Palladian Days (32 page)

“Family crests,” suggests another.

“A place to display crossed swords and other military paraphernalia,” offers a third.

Finally a visitor responds in a way that is totally convincing: “They were for lighting the room with oil lamps or candles. Remember, villas did not have central chandeliers in Palladio's time.”

A more profound question about the grand salon concerns something that is not there: frescos.

Frescos—that is, paintings made directly on a plaster surface while the plaster is still wet—were ubiquitous among the Palladian villas. They were the wall coverings used practically everywhere. Their quality ranges from the splendor of Veronese's work at Villa Barbaro and Zelotti's at Villa Emo and La Rotonda to lesser examples at some other locations. Frescos were so sensible. Without them, a noble Venetian family traveling to its country estate in the spring would be forced to bring along its tapestries and oil paintings to decorate the walls; in the fall everything would have to be carried back. How much more practical to have Veronese stop by for a month or so and decorate the walls permanently!

Why then did Giorgio Cornaro leave his villa without frescos? The likely answer sounds paradoxical: Perhaps he did it to show how wealthy he was. After all, the frescos at Villa Barbaro, Villa Emo, La Malcontenta, Villa Poiana, and elsewhere all depict grand interior spaces centered on trompe l'oeil columns, niches, and statues. The grand salon at Villa Cornaro might lack the striking colors of those frescos, but the columns, niches, and statues are real, not trompe l'oeil.

Yes, there was cost and inconvenience in bringing tapestries and oil paintings all the way from the lagoon, but the Cornaros were the wealthiest family in Venice. What better way of flaunting it?

That, at least, is the explanation I like best. One scholar, however, has suggested that perhaps Giorgio, with his wealth tied up in land and other illiquid assets, may have been a little short of cash and simply postponed the frescos for a later day.

That “later day” was December 10, 1716. That is the day Andrea Cornaro, the great-great-grandson of the original patron, commissioned Mattia Bortoloni, a twenty-one-year-old artist from Rovigo, to paint 104 fresco panels in the villa. On the first floor, the frescos cover the walls and ceilings of the six rooms surrounding the grand salon. Upstairs, two rooms are completely frescoed as well and five others—including the grand salon—have frescos above the doorways. The frescos are set into heavy stucco frames executed by another artist, Bortolo Cabianca. Cabianca also created three-dimensional putti and other motifs to surround the frescos on the ceilings and above the doors. (It was Cabianca's putti that the priest found to be too anatomically correct when the parish acquired the villa.) The work Andrea Cornaro commissioned in 1716 completely transformed the interior of the villa. Wandering through its rooms today, I cannot conjure up Villa Cornaro without the colors of Bortoloni's frescos and the animated Cabianca putti.

Painting style changed dramatically between the mid-sixteenth century and the early eighteenth. At Villa Emo or La Malcontenta, for example, Giovan Battista Zelotti's frescos depict disporting Greek gods and goddesses in bright Renaissance colors. The emphasis is on country pleasures. Bortoloni's frescos at Villa Cornaro, on the other hand, were created after artistic fashion had evolved from the Renaissance style through the baroque and awaited the saccharine rococo pastries soon to be produced by Bortoloni's celebrated contemporary Giambattista Tiepolo. Zelotti's brightly colored mythological figures of 1560 give way to familiar biblical episodes rendered in an unusual soft, dusky palette of the early 1700s.

In
Frescoes from Venetian Villas
, Mercedes Precerutti Garberi comments on Bortoloni's work at Villa Cornaro.

Here is the greatest mystery of Villa Cornaro: Why did Andrea Cornaro suddenly decide in 1716 to install frescos on the walls of his Palladian villa after four generations of Cornaros had been content with white walls embellished with paintings and tapestries?

Doug Lewis is the first person to ponder this question seriously. His answer, disclosed in his unpublished 1976 manuscript about the villa and later extracted for a 1988 article, is startling. The frescos, he argues, are Masonic, presenting themes of Freemasonry and incorporating strategically placed Masonic symbols, such as a draftsman's compass and a mason's square. As such, the fresco cycle constitutes the earliest Masonic art identified in Italy and one of the earliest examples anywhere.

Aside from the fact that George Washington, Simon Bolivar, and Giuseppe Garibaldi were all Masons, I know little about Freemasonry. My mental image of it is mostly formed by memories of Shriner parades down Main Street in Littleton. Carl's father and grandfather were Masons, but he knows nothing of the group. A look in the encyclopedia tells us that Masonry, also referred to as Freemasonry, is one of the largest fraternal orders in the world; by the early 1970s one in every sixteen adult American men was a Mason.

