NORTH-WEST of Castelfranco, on a ridge between hills, outliers of the Monte Grappa, is Asolo, a small town overhung by a small fortress that enjoyed a brief moment of greatness as the seat of Catarina Cornaro after she had surrendered the kingdom of Cyprus to Venice in 1489. The road below Asolo is fringed by villas that once had uninterrupted views across their productive agricultural estates. It is from this that the finest, Maser, built in the 1560s, should be approached. The road turns slightly to reveal the Tempietto, the chapel designed by Palladio, a subtle reinterpretation of the Pantheon; on the left the statued terraces of the villa itself come into view, the central block projecting from the hillside framed by arcaded wings, the stucco painted a buttery cream that glows in the sunlight.
Palladio’s patrons were Daniele Barbaro, Patriarch of Aquileia, and his brother Marcantonio; the former was one of the most civilized Venetians of his generation, a statesman and translator of Vitruvius. The architect’s genius was to take advantage of the retention of an existing structure at the core of his building and to understand so well how to turn a steeply sloping site to advantage. At the Villa Rotonda the challenge had been to achieve a building that could be seen from every angle, at Fanzolo to design a villa approached on a central axis: at Maser the position of the public road meant that lateral views were of particular importance. The Barbaro were practical men. Their villa was to be the centre of a working farm, but it was also to represent an ideal, inspired by the writings of such classical writers as Pliny. For the piano nobile, the first floor of the central block but at ground level on the back, they employed a painter of exceptional distinction, Paolo Veronese, whose work was complemented by plaster decoration attributed to Andrea Vittoria, but apparently designed by Marcantonio Barbaro himself.
You arrive at the east end of the arcade. Where this reaches the central block, external stairs lead up into the cruciform gallery, the Sala della Crociera, at the heart of the projecting block. Veronese’s landscapes on the longer walls, leading to the central window commanding the terraces and the farm beyond, are compromised; but the murals of the shorter lateral sections, sophisticated trompe l’oeils with servants at false doors flanked by statuary, show how brilliant a decorative painter he was. In the rooms at the outer corners, the Stanza di Bacco and the Stanza del Amor Coniugale, each with an elegant stucco chimneypiece, Veronese can be seen at work. He follows rough incisions in the plaster, but never slavishly. The spectator is captivated by the monochrome animals of the dado, the happy optimism of the landscapes and of the humans and animals that move in these, by the bright highlights of the fabrics which are so characteristic of the painter, and by the very confidence of his figures. The frescoes imply the intended function of the rooms, and when I first stayed in the house in 1966, the Stanza di Bacco was still used as the dining room, its counterpart as a drawing room.
The Sala dell’Olimpo is very different in scale. This opens from the north end of the Crociera, and the walls are decorated with yet more landscapes, impeccably preserved, in one of which the villa itself is seen transposed to a very different terrain. Above, on trompe l’oeil balconies, are patricians, members of the Barbaro family perhaps or the patriarch’s guests and their dogs, below the soaring vault with the most ambitious of all Veronese’s frescoes in the house, the gods on Olympus. On either side of the Sala dell’Olimpo are balancing enfilades of rooms, of which the nearest, the Stanza della Lucerna and the Stanza del Cane, were decorated by Veronese with yet more landscapes and, above, opposite the windows, fictive canvasses of the Madonna and Child as tender as any of the artist’s independent pictures of the kind. The eye is drawn through these rooms to the splendid mural of a gentleman returning from the hunt at the east end of the enfilade and the less well-preserved lady at the opposite end, their presence expressing the purpose of the rooms as stanze di letto (bedrooms), so judiciously preserved by Contessa Marina Luling Buschetti when she restored the house in the 1930s. These rooms are all lit from the north and open onto a terrace across which is an equally remarkable survival, the Nympheum, a fountain flanked by stucco figures and – much damaged by exposure – a further ceiling by Veronese, or ‘Paolo’ as the contessa used, with affectionate familiarity, to call him.
Villa Barbaro: Paolo Veronese, Sala di Bacco, fresco (detail).
Among Palladio’s villas it was only at Maser that Palladio’s contribution was matched by those of a painter of equal distinction. And it is the seamless harmony of their contributions that makes the house the most perfect secular statement of Venetian patrician taste of its time.
