CHAPTER FIVE
VILLA BARBARO: ARCHITECTURE, KNOWLEDGE AND
The apparently divergent views that usually stand
between the ideals of town and country, utopia and arcadianism, are reconciled
in Palladio’s villa buildings. Just as
Palladio’s civic works in
…he will
not reap much less utility and consolation from the country house; where the
remaining part of the time will be passed in seeing and adorning his own
possessions, and by industry, and the art of agriculture, improving his estate;
where also by the exercise which in a villa is commonly taken… the body will
the more easily preserve its strength and health; and, finally, where the mind,
fatigued by the agitations of the city, will be greatly restored and comforted,
and be able quietly to attend to the studies of letters, and contemplation.[i]
Unlike
the villas around 
discussion
of every public building project from 1574 until his death in 1595[ii].
Figure 13, Palladio: Villa Barbaro, Maser
1557-58[iii]
The Barbaro villa is not just a palace in the
country, but a complex in which dwelling and farm functions are integrated into
the building itself. The upper floor of
the villa is for habitation and equal to the level of the rear terrace that is adorned
with a richly sculpted nymphaeum and a pond (fig.15) that flow from a natural
spring that influenced the original placing of the villa site. The lower floor is an adaptation of the
arched barchesse traditional in the
with the same symbolic meaning and value as in a Roman villa
and the villas of antiquity are also put to practical uses such as fish farming
and irrigation.
Figure
14, Villa Barbaro, view from the Piano nobile over the Barbaro farming land[vi]
The
emphasis upon the necessary interconnection between the functionality and
appropriateness of the villa with its symbolic and spiritual roles is also clear
in Palladio’s description of Maser in the Quattro
Libri:
The
building below is at Maser, a Villa near Asolo Castello del Trevigiano, of
Monsignor Reverendissimo Eletto di Aquilea and of magnifico Signor Marc’
Antonio, the de’ Barbari brothers. That
part of the building which projects forward, has two levels of rooms. The floor of the upper story is at the same
level as the pavement of the courtyard at the rear, where the mountain has been
cut away and there is a fountain decorated with infinite amounts of stucco and
paint. This spring makes a small lake
that serves as a small fish pond. From
there the water leaves and flows into the kitchen, and then it irrigates the
gardens which are to the right and the left of the part of the road, which,
slowly climbing, leads up to the building.
It [the water] then makes two fish ponds with their drinking troughs
above the public road, from where it parts, and waters the garden that is very
large and full of excellent fruit trees and various bushes. Façade of the house has four columns of the
Ionic order, the capitals and the corner ones face in two directions… On the
one side and on the other there are loggias, whose extremities have dovecotes,
and under these there are places to make wine, and the stables, and the other
outbuildings for the use of the villa.’[vii]
The stuccoed Roman temple-front of the villa that emphatically
does not recall the odours and confusion of the farmyard is explained in the Quattro Libri. Palladio’s reasons for turning to religious
architecture for motifs for the villa are thus:
I have made in all the villa buildings and also in some of the city
ones a pediment on columns for the front façade in which there are principal
portals. The reason is that these
porches announce the entrance of houses and lend much to their grandeur and
magnificence. They make the forward part
more eminent than the other parts…Also the ancients used them in their buildings,
as one sees in the remains of temples and of other public edifices, which in
turn got the motif in all probability from house architecture.[viii]
The influence
of Palladio’s patrons in the design and planning of their villa give Villa
Barbaro an eclectic quality that one meets nowhere else in Palladio’s work. It is
also a quality which certainly derives from the range of the Barbaro’s
contacts, above all in
Figure 15, Courtyard and nymphaeum, Villa
Barbaro[x]
As in many of Palladio’s villas and city palaces, the Villa Barbaro has
magnificent frescos throughout the main part of the villa that work with the
form and design of the building to inspire the inhabitant and visitor with its
elegant harnessing of the classical and the Venetian. In the main salon of the villa illusionistic
frescoed landscapes alternate with real windows that look out onto the Barbaro
lands between white classical columns.
The juxtaposition of illusion and reality gave the twofold effect of
giving greater vivacity to the painting while ennobling the landscape and
thereby bringing beautiful reality and romantic fantasy into union. The links between the architecture and the
classical world, both in form and in meaning is constantly present in the
frescos. Many of the frescos portray
heroic deeds and ancient allegories common to classical mythology and
cosmology. Alongside the symbols of
Virtue, Faith, Hope, Charity, Justice, Temperance and Strength we find the gods
of a more pastoral aspect such as Diana, Ceres and Bacchus. They share the walls in harmony with Christian
figures such as the Madonna della Tazza, who not only imbue the villa with
Christian intention but land it specifically in a Venetian context that
combined the antique with Christian figures significant to the
Figure 16, Paolo
Veronese: ceiling fresco from the main salon in the Villa Barbaro at Maser.[xii]
Interesting also is the fact that the frescos in the
villa are not only dedicated to mythological and sacred figures but real contemporary
figures. Like the frescos of the
landscapes in juxtaposition with the real landscape at Maser, these frescos
deliberately blur the boundaries between the antique and the contemporary, real
and mythological and spiritual. The most
famous and striking of these frescos are the life size depictions of the hunter
coming from the woods with his dogs and the noblewoman, children, parrot and
monkey who look over a ‘balcony’ down onto the Salon of Olympus (fig.16). Other ceilings, such as those of the central
cupola depict astrological scenes.
