What did the celebrated architect Andrea Palladio actually look like? It is a
question the exhibition at the Royal Academy leaves ajar. On display near
the entrance is a Venetian portrait which is supposed once to have belonged
to Rubens, in whose 1641 sale it was allegedly catalogued as being a
self-portrait of Tintoretto. As such, it passed into the collection of the
Danish royal family where, in 1898, it was discovered to bear the
fragmentary signature of Doménikos Theotokópoulos: El Greco.
Now the hunt was on for the identity of the sitter – a rather bald, bearded
and harassed-looking man with a prominent nose, resting his left hand on a
book, beneath which a porte-crayon is just visible. These last are the
attributes, Lionello Puppi tells us in his catalogue note, of a scholar
rather than an architect, but this, he says, is in keeping with El Greco’s
conception of the architect’s “intellectual and liberal role”. In any event
the portrait has come to be identified as Palladio, or possibly Palladio, or
(as the label in the RA show implies) Palladio faute de mieux.
Tintoretto, on the other hand, when portraying the architect Jacopo Sansovino,
shows him with what the same catalogue calls “the instruments of his
profession: the compasses”. And the painter and architect Giulio Romano, as
depicted by Titian (in an adventurous portrait which passed – indirectly –
from Charles the FirstI to Imelda Marcos, and thereafter from Manila to
Mantua), “does not hold a brush or compasses but an architectural project, a
key to his profession and identity. Drawing is presented as his central
activity, representing the capacity for invention, following Alberti’s
definition of the intellectual basis of the architect’s skills . . .”.
The visitor may be forgiven for feeling that, on entering this absorbing show,
he has trodden on a wobbly step. There seem to be so many ways of portraying
an architect, even within this one exhibition: as an intellectual, a
liberal, a geometer, a draughtsman, an inventor. Certainly we would like the
El Greco portrait to depict Palladio, if only because we have also learnt
from the catalogue that El Greco admired Palladio greatly, so it would be
nice to think that he also met him and told him his opinion that Palladio
was el mayor arquitecto de nuestro tiempo. El Greco visited Vicenza, where
so much of Palladio’s work was and is to be found, on a journey from Venice
to Rome in 1570. He asks, in the course of his annotations to Vitruvius,
“And, in what is typical of the Ancients, who could equal Andrea Palladio to
whom, only considering his individual buildings, everyone is indebted more
than to all others who have written on architecture?”.
El Greco had clearly thought hard about this subject. He had written a
treatise on architecture, now lost. It could of course turn up. Some time in
the 1960s, a professor from the Complutensian University in Madrid, Xavier
de Salas, was thumbing through an early edition of Vasari, in a Charing
Cross Road bookshop, when it suddenly dawned on him that the book in his
hands had been owned and annotated by El Greco. The annotations were
sarcastic at Vasari’s expense, taking him to task for his insufficient
esteem for Palladio: “I know of no name pronounced in the world which is of
so much benefit as Palladio’s”.
The edition of Vitruvius which El Greco annotated has also survived (and was
on show in Vicenza in the earlier version of the London exhibition).
Translated by Daniele Barbaro in 1556, it was illustrated by Palladio
himself. Barbaro and his brother were important patrons of Palladio, and
responsible for one of his most charming commissions, the rebuilding of the
Villa Barbaro at Maser. Veronese painted the frescoes in this villa, and
also made a portrait of Daniele Barbaro (on loan from the Rijksmuseum)
showing him with his Vitruvius manuscript.
James Ackerman, in his Palladio (1966), is inclined to emphasize the
functional nature of the Villa Barbaro, with its dovecotes and its long
smelly (he says) arcades where animals and farm equipment were kept. Howard
Burns mentions the alignment of the barns in these arcades to face south,
which was considered appropriate for the storage of hay. The eccentricity of
Maser, which has caused some writers even to doubt that it is by the master,
is, he suggests, a result of the Barbaro brothers’ insistence that existing
buildings be incorporated into the new structure – hence the narrowness of
the central block, the owner’s house itself.
