The Perfect House: A Journey with Renaissance Master Andrea Palladio by Witold Rybczynski Page A
Authors: Witold Rybczynski
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across a reference to the Villa Saraceno. 2 The magazine article described how the house had recently been restored by a British trust that rescues old buildings and rents them to holidayers. I could live, for however short a time, in a Palladio villa! This was too good an opportunity to pass up, and together with two friends, my wife, Shirley, and I booked the villa for the following March.
“You have to see these buildings with your own eyes to realize how good they are,” Goethe had written. True enough, but experiencing a building is not the same thing as looking at a painting in a museum. Paintings are meant to be looked at; architecture should be lived in. Buildings reveal themselves slowly; they must be seen at different times of day and under different conditions, in sunlight and darkness, in fog and rain. Houses particularly should be appreciated in small doses. For days on end you may be unaware of your surroundings, then one day you stop what you are doing, look around, and indescribably but unmistakably you feel that everything, including yourself, is in the right place. That is the experience of architecture. That’s what I wanted—to wake up under Palladio’s roof, eat a meal in front of his fireplace, and watch the sunset from his loggia. If only for a short period I wanted to call a Palladio villa home.
L IKE MANY OF P ALLADIO’S COUNTRY HOUSES, THE V ILLA S ARACENO WAS THE HEART OF A WORKING FARM.
I also wanted—although I didn’t admit this to anyone, hardly even to myself—to discover Palladio’s secret. What made his houses so attractive, so imitated, so perfect? I’d traveled from villa to villa, studied Quattro libri, pored over photographs and plans, and read scholarly papers, but I still wasn’t sure that I knew the entire answer. Now I had eight days to find out.
• • •
I’m alone in the villa, the others have gone to the food market in Padua. The house is silent, except for the occasional crackling of burning logs in the fireplace. Pale mid-morning light slips in through tall windows and across the worn refectory table that is spread with my books and papers. It’s an ordinary enough room, with white, roughly plastered walls, a reddish terrazzo floor, and an extremely high, dark wooden ceiling.
The Villa Saraceno dates from the first decade of Palladio’s career, roughly the same time that he was designing the Villa Poiana, which is only a few miles away. As happened so often, his client was the younger of two brothers, Giacomo and Biagio Saraceno. They belonged to a Roman ecclesiastical family that generations before had moved to Vicenza and established itself in the professions. 3 Their grandfather had bought the Finale estate, which they inherited on their father’s death in the late 1530s. Giacomo, the elder, got the customary lion’s share and forthwith built a large country house known locally as the Palazzo delle Trombe, perhaps because of its trumpetlike rain spouts. The spouts are gone but the house still stands, surrounded by a working farmyard. It is sometimes claimed that Giacomo’s villa was designed by Sanmicheli, but it is more likely that the sturdy, rather conventional design was the work of a local builder. I A decade later, around 1548, the younger brother commissioned a villa of his own. He turned to Palladio, who by then was making a reputation for himself with the Basilica, a project with which Biagio, as a member of the city council, was intimately familiar. The site for the villa was an existing medieval farmyard, just down the road from Giacomo’s house.
A PAGE FROM Q UATTRO LIBRI, V ILLA S ARACENO
The Villa Saraceno has a checkered history. Biagio died in 1562 and left the house to Leonardo, the younger of his two sons. When Leonardo died without an heir, the property passed to his brother Pietro, clearly his father’s second choice. Something of a ne’er-do-well, Pietro fathered several illegitimate sons, but since Biagio’s will
“You have to see these buildings with your own eyes to realize how good they are,” Goethe had written. True enough, but experiencing a building is not the same thing as looking at a painting in a museum. Paintings are meant to be looked at; architecture should be lived in. Buildings reveal themselves slowly; they must be seen at different times of day and under different conditions, in sunlight and darkness, in fog and rain. Houses particularly should be appreciated in small doses. For days on end you may be unaware of your surroundings, then one day you stop what you are doing, look around, and indescribably but unmistakably you feel that everything, including yourself, is in the right place. That is the experience of architecture. That’s what I wanted—to wake up under Palladio’s roof, eat a meal in front of his fireplace, and watch the sunset from his loggia. If only for a short period I wanted to call a Palladio villa home.
L IKE MANY OF P ALLADIO’S COUNTRY HOUSES, THE V ILLA S ARACENO WAS THE HEART OF A WORKING FARM.
I also wanted—although I didn’t admit this to anyone, hardly even to myself—to discover Palladio’s secret. What made his houses so attractive, so imitated, so perfect? I’d traveled from villa to villa, studied Quattro libri, pored over photographs and plans, and read scholarly papers, but I still wasn’t sure that I knew the entire answer. Now I had eight days to find out.
• • •
I’m alone in the villa, the others have gone to the food market in Padua. The house is silent, except for the occasional crackling of burning logs in the fireplace. Pale mid-morning light slips in through tall windows and across the worn refectory table that is spread with my books and papers. It’s an ordinary enough room, with white, roughly plastered walls, a reddish terrazzo floor, and an extremely high, dark wooden ceiling.
The Villa Saraceno dates from the first decade of Palladio’s career, roughly the same time that he was designing the Villa Poiana, which is only a few miles away. As happened so often, his client was the younger of two brothers, Giacomo and Biagio Saraceno. They belonged to a Roman ecclesiastical family that generations before had moved to Vicenza and established itself in the professions. 3 Their grandfather had bought the Finale estate, which they inherited on their father’s death in the late 1530s. Giacomo, the elder, got the customary lion’s share and forthwith built a large country house known locally as the Palazzo delle Trombe, perhaps because of its trumpetlike rain spouts. The spouts are gone but the house still stands, surrounded by a working farmyard. It is sometimes claimed that Giacomo’s villa was designed by Sanmicheli, but it is more likely that the sturdy, rather conventional design was the work of a local builder. I A decade later, around 1548, the younger brother commissioned a villa of his own. He turned to Palladio, who by then was making a reputation for himself with the Basilica, a project with which Biagio, as a member of the city council, was intimately familiar. The site for the villa was an existing medieval farmyard, just down the road from Giacomo’s house.
A PAGE FROM Q UATTRO LIBRI, V ILLA S ARACENO
The Villa Saraceno has a checkered history. Biagio died in 1562 and left the house to Leonardo, the younger of his two sons. When Leonardo died without an heir, the property passed to his brother Pietro, clearly his father’s second choice. Something of a ne’er-do-well, Pietro fathered several illegitimate sons, but since Biagio’s will
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