Palladian Days (13 page)

Villa Barbaro and Villa Emo both demonstrate one of Palladio's favorite looks. He starts with the family's residence as a tall block in the center. Then he attaches long, low
barchesse
symmetrically to the left and right. The
barchesse
are faced with repeated arches, forming a loggia. La Malcontenta was designed in this same manner, although the
barchesse
were never built. At Barbaro and Emo, Palladio added one more effect: at the far end of each
barchessa
he built a dovecote on top. The overall result is called the “five-part profile” because of the five different segments of roofline that it produces: the two dovecotes and two
barchesse
with the residential core in the middle. Palladio's symmetrical five-part profile is one of the most influential and ubiquitous designs in all of architecture. For Americans, the Capitol in Washington, D.C., is the best example. The domed center of the Capitol is analogous to the residential
core at Barbaro and Maser, the Senate and the House of Representatives are the dovecotes, and the connecting segments are the
barchesse
. At the other end of the grandeur scale, almost every residential area has at least one house with a five-part profile. Usually a garage at one end stands in place of a dovecote, sometimes connected by a breezeway that recalls a
barchessa
.

La Malcontenta's most influential feature arose from its site, just as the double projecting portico did at Villa Cornaro. La Mal-contenta sits on the banks of the Brenta River. The frequent floods of the Brenta required Palladio to raise the villa's
piano nobile
(principal floor) high above the floodplain. To disguise the length of the stair needed in order to reach the
piano nobile
, he placed it
beside
the projecting front portico—instead of leaving it in front— and divided the stair into two flights at right angles to each other. Because Palladio could never abide anything that was not symmetrical, he placed a matching stair on the opposite side. The result is one of the emblematic motifs of later Georgian architecture.

The principal architectural heritage of hilltop La Rotonda, of course, springs from its great dome surrounded by identical porticos on all four facades. Itself inspired by the second-century Pantheon in Rome, La Rotonda can be seen as a major source for every later building constructed with a dome over classical columns.

Why stop with a Big Five? Why not a Big Seven? Villa Poiana and Villa Badoer also have influential motifs. Maybe the only rational stopping point is a Big Eighteen.

In an early conversation, Doug Lewis mentioned that the archives of the Museo Correr in Venice hold
hundreds and hundreds
of boxes of original Cornaro family documents relating to the family's
properties in Piombino Dese and elsewhere on the mainland. Those documents were the principal source for the manuscript Doug wrote about the villa twenty-five years ago.

“Did you actually read all those files?” Carl asked.

“That would take a lifetime,” Doug replied.

I am haunted by the vision of those unexplored boxes. Uncovering the secrets in each of them becomes an insistent refrain in my mind. Everyday operations of the house are proceeding smoothly: the kitchen functions well, the Miolos take care of tour groups when I'm tied up or not at home, and Ilario tends the garden. The day after Carl departs for Atlanta in late May, I hop the early-morning train for Venice.

As Edgar Allan Poe suggests in “The Purloined Letter,” sometimes things are best hidden in plain sight. The Museo Correr demonstrates the principle: a gem of Venice hidden in one of its most crowded spots, the Piazza di San Marco. For Carl and me the museum is a favorite destination because it showcases treasures from the long, glittering history of the Venetian Republic: enormous battle flags flown from the prows of triremes during desperate engagements with the Turks, wall-size canvases depicting storied events such as Queen Caterina Cornaro's arrival in Venice for the transfer of Cyprus to the republic in 1489, a pair of seventeenth-century shoes exactly like some drawn on the attic walls of our villa. All this is housed on the second floor of the Procuratie Nuove, the long, low building designed by Vincenzo Scamozzi that runs along the entire south side of the trapezoidal piazza, and of the adjacent building at the west end of the piazza, constructed by the French after Venice's fall to Napoleon's forces in 1797. Tourists who focus on the dramatic attractions at the east end of the piazza—the Basilica, the Campanile, the Loggetta, the Doge's Palace, the Clock Tower—easily overlook the elegant entranceway to the museum, which opens off a passageway in the Napoleonic structure.

The entrance to the museum's archives and research library is even more obscure. After many requests for directions, I find an
arched passage midway along the Procuratie Nuove and cautiously stroll through it into an interior courtyard. A flight of stairs leads me to an elevator, which chugs upward to the card-catalogue room, a cramped, poorly lit space with antiquated metal cabinets. A genial middle-aged man inspects my business card, passport, and driver's license, and grants ad hoc permission to use the library; an official card will be mailed to me in Piombino Dese.

For one week I peruse the catalogue and order intriguing items from storage. I am soon convinced that—aside from Douglas Lewis or some few foreign scholars like him—only an Italian with fabulous eyesight, great intuitive abilities, and deep knowledge of Venetan and Latin and sixteenth-century Italian will succeed in gleaning the Cornaro family secrets.

