The Perfect House: A Journey with Renaissance Master Andrea Palladio by Rybczynski Witold

Author:Rybczynski, Witold [Rybczynski, Witold]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2013-02-26T00:00:00+00:00

THE VILLA BARBARO IS MASTERFULLY INTEGRATED INTO ITS SITE AT THE FOOTHILLS OF THE DOLOMITIC ALPS.

The villa at Maser was, in any case, a challenging project. The site, a hill called Castellano (Lord of the manor), contained a medieval fortified house.7 Evidence of old fireplaces in the attic of the casa del padrone indicates that Palladio reused the exterior walls of the old structure in their entirety. This meant that he had to find a way to accommodate the space needs of not one but two households within the tight dimensions of the relatively small castello.

The castello was built into the slope, and he took advantage of the situation to open the upper floor of the house to a large rear terrace cut into the hill, a landscape feature no doubt influenced by the stepped gardens of Tivoli. The villa at Maser had water features, too. The terrace was the site of a natural spring that fed a fountain that “forms a little lake that serves as a fishpond,” he wrote. “Having left this spot, the water runs to the kitchen and then, having irrigated the gardens to right and left of the road which gently ascends and leads to the building, forms two fishponds with their horse troughs on the public road; from there it goes off to water the orchard, which is very large and full of superb fruit and various wild plants.”8 The troughs are gone, but they must have been located in the semicircle where I am parked.

The formal approach road is still here, but is permanently gated. Leaving my car, I walk down the highway and follow the signs to the side entrance. The large parking lot near the house is starting to fill up with cars and a couple of tour buses, and there is already a crowd of people milling about in front of a locked gate. I usually wander through Palladio’s villas alone, but clearly that will not be the case today.

A custodian opens the gate and the crowd swarms into a small courtyard at the eastern end of the house. From this vantage point, it is obvious that the giant curved brackets of the pavilion are nothing more than screens masking a small box-like structure that in a modern building might house an air-conditioning unit. Judging from the rows of small holes, it’s a dovecote. Pigeons were a familiar sight on terraferma farms since they provided food, fertilizer, and communications—homing pigeons could reach Venice from Maser in less than an hour. The contrast between the grand architectural gesture in front and the utilitarian pigeon coop behind reminds me of false-fronted buildings of the Old West.

A tall arched opening signals the entrance to the arcaded loggia. People are pushing their way in and lining up to buy tickets, so I walk around to the front of the villa until things settle down. The upper part of the pavilion contains a giant zodiac dial, reflecting Daniele’s interest in astronomy (the corresponding face of the other pavilion has a sundial).

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.