four Books? Well, maybe Giorgio Cornaro, when he saw Palladio's new drawing, decided he liked the wings and would add them on to his villa even though it was a tight squeeze. But then Giorgio Cornaro died just one year after Four Books was published, leaving it to his son Girolamo to finish the project.

  Maybe it is all far-fetched. In any case, it keeps Carl and me entertained for weeks, discussing the possibilities, combing through our books, and inspecting brick patterns in the stairwells for clues to what was built later.

  We are still left with a big puzzle: How did Palladio decide on the dimensions of the module that he repeated throughout the villa?

  At this p
oint Carl and I learn that measuring a villa is not as easy as it sounds. First, we find that opposite walls are not always parallel. You may get one dimension if you measure along one side of a room and a different one if you measure along the other side. Second, there is the problem of deciding what unit of measurement to use. You can't use meters as Italians do today; the metric system was not developed until some two hundred years later. In Four Books Palladio always speaks in terms of the Vicentine foot, which was the unit of measurement in the province of Vicenza, where he lived. He even includes a woodcut illustration of a line equal in length to half a Vicentine foot. This really confounds our measurements for a while. No matter how many times we do the conversion, the actual dimensions in our villa are nowhere near round multiples of the Vicentine foot shown in Four Books.

  Finally we sort out the problem. We have been relying on a photographic reprint of the 1738 English-language translation of Four Books, not a reliable source because its illustrations might vary from those in the original 1570 Italian edition. In any case, the illustrations in both editions are woodcuts, which can be somewhat elastic. With further reading we learn that every Palladian expert seems to have his own idea of a Vicentine foot, ranging from 34.7 centimeters to 35.7 centimeters. Since the villa's site was originally part of the province of Treviso, we feel we should also consider the possibility that the workers there might actually have used the Tre-visan foot, not the Vicentine one, despite what Palladio wrote. A hurried transatlantic phone call to Doug Lewis produces the information that the Trevisan foot is 34.8 centimeters. Since that falls within the range of lengths we have for the Vicentine foot, we decide that is the unit we will go with. Immediately we are able to confirm that the width of the Noah room as built is 16 Trevisan feet almost on the nose, the same number that Palladio marked on the Villa Cornaro floor plan in Four Books.

  The length of the room is more problematic. Palladio's drawing specifies it as 26.5 feet. Our own measurements show that it was built at 27.03 feet—a discrepancy of about 18.5 centimeters. The difference is important because we are trying to determine what theoretical system Palladio used to establish the ratio of width to length in the room. Vitruvius, an architect of ancient Rome whose treatise on architecture, rediscovered in the 1400s, deeply influenced Palladio and other Renaissance architects, believed that 6,10, and 16 were “perfect” numbers and that the ratio of 6 to 10 was commonly found in nature, including some dimensions of the human body. In the Vitruvian system, a room whose width is 16 feet should be 26.667 feet long order to reflect a 6:10 ratio. The Noah room varies slightly from that ratio, both as marked by Pal-ladio on his drawing and as built (and measured by Carl and me). However, the marked and built dimensions are all within 12.7 centimeters (1.4 percent) of the theoretical ratio. The difference could be explained simply as rounding or might reflect Palladio's instruction that walls be built thinner as they rise. On the other hand, there are some other closely related mathematical ratios that might hold the answer, such as V3, the Fibonacci series, or the golden section.

  The Noah room, used by the Gables for dining, with rooms beyond aligned on an east-west axis.

  I am exhilarated to find so many mysteries still surrounding my villa after 450 years. They bring a challenge to each day and a promise that we will never be bored in Piombino Dese.

  When he leads tour groups through the villa, Carl tells them that the harmony and balance of the interior are what distinguish Palla-dio's own work from Palladianism. Palladianism in architecture today usually means appropriating some exterior motif, perhaps the double projecting portico of Villa Cornaro, the five-part profile of Villa Barbaro, or the oculi of Villa Poiana. Behind those copied exterior motifs hides a jumble of interior spaces. Standing in one room of a modern “Palladian” structure, you have no idea what size or shape or twist or turn awaits you beyond the next door. In a villa designed by Palladio himself, you can stand in one corner room and, without even having seen the rest of the structure, draw a complete floor plan. That is the result of Palladio's interior balance and harmony, the relationship of the parts to each other and to the whole.

  “That is what you should learn from your visit to Palladio's villas,” Carl tells them. “You cannot learn it any other way.”

  Despite Carl's agony in preparing for it, his Harvard Club speech is a big success. His approach is to back off and discuss how Palladio responded to newly emerging economic needs of his time. He points out that, although the Republic of Venice in Palladio's time continued to act like a rich and powerful nation-state with its mainland empire spread along the islands and coasts of the eastern Mediterranean, it was in fact moribund.