The first problem is the fertility of the Cornaros. There are hundreds of entries under “Corner,” the original Venetan form of the Italian name Cornaro; without a knowledge of the family tree, I'm lost in distinguishing one Giorgio (“Zorzi” in Venetan) from another. There are literally dozens of Giorgios, and equal numbers of Marcos, Giacomos, and Giovannis. Second, the card catalogue often only hints at the nature of the documents described. One typical “Cornaro” card, for instance, reads:

To my untrained eye, this merely indicates unspecified miscellaneous documents about the administration of the estate at Piombino during the thirty years from 1737 to 1767, gathered in a carton numbered 2677.

Another “Cornaro” card reads:

This, I infer, is a bundle of documents relating to acquisitions, territorial divisions, exchanges, sales, and leases of family property over the seventy-year period from 1578 to 1648. The brevity of these descriptions suggests that only the most cursory study of each box's contents was made; any one of the documents might hide something important about the villa during the period when its construction was finally completed. More obstacles block the way. Even if the polyglot of languages and arcane vocabulary is conquered, the early handwriting itself is often indecipherable. Moreover, many items I request cannot be found by the library assistants; they're not “lost,” they simply “cannot be found.” Perhaps they are misfiled, or simply buried out of sight beneath another box. Infinite patience is required as well; the time for hunting a particular cache of documents can sometimes stretch to two hours—which might end with a “cannot be found” report.

But occasionally true gold sparkles from the page. A young library assistant places before me the original account book of Villa Cornaro from 1553 to 1555—the very pages penned by Giorgio Cornaro and his estate manager during the specific years that the villa was being built. Adrenaline jolts all my limbs when I see it; I can imagine my normally straight hair drawing up in a curly halo. The first two pages seem to list the tenant farmers and employees of the estate, along with a page number for their individual accounts. Subsequent pages begin with a date, then list expenses incurred for the villa on that date, not just construction costs such as lumber and nails, but food costs for the kitchen as well. I struggle to understand the scribbles and only partially succeed:

I conclude these are expenses incurred for a special dinner
(cena)
for a most illustrious
(Illustrissimo)
gentleman from Treviso whose name I cannot read. The expenses are for veal
(came di vitello)
, for a carp
(raina)
weighing an amount I cannot decipher, for something (flowers? wine? linen?) for the table
(tavola)
, for the hiring of two horses
(cavalli)
to go to Piombino, for five hens
(galline)
, four of which cost D 40 and one of which cost only D 8.
Haver
is an archaic form of the modern Italian
avere
(to have);
nolo
is a shortened version of
noleggiare
(to rent);
do
is the Venetan form of
due
(two).

There are numerous entries on other pages for Giorgio's falconers, for dinner guests, for chickens—clearly a staple of the mid-sixteenth-century diet. Covering just three years, 246 pages speak of the husbandry of the villa's first proprietor. He accounts for every type of expense, just as I try to today; my Quicken computer program would have been a big help to him—and solved the handwriting problem for me as well. Clearly I must study this early record more thoroughly, so I ask the attendant to copy it for me. He promises to do so, but regrets it will take at least a month; he'll mail the copy to me in Atlanta.

The copy arrives as promised and is now one of my treasures. But when I return to the archives on a later trip and ask to see the original, my request is returned with the notation “cannot be found.”
Note to diary: I wonder if they looked around the photocopy machine?

Since an understanding of the Cornaro genealogy seems to be an essential foundation, I move to a smaller adjoining room lined with books of genealogy and local history. Awaiting me here is Marco Barbaro's massive fifteenth-century compendium
Discendenze Patrizie
, with eighteenth-century annotations by Emmanuele Antonio Cicogna. This, I later learn, is a fountainhead of Venetian genealogy. One entire volume is devoted to multiple branches of
Cornaros, some connected and some not. The data are presented in page after page of charts, with many entries footnoted. There is a mass of information, but not in a form that is easily penetrated. I order a photocopy of this as well, confident that Carl can make sense of it all by plugging the data into the genealogy program he has on his computer. Later, we are able to match disparate Barbaro data on our computer, which provides interesting insights into marriages between different branches of the Cornaro family. While entering the data on his computer, Carl learns from Doug Lewis that there are biographies of many Cornaros in the mammoth, multivolume
Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani
—almost two hundred pages of them. Carl tracks down a copy of the
Dizionario
at Emory University in Atlanta and adds excerpts from that information as well.

All winter long Carl appears regularly at my office door with one excited report after another. “Guess how many Cornaros I have entered in the computer?” I stare dumbly. “Five hundred!” he exclaims, turning to hurry back upstairs to his task. In no time at all he's back again. “One thousand Cornaros!” he reports. The number continues to climb and Carl's enthusiasm never wanes, despite the fact that he labors as a two-fingered typist.

We end up with more than three thousand entries in our database, half of them Cornaros and the rest spouses and in-laws. The children begin to tease Carl about his adopted family, but in fact the database supplies a useful capability for identifying within the family tree most of the Cornaros that we find mentioned in books on Venetian history and art. Some of them still stymie us, of course. One in particular is a thorn in Carl's side. When the Turks were massing outside the walls of Constantinople in 1453 for their final assault on the capital of the Byzantine Empire, Emperor Con-stantine placed a Venetian—instead of one of his own men—in charge of the defense of each of the city's four main gates. One of those defenders-to-the-death was Fabruzzi Cornaro—but Carl cannot find a trace of him in the family genealogy.