Daniele and Marc’Antonio’s father Ermolao Barbaro, wrote several texts
on astrology and these frescos deal with his
Figure 17, Paolo Veronese: frescos in the salon, Villa
Maser.[xiii]
ideas. In these
works too, the essence is harmony, the harmony that exists between life and
destiny. The central female figure of
these frescos has been interpreted as Divine Wisdom and the allegory of
The
framework of the program for the villa and the extent to which it can be seen
as a gesamtkunstwerk that seeks to combine practicality with the symbolic,
politics with the intellect can be better understood in the context of Daniele
Barbaro’s commentary on and translation of Vitruvius (1556). The translation was the most accurate and
informed of the Renaissance, and the commentary was the first to be
Figure
18, Paolo Veronese: frescos in the salon, Villa Maser[xv]
based
on a thorough knowledge of the Roman remains.[xvi] It is also a major instance of the
Renaissance appropriation of antiquity and of the discourse on the nature of
artistic invention. A major strength of
Barbaro’s commentary is his capacity to clearly structure confused passages in
Vitruvius’s text and to put them into a simple philosophical framework that
synthesizes Platonic and Aristotelian principles: Platonic in locating the
source of the architect’s inspiration and knowledge in the immanent order and
harmony of the natural world; and Aristotelian in the articulation of
architectural practice.
Barbaro
relates the first principles of architecture to the intellect. The intellect, Barbaro explains, has two
modes (habiti) of arriving at truth, one deriving from necessity and one
contingent. Necessary truth is revealed
by science, intellect (which apprehends truth through divine rays, and leads to
understanding), and knowledge (sapienza).
Contingent truth includes the arts, which do not achieve necessary truth
because they are dependant on human will.
Some relate to union and conversation, some to utility and universal
convenience: the former are ruled by prudence, the moderator of human and civil
action (such as judges); and the latter by craft (soldiers, farmers,
architects).[xvii]
While
Vitruvius limits the meaning of Arte
to manual skill, Barbaro elevates it to a branch of learning. Vitruvius distinguishes three types of
artificer: the first has manual skill but lacks culture; the second possesses
only theory and learning, and therefore follows a shadow rather than the thing
itself; the third commands both, and gains authority and influence. Barbaro develops these distinctions onto a
three-leveled hierarchy, the lowest being experience, the next Arte, and the highest, knowledge. Barbaro argues that Arte is more worthy than experience because it is nearer to knowledge,
understanding and articulating causes and reasons and capable of the most
valuable sign of knowledge – the capacity to teach others. As he writes:
The dignity of architecture appears to be equivalent to knowledge
and to be a heroic virtue residing at the centre of all the arts, because it
alone grasps the causes, it alone embraces beautiful and elevated things, it
alone… joins with the most certain sciences such as arithmetic, geometry, and
many others, without which… all art is vile and without repute.[xviii]
Barbaro placed the transparent truth of mathematical knowledge at the centre of his Platonic and Aristotlean reading of Vitruvius:
the way to know the most
noble Arts is this: that those, in which the Art of numbering is necessary,
Geometry and the other Mathematics, all have something great, and the rest that
is without these arts (as Plato says), is vile and abject like a thing born of
simple imagination, false conjecture, and is experience devoid of truth.[xix]
For Barbaro, science is the habit of drawing
conclusions according to a true and necessary acquired proof, but it is also
about knowing how to conclude many things from the right principles.
Truly divine is the desire of those, who raising their minds to
consider things, search for the reasons behind them, and looking as if above
them and at the truth from afar, are spurred to try to look at it… It is a
beautiful thing to be able to judge, and approve of the works of mortals, as a
superior act of virtue toward an inferior one: nonetheless few take the
trouble, few want to strive… and consequently do not reach the end of
architecture.[xx]
It is from this standpoint then that Barbaro sees the
works and theories of Palladio as being both functional and intellectual. Palladio’s conscious appropriation of
classical architectural forms is elevated to a spiritual and moral duty. A duty that has a civic role in enlightening
the viewer to not only the virtue and nobility of Venetian power and heritage
but to the essential and structure of the divine world.