  Three crushing events of the prior century, all within a span of about fifty years, tolled the death knell of the republic, although few recognized the peals: the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, Columbus's discovery of America in 1492, and Vasco da Gama's pioneering of the sea route around Africa to India and the Orient in 1498. For 250 years much of Venice's wealth had come from its domination of European trade with the East. The Ottoman capture of Constantinople marked the end of the Venetian monopoly on trade in the eastern Mediterranean, while da Gama demonstrated that the Mediterranean could be bypassed completely in reaching India. Columbus brought the biggest blow of all: Trade with the New World proved much more lucrative than trade with Asia, leading to the rise of the Atlantic powers whose advanced technology in sailing ships beat out the galley ships of the Mediterranean.

  By the mid-ijoos the Venetians were in a fury to develop their territory on the mainland into plantations. They needed a source of wealth and agricultural produce to replace their threatened resources in the eastern Mediterranean. Most important for later architecture, the grand Venetian families needed equally grand places to live while they were in the countryside to supervise the planting and harvest seasons on their new lands. They wanted country palaces as imposing as their homes in Venice but, of course, since the country villas were only for seasonal use, they wanted something cheap.

  In Carl's analysis, Palladio brought a three-part solution. First, he achieved the grandeur his Venetian patrons were seeking by adapting exterior motifs that the Romans—and the Greeks before them—had used for temples and public buildings. Second, to hold costs down, he executed his villas in brick covered with stucco to resemble marble or Istrian stone, and he used other cost-saving shortcuts such as incorporating foundations from earlier buildings or occasionally substituting terra-cotta for stone. Third, he organized his interiors with the balance and harmony that Carl and I have enjoyed exploring.

  Later, Carl gives versions of the speech to several other groups in Atlanta and once even to the Newburyport Historical Society in Massachusetts. As personal Internet Web sites are introduced, Carl cajoles our son Carl—who after college turns his artist's training toward graphic design, including Web sites—into helping him assemble a site on Palladio's villas (www.boglewood.com/palla-dio/). The text of his Harvard Club speech is the core of the site, but he adds bells and whistles, such as a biography of Palladio, a census of the villas, and a bibliography. He also creates a time line that organizes nineteen key events of Venice's original settlement, expansion, and final decline. To everyone's surprise, the site is soon getting hundreds of visitors every day. Several college professors e-mail Carl to say they have made his Web site required reading for their students.

  28

  Rondtnt

  “Oh, Signora Sally, you can't do that!” Silvana protests. Tradition is a powerful force in a Palladian villa.

  We cannot replace the faux antique chairs in the Tower of Babel room with a bright tomato-red contemporary sofa, Silvana explains to me in the gentlest possible way. We must find a way to rescind the order we have just placed with the furniture store in Loreggia, she suggests.

  Dick and Julie Rush furnished the villa with antique tables, chairs, sofas, cassoni, and armadi, most from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, though salted with a
scattering of reproductions. Several pieces are as old as the villa, but only one of those—a small canopied bed—is from the Veneto. The Rushes wandered Europe and haunted the auction houses for good buys. Many pieces they shipped to the States at their departure, but other items were not worth the trouble and freight, or would not fit into their new Florida home. Dick sold them to us for a lump sum. We became owners of dozens of interesting and desperately uncomfortable chairs, numerous large tables, and several nice armadi, including the beautiful armoire that determined our new kitchen color scheme. There are lots of old bed frames and mattresses as well, and Julie has left enough plates and kitchenware to suffice until we can assemble our own.

  Like newlyweds, Carl and I plot what we need immediately (new kitchen, new beds) and what we hope to add over time (comfortable sofas, rugs, bookcases, a new washer-dryer, good china). Afternoon sorties carry us to Bassano for a set of pretty white casual china with a raised border of lily of the valley; to Loreggia for a bright red teakettle and kitchen cups and saucers; to the De Grandis shop just down the street for gorgeous heavy pots and pans and Villeroy & Bosch wineglasses. One afternoon's excursion takes us to Castel-franco for a fax machine so that Carl can transact business while at the villa.

  Our initial plan is not to change any of the furniture on the lower floor, where tourists visit, but to focus our nesting efforts upstairs, which we have to ourselves. Our plan collapses when we begin to realize that all of our leisure time downstairs is spent huddied at the kitchen table because none of the other chairs on that floor is comfortable enough to linger in. That is what leads to our tradition-shattering decision to introduce comfortable seating to the Babel room. Despite her initial misgivings, Silvana admires the sofa when it is installed, as well as the two new large brown leather chairs. Visiting tour guides and their clients are not shocked. In fact, they scarcely notice the changes because, we find, the spirit of the space is not set by the new furniture or even the several old pieces we have left; it derives as ever from Palladio's proportions and from the character and soft colors of the surrounding frescos and stuccos. The Tower of Babel room becomes our den, where we spend comfortable hours reading, visiting with guests, drinking coffee after breakfast and dinner.