Who would want to live anywhere out of the country? Here we have complete peace, real freedom, tranquil security and sweet repose. We can enjoy pure air, shady trees with their abundant fruit, clear water, lovely valleys; we can make use of the fertile farmland and the productive vines, as well as appreciating the mountains and hills for the view, the woods for their charm, the fields for their spaciousness and the gardens for their beauty.
Another source of enjoyment is being able to watch the hard work of the farmers and the obedience of their teams, as they skilfully plow and sow the fields, and then the crops growing well and being harvested; and also to hear the songs of the peasants, the pipes of the shepherds, the rustic bagpipes of the cowherds, and the sweet singing of the birds.
(Agostino Gallo, A discussion between the noble gentlemen Messer Giovanni Battista Avogadro and Messer Cornelio Duccio in the month of May 1553 on the delights of the villa and how it is better to reside there than in the city (Venice, 1566))1
For the Renaissance patron, building in the country satisfied multiple desires. A significant house established land ownership and projected a seigneurial presence in the region. Landownership provided financial security, escape from the health risks of the city, political advantage, and the pleasure of nature. Life in the country offers pleasures in every domain, says Messer Avogadro: clean air, fertile agriculture, beautiful sights, and the labouring peasantry.
Rural residences usually consisted of a number of buildings, some for the habitation of the owners, others for animals and the storage of equipment, others for the collection of the agricultural products that provided wealth to the patron and employment to his labourers. If the countryside was rich with wildlife, life in the country offered the pleasures of hunting and an escape from the demands of city living. With a great house and fertile land, the owner could entertain for the pleasure of their company and the possibility of political profit if the guests were members of the royal court or powerful families.
Detail of 134
As a building type, the country house responded to the social, political, and economic changes in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. If protection was no longer as central a concern with the end to some local struggles, then houses could open to the landscape with larger windows and fewer of the defensive moats and walls needed in an earlier time. Yet, traces of architectural elements such as towers continued to be popular elements of even newly built houses as a sign of a noble past and family ancestry.
If the fortified house or castle was one precedent for country houses the agricultural farm offered a local model. Simple rural houses were often cubic in shape and enlarged or rebuilt as the needs of the owners changed. These types of buildings changed slowly, often imperceptibly, over many centuries. Their construction and appearance evolved out of local circumstance, and availability of regional materials. This core of building tradition coexisted with other aspects of rural crafts and meshed with the rural economy of production and use. Builders and craftsmen were often the owners themselves. The continuity of rural building tradition, on the one hand, resisted change when none was needed or expected. When patrons and architects had the financial resources and the desire to build afresh, building in the country offered the opportunity to innovate in ways that urban density did not allow.2
Perhaps the most significant change in the history of the country house was the increasing desire by owners of property to live there. As Agostino Gallo writes in the passage that began this chapter, rural life could be filled with pleasurable activities that the city did not offer. Part literary fantasy, part cultural shift, the ideology of the country life captured the contemporary interest in the natural world and the pleasures of leisure. The specific look of rural houses, and the activities that took place there, varied based on local traditions, conditions, and especially the climate. In Scotland, leisure pursuits tended to involve much more activity to counter the cold than in the hot climates of Spain or Italy.3
There is in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries a new attitude toward life in the country. The creation of a Renaissance villa ideology, or set of beliefs about the pleasures and benefits of country living, shaped the perception of even the most traditional of structures. Building in the country was as old as architecture itself, and Vitruvius says that architecture began when people huddled by a fire and built shelters [125]. Rural life continued in the same ways as it had essentially before, yet as with the urban palace, Renaissance patrons and architects believed that architecture could project the ideals and aspirations of the owners. The country house was an extension of the individual and the family out into the world.
