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

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I should like to acknowledge the generous advice and personal insights of Douglas Lewis, a distinguished Palladio scholar and curator of sculpture and decorative arts at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and the friendly assistance of Deborah Howard of Cambridge University, and Pierre de la Ruffinire du Prey of Queens University. I relied on the published research of many Palladio scholars (mentioned in the notes), but I would like to single out the published work of James S. Ackerman, Bruce Boucher, Howard Burns, Douglas Lewis, and Lionello Puppi. I used the marvelous new translation of Quattro libri by Robert Tavernor and Richard Schofield. Charles W. Hind, head of special collections and curator, and Philippa Martin, of the Royal Institute of British Architects Drawings Collection in London, an invaluable repository of several hundred Palladio drawings, offered efficient and helpful assistance. John Blatteau shared his extensive knowledge of classical architecture. Allen Freeman contributed a CD-ROM version of Quattro libri. Richard and Susan Wyatt offered me the hospitality of their Pennsylvania Rotonda, and Alvin Holm provided architectural information about the house. Eva Loeb and David Burns shared the Villa Saracenoand much more. The Landmark Trust deserves great credit for rescuing the Villa Saraceno, and for accomplishing a sterling restoration. Colleagues and friends at the University of Pennsylvania contributed advice and conversation: Joseph Farrell, Gino Segre, Liliane Weissberg, David De Long, and Julia Moore Converse, director of the Architectural Archives. The staff of the Fisher Fine Arts Library, the Van Pelt Library, and Interlibrary Loans were helpful as always. Throughout much of the writing of this book, Acalya Kiyak served as a diligent research assistant. Jane Herman did a sterling job of copy editing, and Erich Hobbing produced a masterful book design. My longtime editor, Nan Graham, provided encouragement, criticism, and wise advice; Susan Moldow, publisher of Scribner, was equally supportive, as usual. Thanks to Andrew Wylie, my agent. Thanks, also, to the University of Pennsylvania, which granted me the sabbatical that gave me a chance to see the buildings with my own eyes.

March 2000December 2001

Hotel Palladio, Vicenza

Villa Saraceno, Finale di Agugliaro

The Icehouse, Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia

About a year after I finished this book, it came to my attention that an old retaining wall in our garden had started to bulge and sag and was in need of repair. Made of stones laid atop each other without mortar, it had to be dismantled and rebuilt. I was not up to the jobthe wall is 150 feet longso I hired a professional to do the work. Over the next four weeks, watching Brian Corrigan and his assistant labor in my garden, I realized that I had not paid enough attention to Andrea Palladios original calling. Of course, I had understood that the nearly two decades of his youth and early manhood spent working as a stonemason had provided him with useful knowledge of the building crafts. But I had not considered how the actual occupation may have affected him.

I had always imagined Palladio as he appears in the statue beside the Basilica in Vicenzaa pensive scholar, albeit a self-educated one. But, as was obvious from watching Brian at work, handling heavy stones is an intensely physical activity. (So is wielding a stone-carvers mallet and chisel.) However refined and courtly Palladio may have become under Trissinos tutelage, and however gentlemanly he appears in Maganzas portrait, he could not have been a delicate sorthe must have had a rugged and powerful physique. His active and extremely productive life should be seen in that light.

The work of a stonemason involves strenuous activity, but the pace is stop-and-go, very different from the steady toil of a plasterer or a painter. Brian spent a lot of time considering the piece of wall he was working on, examining the different stones that were laid out on the grass like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. It was only after careful scrutiny that he would bend down to heft a stone into place. He did everything calmly and carefully, reinforcing my impression of Palladio as a deliberate sort of person who approached problems in an unhurried, almost ponderous manner. Thus he bided his time during the Basilica competition, waiting until the right moment before submitting the ideas over which he had evidently labored a long time.

When Brian and I discussed how the wall should be rebuilt, he said that the original wall had been placed directly on the ground, and that before rebuilding it he wanted to add a foundation of crushed stone. Wouldnt that add to the cost, I asked. Yes, he said, but if he didnt do it, in another fifty years the wall would start moving again. His evident conviction made me realize that the subject wasnt open to discussionthis was how it had to be done. Palladio may have given the most intense pleasure to the Gentleman and Lords with whom he dealt, but I wonder if stubbornness wasnt also a part of his character. Not the willfulness of the self-involved architectit must be done the way I wantbut rather the considered but obstinate attitude of the experienced craftsmanthis is the right way to do it.

A stonemason contends against gravity and time, which are unrelenting. A badly plastered wall can be patched up, peeling paint can be scraped and re-covered, but a poorly built stone wall eventually will collapse. The stonemason is an innate conservativeor, perhaps, stonemasonry is a craft that attracts men of conservative temperament. The architect Palladio was innovative, sometimes unusually so, but his innovation was always in the context of the tried and true, for when Palladio found something that worked, he stuck to it. His invention was never gratuitous or capricious. And the evidence of superior building is in the villas themselves, standing strong after almost five hundred years.

Like so many who have visited Palladios villas, I was attracted by their somber beauty and chaste geometry. But since writing this book, I have discovered a more individual and personal connection. I was researching some family background and came across a surprising coincidence, something I had vaguely known but entirely forgotten: both of my parents grew up in houses built in the Palladian style. My mothers family lived in the center of Warsaw in a villa built in 1860 by the Italian architect, Francesco Maria Lanci. On the hundred-foot-long street faade is a tall main floor punctuated by a row of windows with pediments supported by Composite pilasters. A lightly rusticated base indicates the ground floor.

The country house where my father spent much of his childhood is in a village called Lusawice, in southern Poland on the Dunajec River. It did not belong to my grandfather; he was merely a houseguestfor more than twenty years. The house was a dwr, or manor house, built in the early nineteenth century. It is a long low structure, without a basement or attic, but with an elegant central pedimented portico supported by four Doric columns. The portico is distinctly Palladian, of course, but even more Palladian is the combination of a rustic structure with an elegant classical appendage.