The Perfect House: A Journey with Renaissance Master Andrea Palladio (4 page)

When he was twenty-six, Andrea took a wife. This was somewhat unusual, for men generally married in their thirties or forties, when they were financially independent, and we do not know the circumstances of the marriage. We do know that his bride was named Allegradonna, and that she was the daughter of a carpenter. The record shows that she was in service as a maid, and that it was her mistress who provided the dowry: a bed, a pair of sheets, three new shirts, three used shirts, handkerchiefs, assorted clothing, and lengths of cloth.
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The dowry was valued at about twenty-eight ducats (a far cry from the five to ten thousand ducats that accompanied a nobleman’s daughter). The couple shared Andrea’s room in the workshop after they were married, and it was another year or two before they could afford to set up their own household.

In 1537, the Pedemuro workshop received a commission to remodel part of a large house on an estate in Cricoli, just outside the northern city gate. The client was Count Giangiorgio Trissino, scion of one of the oldest families in Vicenza. The fifty-nine-year-old nobleman was more or less in retirement. He had spent most of his life as a diplomat and papal ambassador in Rome and elsewhere, and had only recently returned to Vicenza. Now, after a failed second marriage, he was ready to settle down. His new house at Cricoli was not to be merely a suburban retreat—he already owned a country villa as well as a residence in the city—but the seat of a new academy where he planned to introduce the progressive culture of Rome to the
young men of his native Vicenza. Trissino was a formidable personage: a familiar of cardinals and popes, confidant of emperors, an intimate friend of that cultivated aristocrat Isabella d’Este and her infamous sister-in-law Lucrezia Borgia. His portrait hangs in the Louvre: large handsome features, a sensual mouth, and heavy-lidded eyes with a shrewd, penetrating gaze. He holds a beautifully bound book in his delicate hands, a symbol of his literary accomplishments. Trissino was a scholar and poet, the author of a celebrated tragedy, and a linguist. Well known throughout the Italian states, he was Vicenza’s leading Renaissance humanist.

He was also an amateur architect. The Cricoli house that he was remodeling had been bought by his father. It was a
castello,
a type common throughout the mainland, or
terraferma,
of the Venetian Republic. Patterned on medieval fortified houses,
castelli
typically had four corner towers, often picturesquely crenellated, and a main façade with a central balcony or loggia. They were adorned with the delicate Gothic tracery that was popular during the Venetian quattrocento. Trissino was modernizing his house, removing the Gothic elements and completely rebuilding the loggia in the so-called
all’antica
style, based on the classical architecture of ancient Rome. His design was a literal copy of a garden loggia by the famous architect Raphael, whom he had known in Rome: a three-arched opening surmounted by pedimented windows, with Ionic pilasters below and Corinthian above.

It is not recorded exactly how Trissino encountered Andrea, but popular legend has them meeting on the Cricoli building site. While the story has been dismissed as apocryphal by some scholars, it seems a plausible explanation; after all, where else would a count meet a stonemason? We do not know exactly what it was that caught Trissino’s eye, for surely it was he who
initiated the encounter. Maybe he saw one of Andrea’s sketches and recognized his innate ability. Or maybe he was talent spotting, for Trissino intended the membership of his future academy to include young men of different social backgrounds, not only the sons of his aristocratic friends. In any event, as Paolo Gualdo, a canon of the Cathedral of Padua who knew Palladio well, described it, the pair “developed a very close relationship.”
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This must have happened in 1537 or 1538, for by 1539, Andrea is mentioned as being a guest in the Trissino home.