One sees very clearly from the beautiful model in Andrea Palladio: His life
and legacy how the villa is tucked into the base of the hillside, so that
the garden walls at the rear are in fact retaining walls. The spring-fed
fountain at the focus of the semi-circular nymphaeum feeds into the pool,
from where the water is eventually channelled into horse troughs at the
front. Everything works together, at least in the symbolic and the hydraulic
sense: there is scholarly tranquillity in the house and its rear garden, but
the property is designed to overlook the estate which it manages. “Maser
really functions as a farm”, is the way Ackerman put it. “Daniele and
Marcantonio Barbaro were not there simply to get away from the heat and the
gondolas of Venice, but to make sure that the crops were good; the luxury in
which they lived was dependent on those crops.”
Howard Burns, who co-wrote both the present catalogue and its predecessor of a
generation ago, for the Arts Council’s Palladio exhibition in 1975, reminded
his earlier readers not to think in terms of the English country house. The
aristocracy of the Veneto made their careers in the city, even when they
drew the bulk of their income from their country estates. They never spent
the majority of the year in the country, in the manner of English country
squires. Palladio’s villas, and indeed the Veneto villas in general, were
occupied by their owners for only part of the year.
At the Royal Academy, the models and Palladio’s drawings give a strong sense
of structure, exterior and lay-out. What comes over much less powerfully is
any sense of the interiors – although it is unclear how this could have been
conveyed, without greater resort to photographs. The problem with using
photographs in a large format is that they compete for visual priority with
the autograph material which is the chief glory of the show, as it would be
in any Palladio show: the architectural drawings, so many of which have
found their way to England, above all to the Royal Institute of British
Architects.
It is from these drawings that we derive a sense of process – from jotted
sketch to elegant presentation copy and preparatory design for the published
woodcuts (themselves works of great beauty). The visual language of Italian
Renaissance architectural drawings is so simple, and so lovely, that one is
surprised, looking through old books and catalogues, to see how badly it
reproduces. It is not difficult for the general reader to find excellent
facsimiles of Palladio’s Four Books on Architecture in which the woodcuts
come across very well indeed. But it is much harder to find really good,
informative reproductions of the drawings.
“Informative” in this context means colour reproductions in which one can
distinguish between drawing in pen and brown ink (the medium of the finished
drawing), lighter preliminary sketching in black chalk or graphite, washes
applied by brush, and accidental stains and dirt. One cannot expect
everything from a photograph: it is not always going to be easy to see the
preliminary drawing with stylus and ruler or compasses which is also typical
of this work – lines that leave no stain but only the mark of a sharp
pressure on the page. But a photograph good enough to make you aware of the
texture of the laid paper is often going to convey with it a sense of the
complex history of a sheet of drawings. The scholarly entries on the
individual sheets may contain much information that is of interest only to
specialists, but the photographic reproductions in the catalogue are of a
quality which will benefit anyone approaching Palladio.
As to contemporary photographs of the villas themselves, they are often and
inevitably unpleasant, when one has been made aware of the usually
anachronistic planting of the gardens, the fussy cleanliness and excessive
tidiness of the approaches, and of the general lack of evidence of
agricultural activity. These barns and these granaries should not always be
empty. Where are the people? Where are the horses and oxen? Where is the
mud? What happened to all the urine?
Where are the beans laid out to dry on the floors of the piano nobile, the
washing strung out on lines in the great frescoed salone? Where are the
grains of wheat caught between the bricks on the stairs after the sacks have
been carried up to the attic granary to be spread out under the roof? That
was the hardest job of the year, for the sacks weighed more than 5050 kilos
each, and a Victorian observer, Margaret Symonds, watching these
centuries-old practices still at work, tells us that it required both
strength and agility
"to hoist them on the shoulders and run up the precipitous brick steps into
the barn. The work is well paid. A man can even earn five francs in a single
evening by straining his muscles considerably . . . . They strip themselves
of all possible clothing, and if Michelangelo were to see them he might
glory in the grand display of human muscle. The low red light of the setting
sun streams into the barchesse [the barns], the carts with the golden grain,
the sacks, the dust, and the large lithe figures of the men."
To see it all – the world of Palladio – you have to imagine it all. But there
are aids to the imagination both in the vivid documents quoted by scholars,
and in the photographs that survive from the nineteenth century, from the
days just before the agricultural revolution destroyed the old order. Not
that the old photographs are themselves without their anachronisms: wisteria
or Virginia creeper growing up a Renaissance villa is a botanical
anachronism, and a foolish piece of planting (the rats climb up the creepers
to get at the corn in the attic). The arum lilies (Zantedeschia) you see
everywhere clogging the ditches of the Veneto come from Southern Africa, and
are named after the North Italian botanist Giovanni Zantedeschi (1773–1846).