Carl is intrigued by the connection between our frescos and Freemasonry. So in order to learn more he begins buying books on the subject. He concludes that, despite its claims to origins as early as King Solomon or even Noah, Freemasonry can be traced to the second half of the seventeenth century, when it grew out of Rosicrucianism
and other mystical movements of that era. Its primary rituals and ceremonies, utilizing symbolically the terms of architecture and the masonry craft, were compiled about 1700. Freemasonry, according to its commentators, offers “a philosophy of the spiritual life of man and a diagram of the process of regeneration.” That philosophy is traditionally described as “a system of morality veiled in allegory and illustrated by symbols.” Those symbols, W. L. Wilmshurst explains in
The Meaning of Masonry
, center on the terms of architecture because “they are ready to hand; because they were in use among certain trade-guilds then in existence and, lastly, because they are extremely effective and significant from the symbolic point of view.” Recasting certain themes from the group of early mystical Hebrew texts known as Kabbalah, Freemasonry
posits a core system of scientific, religious, and moral wisdom and insights originating before the biblical Flood. According to this tradition, the system was preserved by Noah and communicated to his descendants; the system was largely lost when the building of the Tower of Babel precipitated the wrath of God and the dispersion of mankind; Abraham carried the system to Egypt; Moses acquired the system in Egypt and brought it back to Israel; Freemasonry was purified and organized by King Solomon and his builder Hiram Abif at the time of the construction and decoration of the first Temple at Jerusalem.

South wall of Tower of Babel room, with Mattia Bortoloni's 1717 frescos:
Abraham Receiving the Covenant of God
(left) and
Hagar and Ishmael in the Wilderness
(right)

The fresco cycle at Villa Cornaro highlights those same biblical figures and episodes: Noah and the Flood, the Tower of Babel, Abraham and his sons and grandsons, Moses in Egypt and the Wilderness, King Solomon and the construction and decoration of the Temple with Hiram Abif.

Carl's research supports Doug Lewis's initial characterization of the frescos, but goes further. Carl concludes that the installation of the fresco cycle might have been just one part of an overall campaign by Andrea Cornaro to transform his Palladian country palace into a Masonic temple. For example, in the room with frescos featuring Solomon's Temple the original terra-cotta floor has been replaced by a wooden floor in which the boards are cut and laid out in a design of repetitive squares. Carl points out that this “checkerboard” motif is the pattern required by Masonic ritual for the floor of a Masonic lodge hall or meeting room. Bortoloni has incorporated the same pattern as a feature in several frescos in the room, including the one depicting the courtyard of Solomon's Temple.

As frequently noted by architectural historians, the exterior stairs leading to the south and north entrances of Villa Cornaro were reconfigured at some time in the past. Palladio in
Four Books
shows the treads rising in a direct, uninterrupted pattern, but the treads now are grouped in units of three, separated by sloping planes. Carl notes that the fresco representation of the stairway leading to Solomon's Temple shows the same pattern of treads and planes; on this basis he concludes that the reworking of the stairs
occurred as a part of Andrea Cornaro's Masonic program. He also speculates that two mysterious statues flanking the south entrance stairs and incorporating obelisks are Masonic as well. One of the statues incorporates the figure of a pilgrim to the holy shrine of Saint James at Santiago de Compostela; Carl has unearthed a historical incident linking Compostela with the Knights Templar, who in one widely accepted though presumably spurious account are said to be antecedents of Freemasonry.

Temple Room—south wall

Here is a mystery that will amuse us for years.

A preservationist in America once told me that the thresh hold issue in any restoration project is “Restore to when?” Monticello offers an easy illustration of the problem. The meticulous restoration there has returned the famous home not to its original condition—when it had a double projecting portico based on Villa Cornaro—but rather to its remodeled state after Jefferson had enlarged it and reworked the exterior to incorporate the famous
dorne inspired by Palladio's La Rotonda (by way of the Hotel de Salm in Paris). The decision not to return to the original structure was easy for a variety of obvious reasons: the remodeling was done by the original owner-architect within a decade of the original construction; the remodeled state is handsome, historically important, and associated with Jefferson in the popular imagination; and a return to the earlier model would have been structurally difficult or impossible. Not to mention having to recall all those nickels!

The Miles Brewton House in Charleston, dating from about 1740, raises a more complicated issue. It was recently restored after careful archival research, but no one suggested removing its double projecting portico even though it was a later Federal period addition to a basically Georgian structure.

On the other hand, Ca’ Cornaro Piscopia on the Grand Canal in Venice (now known as Ca’ Loredan) presents a different case. The two amazingly beautiful and detailed lower floors, built around 1200, were topped in the 1500s by two utterly undistinguished upper floors. In my opinion, a sensitive restoration of the building—unrestrained by budget limitations—would entirely remove the two top floors even though they are almost five hundred years old; the addition distorts and detracts from the harmony and unity of the original facade without bringing any artistic value of its own.

That is the context for the bizarre suggestion that an official in the office of the Soprintendente di Belle Arti once made to Dick Rush in the early days of his work restoring Villa Cornaro. “You should remove all these frescos from the villa,” he said. “They are not original.”

“I was dumbfounded,” Dick told us later. “I had to spend months negotiating with him before he finally dropped the issue.”

The suggestion reflected two misconceptions: first, the idea that all architectural restoration should be to a structure's original condition; second, a trendy notion—now demolished by Doug Lewis in his authoritative new book on Palladio's drawings—that Palladio himself disliked frescos and that his villas should be viewed as spatial forms without decoration or furniture. Fundamentally, the
suggestion failed to appreciate that two masterworks—in this case Palladio's villa and Bortoloni's fresco cycle—can exist in the same space and that, despite the 155 years that separate their creation, an intimate symbiotic bond can exist between them.