“Finding Palladio to be a young man of very spirited character and with a great aptitude for science and mathematics,” Gualdo recounts, “Trissino encouraged his natural abilities by training him in the precepts of Vitruvius.”
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Training
may not be exactly the right word. Trissino was a man of taste but his architectural abilities were limited. His surviving sketches, for example, are clumsy and amateurish. I went one afternoon to see the loggia at Cricoli, which still exists. It’s a handsome enough building that demonstrates his academic knowledge, but it gives the impression of a textbook exercise, stylistically correct yet curiously flat—a literary man’s idea of architecture. Nor is it likely that Andrea was ever a full-time student at the so-called Accademia Trissiniana, which opened in the late 1530s. For one thing, he had a growing family to support—by this time Allegradonna had borne him three sons. Moreover, whatever his natural aptitude, lacking early schooling or tutoring, he would have been ill-prepared to undertake a humanist education. More likely, Trissino lent him books and invited him to sit in on classes. Yet the nobleman’s influence was considerable. Trissino had lived in Rome and knew the city’s leading artists and architects, and he could speak with firsthand authority about the latest currents of architectural thought, including the
all’antica
style, which, though it originated in Florence and Rome in the
previous century, was still a novelty in the Republic. In that regard, the loggia at Cricoli, whatever its shortcomings, was an invaluable model for Andrea. He had had years of practical training in architectural decoration from Porlezza and, we can assume, years of personal reading; contact with Trissino provided an intellectual frame of reference for this informally acquired knowledge.

The Count was a restless spirit, and he spent much of the next two years traveling, often accompanied by his protégé Andrea. There were extended stays in Padua, which was not only larger than Vicenza but also the seat of an ancient university and the intellectual center of the Venetian Republic (there was no university in Venice proper). Andrea, who had left Padua as a sixteen-year-old apprentice, now found himself moving in very different circles. One of Trissino’s friends who had a lasting influence on Andrea was Alvise Cornaro, a successful businessman and dynamic patron of the arts. He was an unusual character who, after an intemperate youth, had adopted strict dietary rules and preached moderation (years later—he would live to ninety-one—he published his celebrated
Treatise on the Sober Life
). Like Trissino, Cornaro was an architectural dilettante, but with an original bent; he was not a nobleman, and his ideas about architecture were those of a bourgeois. Cornaro described architecture as “ministering to the good comfort of men in their lodging, and to their other necessities . . . and in addition to this, it is beautiful as well.”
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He stressed the importance of personally examining ancient Roman buildings rather than simply reading about them in Vitruvius. Yet his approach to the past was pragmatic. “A building may well be beautiful and comfortable, and be neither Doric nor of any such order,” he instructed, “as are in this city [Venice] the church of S. Marco and in Padua the Chiesa del Santo.”
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Such down-to-earth
thinking provided Andrea a practical counterbalance to Trissino’s more theoretical view of architecture.

Padua offered several architectural examples of the
all’antica
style, most by the recently deceased Veronese painter and architect Giovanni Maria Falconetto. Falconetto had been a protégé of Cornaro, and a decade earlier had built two structures in his patron’s garden: a loggia used for theatrical presentations—some of the earliest
comedia dell’arte
was performed here—and the so-called Odeo, a pavilion used for musical performances. Both buildings were skillfully designed and contained the first examples of architectural frescoes in the Veneto. Cornaro taught that frescoed décor, which the ancient Romans also used, was both attractive and economical. Falconetto’s designs obviously served as an inspiration for the Cricoli loggia, and his drawings, including his measured drawings of Roman antiquities, were available to Andrea for copying. Unlike Vicenza, Padua also offered significant examples of actual Roman ruins, including an impressive amphitheater, an open-air theater, and a ceremonial gateway. At Cornaro’s house, Andrea was introduced to several Venetians who were studying at the University of Padua: the young noblemen Vettor Pisani, his cousin Daniele Barbaro, and Giorgio Cornaro (no relation to Alvise), as well as Pietro Godi, his future client’s older brother.