The nineteenth century also saw the planting of exotic trees in
English-style parks, replacing the strictly economic fruit trees the
sixteenth century would have known.
But still, what grips us about the old photographs when we can see them (there
are none at Burlington House) is the glimpse we have of the functioning
rural economy in which these crucial structures played their part, caught in
the years when it was coming to an end, when the threshing machines were
making their first appearance. Perhaps it is a snapshot of an old peasant
squatting in the barn of a villa long since destroyed, but it is immediately
instructive how much of the height of the barn he needs for his supplies.
Perhaps it is just a carriage seen under an arcade, or a row of men
harvesting in a field, or a line of scythed grass waiting to be stacked for
hay. One is reminded that if many of these farm complexes were enormous,
longer than the Piazza San Marco in Venice, they were long because they
needed to be long. There was so much produce to handle.
To sleep, like the nobility, sandwiched between the wine and the grain (the
grain in the attic, the wine fermenting on the ground floor) no doubt held
its anxieties, for the cheating peasant is a well-established figure in the
literature. But it was conventionally held to be bliss itself in comparison
with the treasonous pressures of the city. To sleep like the peasantry was
to dream of famine – those recurring shortages which brought the peasants
into the city, to die outside the Doge’s Palace, or to beg outside the
churches, “hunger written on their faces, their eyes like gemless rings”.
Famine was in their bones. Gleaning was in their blood, or, as Symonds put it,
“Gleaning is a pure, unmitigated passion. It is the heart of these people –
their very souls seem bound up in it”. And she explains that, gleaning
coinciding with the season of courtship, “the girl who has gleaned most
during the period is the most admired and sought after in marriage. She
hangs all her gains out over her window or upon her parents’ thatched roof –
each little hut is covered with corn during this season – and thus the world
measures her worth”.
When the harvesting machinery brought gleaning to an end, something about the
life of the Veneto was rendered incomprehensible to us. It is to do,
essentially, with what was at stake for the different classes involved in
the enterprise. It was not that the Palladian villas represented the most
conspicuous consumption (they shrink in comparison with the later
eighteenth-century Villa Pisani at Strà, with its 114 rooms). Palladio was
economical with his materials, and the columns are made of brick (by a
method usefully illustrated in the exhibition), not stone. Frescoes were
cheap, or cheaper than tapestries. Villa life was expected to be less formal
than city life. One dressed down. One expected country food – wholesome but
plain.
The thing that has been lost is the comparison between the lives of the
leisured classes and that of the peasants. The houses of the gleaners and
their families, hovels with thatched roofs decorated in harvest time with
their trophies of gleaned corn – everything desperate that such structures
represented has been swept away. The manners of the nobility may have fallen
just short of the haughty, on the principle that “a man is like a horse, and
does not want to be governed haughtily”. But still the peasants were there
to be governed.
Among the fascinating items at Burlington House we find a double-sided sheet
of drawings by Palladio illustrating military formations (lent by Worcester
College, Oxford). These have an extraordinary abstract beauty. Palladio was
interested in military theory and was preparing an illustrated edition of
Polybius’s Histories at the time of his death. This was missing, believed
lost, until 1977, when John Hale found a mock-up of it, with its
illustrations, in the British Library. A second version turned up in
Florence in 1986 – a reminder that, when it comes to such missing
manuscripts, all is not lost.
Finally, although it may seem tangential to Palladio, the wonderful drawing
from Hatfield House showing the Escorial under construction earns its place
as “one of the most detailed surviving representations of a
sixteenth-century building site”. William Cecil himself wrote on it: “The
kyng of Spaynes howse”. The Flemish artist Rodrigo de Holanda depicts not
only the monastery but also the workmen’s huts, their workshops, their
chapel, the cranes and the scaffolding. It has been said that such attention
to the construction of a single building would normally only have been
bestowed on some legendary structure, such as the Tower of Babel. One wishes
there were documentary drawings of this kind for the more modest buildings
of the Veneto.
ANDREA PALLADIO
His life and legacy
Royal Academy of Arts
Guido Beltramini and Howard Burns
PALLADIO
442pp. Royal Academy of Arts. £48 (US $115).
978 1 905711 24 6
James Fenton's Selected Poems was published in 2006. He is a Fellow of
the Royal Society of Literature and in 2007 he was awarded the Queen's Gold
Medal for Poetry.
