Palladio by James Ackerman

Author:James Ackerman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141936383
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2008-11-19T00:00:00+00:00

64. Palazzo Barbarano, façade detail

65. Palazzo Porto-Breganze

in buying a proper building site, and proceeded with an irregular one invaded by earlier buildings on the left of the court. Palladio’s first plan with its long atrium and court in the central tract – reminiscent of the Venetian tradition and of Sanmicheli’s Veronese palaces – also developed naturally from his own earlier innovations. Almost nothing of it is preserved except the ample atrium which, in spite of its irregular form, has an imposing harmony that rings through its present decay. Palladio wrote that the plan already had been altered at the time of publication of the Quattro Libri, but too late to allow the preparation of a new cut; maybe the client had acquired the missing piece of property. The existing plan is so disorderly, however, that it must represent a major departure from Palladio’s revised project. Some time in the later sixteenth century (?) two extra bays were added to the façade, throwing the portal off-centre. The rectangular reliefs on the ground floor were interpolated also, in imitation of the Palazzo Valmarana [64]. Palladio wrote that he changed the façade when he changed the plan, but does not say why; the first scheme with a giant order, shown in a small cut in the Quattro Libri, was abandoned in favour of superimposed half-columns to achieve a pictorial enrichment of the early formula of the Palazzo Iseppo Porto [55]. Probably he calculated that the giant order would be too dramatic for the narrow street; in substituting the present design he adjusted the façade to the scale of the site by making the lower order equal to the width of the street.

Where giant half-columns were used, as at the Loggia del Capitaniato [39, No. 10; 66] and the Palazzo Porto-Breganze [39, No. 12; 65], ample squares offered distant and varied viewpoints; the church façades, where Palladio developed his taste for this motive, were also unencumbered; in fact, the order of the Porto Palace [65], with its high podia and its swags between the capitals, is almost a replica of that on the San Giorgio façade [86]. How were the lonely two bays of this building to have grown into a proper palace? Vincenzo Scamozzi, who supervised the construction, wrote in his Idea della architettura universale of 1615 only that the palace was among those that he had ‘finished… but with certain changes’ (he was too envious to mention Palladio in any of his writings). The portion completed is only one room wide and extends into a rear court with one-storey half columns along the wall, the last of which faintly indicates the beginning of a curved rear wall that Bertotti Scamozzi, in his plates of 1776, restored persuasively as a theatre-like hemicycle, a novel idea that probably was Palladio’s. Bertotti drew the hemicycle as high as the façade, which would have made the court a dark well; a one-storey elevation of the type of Palazzo Pitti in Florence would be more convincing.

The partly

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