Andrea also met two architects. One was Sebastiano Serlio, an elderly man and a friend of Giangiorgio Trissino; he is believed to have helped the Count with the design of the Cricoli villa. Serlio was a Bolognese who had been trained as a painter by his father and had then gone to Rome, where, at the age of thirty-nine, he decided to become an architect. His life was turned upside down in 1527 when the besieged city fell to the army of the Holy Roman Emperor, whose Lutheran mercenaries went on a weeklong rampage pillaging and destroying
hundreds of churches. The calamitous Sack of Rome, which a contemporary observer described as “rather the fall of a world than of a city,” marked the end of an era.
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It was also the end of papal patronage—at least for the moment—and many artists and architects left Rome in search of work. Serlio, now in his sixties, moved to Venice. His career did not flourish. He had a prickly disposition and was by inclination a scholar rather than a builder. He published several prints illustrating the classical orders, and in 1537 brought out the first volume of a treatise ambitiously titled
Tutte l’opere d’architettura, et perspectiva
(All the works of architecture and perspective), which would become an influential architectural handbook. In Serlio’s book Andrea could study the ancient monuments of Rome. It is also likely that Serlio taught the young stonemason proper draftsmanship while he was in Padua, since Andrea’s earliest surviving architectural drawings date from this period.
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The other architect was the Veronese Michele Sanmicheli, whom Palladio may already have known, since he was a distant relative of Porlezza. Sanmicheli was then about fifty, his career in full swing. Raised in Verona, as a youth he had gone to Rome, trained under the great Bramante, and, together with his friend Antonio da Sangallo, worked for the papacy. After the Sack, he, too, sought employment in the Venetian Republic. Sanmicheli’s specialty was military architecture, and he was engaged by the Venetians to refit the battered fortifications of their
terraferma
towns and cities. At the time of Andrea’s visit, Sanmicheli was rebuilding the walls of Verona. A skilled engineer, he was also a superb architect. Of Verona’s Porta Nuova gate, Vasari would write that it was “done with so much judgment, cost, and magnificence, that no one thought that for the future there could be executed any work of greater grandeur or better design.”
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Sanmicheli had recently completed the magnificent
Palazzo del Tè in Mantua, which Palladio visited, and he was building three more palazzos in Verona. His domestic architecture exemplified the latest direction in Renaissance classicism. Whereas an earlier generation of architects—Bramante and Raphael—had sought harmony and repose, Sanmicheli—like Michelangelo and Giulio Romano—stressed drama and originality. He was interested in the past, but he freely interpreted classical rules to great scenographic and emotional effect.

Sanmicheli, an extremely successful practitioner, had an unusual background: he was not a painter or sculptor; both his father and his uncle were architects. He must have been a compelling model for Andrea. There is every reason to suppose that despite his humble origins, the Vicentine stonemason was welcomed by these sophisticated and accomplished men. Cornaro was no snob, and Serlio and Sanmicheli would have been sympathetic sounding boards. The learned conversations, the study of plans, the sketching of buildings, the drawing lessons, and the contact with men for whom architecture was a subject of everyday vital concern, deepened Andrea’s interest and inevitably influenced his thoughts of the future.

Trissino had his own reasons for encouraging his protégé to pursue an architectural career. The Count was a patriot. Not that he was devoted to the Republic—quite the opposite, like many Vicentine noblemen he considered Venice an oppressive power (and had sided with Venice’s enemies during the War of the League of Cambrai, which later caused him problems). His allegiance was to his native city. He had great hopes that his academy would promote the dissemination of humanist culture, including architecture, and raise the level of intellectual life in Vicenza. Postwar prosperity had arrived, and new construction would follow: palazzos in the city, houses on country
estates. But Vicentines lacked their own architect; there was no Sanmicheli waiting to come home. They could import an outsider, as the Venetians had done in commissioning the celebrated Florentine architect Jacopo Sansovino. But Trissino understood that greater honor would come to his city if it nurtured a homegrown talent, and in his estimation, Andrea di Pietro could be that person.

Of course, there’s more than a little Professor Higgins and Eliza Doolittle here.
^II
Andrea, whatever his abilities, was a diamond in the rough when Trissino met him. The nobleman had the wit to recognize Andrea’s amiable nature and innate talent, and the foresight to perceive that his experience as a stonemason could be an invaluable asset. But the Count, a diplomat and courtier, wanted more. Renaissance architects and painters were generally uncouth, rough individuals who belonged to the artisan class.
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He resolved to teach his protégé genteel manners—how to behave, speak, and dress. The stonemason might be a commoner, but he would be a man of refinement and taste to better command the confidence of noble clients. Andrea must have learned these lessons well, for later firsthand accounts invariably mention his gentle and well-bred disposition; according to Gualdo, he was a “most extraordinarily able and attractive conversationalist.”
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