Art Trip to Vicenza
Vicenza and its rural environs offers the traveler the best opportunity to view the civic and domestic architecture of Andrea Palladio. Born in Padua, Palladio came to Vicenza to work as a stone carver, and rose to became the premier architect of late sixteenth-century Italy . His style is synonymous with “classicism” -- that is, the revival of the grandeur that was ancient Rome. He also authored an illustrated treatise on architecture, whose fame and influence spread to England and the United States during the late eighteenth-century. The Villa Rotonda is perched on a gentle hill just outside Vicenza. As celebrated as is the villa among art historians -- an icon almost akin to the Mona Lisa -- it is surprisingly not as well-known as a tourist destination. The villa will take the traveler into the lovely countryside of the Veneto region.
Andrea Palladio, Villa Rotunda
The Villa Rotonda speaks in a language of unmistakable aristocracy, for, perched on its hill, we are compelled to gaze up in reverence towards its crowning central dome. Palladio was sensitive indeed to location of his villas: he remarks in his treatise that the place should be convenient to the city, but provide a healthful retreat from the heat of the summer. It should be built near running, not standing waters, and be elevated, so that breezes stir the air. The Villa Rotonda conforms to this prescription. Built on a rise in the terrain, to one side runs the river Bacchiglione, and all around fertile hills animate the airy and delightful site.
The villa was commissioned in the late 1560s by Paolo Almerico, a retired official of the papal court in Rome. Unlike many of Palladio's other villas built in Northern Italy (for example, Villa Barbaro in Maser), the Villa Rotonda had no agricultural function. Rather, it was built only for pleasure, and this role is reflected in its design. For example, an open-air loggia supported by six columns adorns every side of the cube-shaped villa. Each of these loggias provides a cool, covered space from which to appreciate views to the surrounding landscape. Further, each is surmounted by a triangular pediment, a shape traditionally associated with holiness and derived from classical temples Palladio had studied in Rome.
The villa, in a sense, declares itself to be a “temple” devoted to the pleasures of the countryside. The central, hemispherical dome confirms this interpretation of the architecture. Like pediments, a dome denotes a spiritual edifice, such as the Pantheon in Rome. The Villa Rotonda was in fact the first private home of the Renaissance period to appropriate a celestial dome for its none-too-modest crown.
Interior to the villa are frescoes executed by a team of artists during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These are less fine than the decorations by Paolo Veronese at Villa Barbaro, these paintings rivalling Palladio's own architectural accomplishment. But perhaps such rivalry is precisely what Palladio did not want: in his treatise, in fact, he never mentions the paintings interior to his villas. Standing under the central dome in the Villa Rotonda, the traveler may get some sense as to why. The walls are as if dissolved, and the building appears to be supported on illusionistic marble columns. Figures of the gods stand on ornate, fictive platforms. Swags of painted garlands hang over the archways, and the vault of the dome itself is encrusted with stuccowork and more frescoes. Compared to the noble flow of the Villa Rotonda itself -- its harmony of cube and dome, the rhythms of its temple-front loggias, the shadows cast within its cooling open-air spaces -- the interior decoration is ebullient and over-ripe. Whatever your final judgment of the interior of the villa, it must be conceded that it lacks the classical decorum that defines, above all else, the architecture of Andrea Palladio.
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