125 Vitruvius, origins of building from Jean Martin, Architecture, ou Art de bien bastir de Marc Vitruve Pollion Autheur (Paris, 1547)
Jean Martin (d. 1553) translated the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499) and the treatises of Sebastiano Serlio, Leon Battista Alberti, and Vitruvius into French. Singlehandedly, he made the seminal works of architectural classicism available to a wide audience in France. Many interested in ancient culture and humanist learning praised Martin’s careful and scholarly translations. In the second half of the sixteenth century, however, others, including Philibert de l’Orme, argued for a more national style, derived from French precedents and attuned to native forms. The sculptor Jean Goujon provided many of the illustrations to Martin’s text, freely interpreting the text in order to provide a more pictorial commentary on Vitruvius’ work.
At the start of the fifteenth century, country houses for nobles were geared toward protecting the owners and an extended household, and establishing claims to property and agricultural land. The medieval houses of the ruling classes were primarily designed as places of protection that established their authority over the land. Within feudal society landowners needed to protect their family, dependants, and property from the attack of other landowners seeking to expand their holding, or the invasions of foreign powers. Thus the early history of castles, up to the fifteenth century, is directly connected with the history of feudalism that bound vassals to their lords through primarily military service. As the residence for the lords, castles were the locus of their power and prestige. The defensive quality of castles in the medieval era was a fundamental aspect to their design, but they were also private residences of the lord.
The fifteenth century marks a turning point in the history of rural building as patrons became increasingly interested in the comforts of their life as well as the protection of their assets. When Sir Edward Dalyngrigge built Bodiam Castle (East Sussex, England, 1386–8) he had returned from fighting in the Hundred Years War against France [126]. Many of the features of Bodiam Castle reflected his experience in France such as the towers which recall the French donjon, or castle house.
126 Bodiam Castle, 1386–8, Sussex, England
By the end of the 14th century, fortified castles already evoked a military past that was no longer relevant. Bodiam Castle still has all the elements of a true fortified house in the towers and protective moat. Yet the attention to a powerful and unforgettable visual effect was equally important in its design and construction.
The square castle, impressively high, sited in the middle of a protective moat, makes any assault on the building more difficult while also amplifying the size and importance of the building against the gentle landscape of Sussex. A single road leads to the entrance gate, and controls access to the castle’s interior. A rhythm of round corner towers, bastion walls, and rectangular towers is reminiscent of the great walls surrounding many cities, including the medieval walls around Constantinople or even London.
Dalyngrigge received permission ‘to crenellate’ his house from King Richard II, that is, to add the symbolic and functional battlements along the roofline in order that the castle might serve ‘in defense of the adjacent country and for resistance against our enemies’. Like earlier medieval castles, the towers tie this building in with the tradition of tower houses used as protective fortresses by individual families in the English countryside. Dalyngrigge incorporated many of the latest inventions in defensive architecture used by other patrons, and developed during the long period of war in the previous century.
Bodiam was a city unto itself, and was intended to accommodate the large company of family and friends that made up the extended household. Dalyngrigge gave special attention to his own accommodations and those of his servants and retainers. Separate suites of rooms were included for men of standing and class, as well as the service rooms across from the gatehouse needed to feed and entertain the flow of people in the castle. Kitchen, pantry, and buttery served the needs of the hall in the towers and gatehouses. Landowners were required to provide appropriate levels of hospitality for important visitors to the castles as well as the families who worked the lands attached to the castle.
Dalyngrigge built Bodiam to satisfy his desire for a house that would reflect his status and serve his social and political needs after his retirement from war. The need for protection went hand in hand with the desire to appear fortified (through features such as a tall profile, multiple towers, crenellations along the wall, and the moat), which served both to reinforce the patron’s desire to be identified with his military occupation and the ideals of chivalry.
Throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries builders continued to use the architectural language associated with military architecture in houses for which there was no immediate defensive purpose. The architecture of chivalry represented the aspirations and noble genealogy of the patrons through the familiar forms and ornament of fortifications. Battlements, towers, and even moats were incorporated into country houses throughout Europe even when the function of those houses was now more directed toward the enjoyment of country life or the agricultural and economic production of land and its resources.
Plagues began in the cities, and country life provided an escape from the fetid air that was thought to carry disease. Health, from a Renaissance perspective, was understood to be a careful balance of the four humours: blood, yellow bile, phlegm, and black bile. If any were present in too strong a concentration, then the health of the individual would be compromised. In a Renaissance context, the circulation of air was understood as part of a larger concept of the pneuma, an ancient Greek term that encompassed ideas of health and breathing, the energetic matter of the universe, and the spirit. Simply moving out of the city, with its overcrowded streets, poor hygiene, and damp air, could be enough to improve one’s health. Fresh air countered the dangers of excessive dampness, and thus disease. In the country the air could circulate freely both outside and within the house, preventing disease from entering the body.
In the cities there was little opportunity to change the location of buildings. In the country, however, patrons could select the best site for a new house. Alberti advised ‘a gentleman [to choose a site] somewhere dignified, rather than in a particularly fertile stretch of land, where it could enjoy all the benefit and delight of breeze, sun and view’.4 A beautiful view, so often praised in architectural writings on the villa and the landscape, was an aesthetic pleasure that ensured a healthy location for living. Builders should thus avoid swampy land, or building close to a river or pond. Among their other skills, architects needed to know the local geography and the patterns of the seasons. When did the land flood? What were the prevailing winds?
Land reclamation projects, including the draining of swamps and fens, increased the usable acreage for cultivation and made it healthier for habitation. In his treatise on The Art of Living Long (Discorsi della vita sobria, 1558), Alvise Cornaro describes his own villa outside of Venice.
[I]t is, indeed, a very different place than what it was formerly, having once been marshy and of unwholesome atmosphere—a home fit rather for snakes than for human beings. But, after I had drained off the waters, the air became healthful and people flocked thither from every direction; the number of the inhabitants began to multiply exceedingly; and the country was brought to the perfect condition in which it is today.5
In the organization of rooms, the planning of the villa could also mitigate the threat of cold and dampness. Rooms with windows on more than one wall allowed for better circulation, and deep porticos shielded the interior from the heat of the summer sun [127]. The Villa Capra, one of Palladio’s most studied villas, has porticos on the four sides and a large room at the centre under a domed ceiling. Hot air rises toward the dome, and out through the opening at the top (now covered over). Air can circulate freely through the four porches, and into the rooms off the central space.
127 Andrea Palladio, Villa Capra, begun 1565, Vicenza, Italy
The Ionic columns of the porch are enclosed by walls pierced with tall narrow arches. This combination of column and wall recalls a type of ancient temple in antis. This detail, typical of Palladio’s adaptation of an ancient motif to a contemporary use, accentuates the geometrical clarity of the four temple fronts and their simultaneous connection with the main body of the building and their relationship to the landscape.
Palladio’s Villa Capra (begun c.1565–6) was a villa suburbana, built just on the outskirts of the city of Vicenza for Paolo Almerico, a papal envoy who returned to his native city after a career in Rome. The house is on the edge of the hills, overlooking open fields, and within easy walking distance of the city centre [128]. The plan is the most closely controlled of any of Palladio’s villas, with four porches arranged on the cardinal axes [149]. Each porch is a temple front, reached by wide stairs that lead to a landing and entrance into the central domed space. In terms of function, Palladio does not include it among the villas as it is so close to the city, and it served a different function from other country residences. It also comments most directly on the landscape through the four porticos. It is not subservient to the landscape, but takes and moulds it, addressing it through its rigorous geometry and monumental dome. The building is self-consciously architectural in the face of nature.
128 Andrea Palladio, Villa Capra, begun 1565, Vicenza, Italy
The main entrance to the Villa Capra was originally along this axis from the road. This view shows how the house articulates the rise of the hill in the form of the dome.
Throughout the Italian architect and writer’s Sebastiano Serlio’s long life (Bologna 1475–France 1553/5) his multi-volume treatise reflected his changing architectural ideas and the fortunes of his career. Each book of the treatise appeared individually, and the whole project was probably intended to include seven books covering all necessary topics for the practising architect including geometry and perspective, antiquity, the orders, temples, and unusual circumstances in building. His attention to the unplanned aspect of building, that is the realities of architecture, reflects Serlio’s own work as an architect, though few of his actual projects survive. His greatest legacy is certainly his treatise, which was widely read and translated.
Not all of his ideas made it into print. Book VI, known only through two manuscript copies, showed domestic architecture in the city and country [112]. Serlio began it around 1541, soon after he and his family, including his wife and several children, moved to France to work at the court of King Francis I, and it is dedicated to Henry II, son of Francis I. It reflects both his background and initial training in Rome, central Italy, and Venice, and his growing knowledge of French architectural practice and styles. He includes existing buildings, though often modified, and other more general schemes. In the service of the French royal court, Serlio was responsible for work on the palace at Fontainebleau and there built a palace for the Cardinal of Ferrara (built 1544–6), which he included in Book VI. The Château of Ancy-le-Franc (designed from c.1541, Burgundy, France), the best surviving building by Serlio, is represented in the book as a ‘House of the Illustrious Prince in the Style of a Fortress’. Built for Comte Antoine de Clermont-Tonnerre, the four wings surround a courtyard, and, along with the corner towers, retain the air of the fortified house [129]. Classical pilasters on the exterior and in the courtyard were, according to Serlio, the desire of the patron, although in the drawing for the book Serlio shows the ground floor of the exterior with the rough stones of rustication (see the discussion of rustication later in this chapter) as surrounds for the door and window. In praising the patron on the one hand for his ‘three qualities: knowledge, will, power’ he also disowns some of the aspects of the building as built, for the use of columns was ‘in part made according to the wishes of the patron’.6
Although Ancy-le-Franc incorporates pilasters over the surface of the exterior, in more ways the building reflects French architectural practice in plan, form, and style. The steep roofs are appropriate for the northern climate. A sequence of rooms with minor apartments on one wing and staterooms on the other is consistent with French planning, which Serlio particularly admired. And even the pilasters, the most obvious sign of central Italian architecture, were redistributed on the façade in a French manner. The pilasters for example in the corner towers are brought in close to the windows, giving a more vertical appearance in those blocks rather than the more horizontal distribution of the orders on a comparable Italian building. In his treatise, as well as in his practice, Serlio shows options for both city and country architecture based on national differences.
129 Sebastiano Serlio, Ancy-le-Franc, 1544–50, near Tonnerre, France
The pilasters on the exterior of the chateau mark out two different rhythms, one on the main range of rooms, the other on the two towers on the corners. The overall effect is of aesthetic restraint, with the use of a limited palette of ornament and materials and subtle gradations of shadow and the contrast of the white stone against the dark roof. In the courtyard Serlio used a greater variety of ornament and materials, perhaps at the insistence of his patron.
The most innovative aspect of Book VI, however, may be Serlio’s presentation of domestic building as a progression from the simplest architecture for the poorest workers to castles suitable for kings and tyrants.7 His country architecture, in particular, shows a one-room house, with a basic porch with column supports, as appropriate for rural workers. Italianate villas included rich references to classical architecture, both ancient and modern. The sequence of architectural options shows Serlio exploring the relationship between building type and national distinctions as well as social and economic difference.
The remains of ancient villas outside Rome fed a Renaissance interest in the houses of the ancients. Poggio Bracciolini, a fifteenth-century historian, described what could be seen of the ruins.
There are many pools and reservoirs … there are aqueducts … there are broken columns and various kinds of marble scattered through the fields; also stones visible in huge piles leave intimations of great things in our minds. There still exist very large remains of quite a few villas filled with various bits of ornaments and fragments of statues; there are arches and vaults of subterranean passages and cellars so large that some of them stretch for more than a stadium … there are also some promenades, beautifully built and still whole.8
These elements of ancient buildings, evocative though they were, did not produce a template for Renaissance architects or patrons but rather a group of features that evoked a past way of life.
It was in the literary descriptions in ancient texts that Renaissance readers had a vision of ancient rural life, tempting in its descriptions and maddeningly vague in its architectural details. Pliny the Younger (AD 61–112) described in his letters the leisurely life he enjoyed away from the demands of the city.
For besides the attractions of the place which I have mentioned the greatest is the relaxation and carefree luxury of the place—there is no need for a toga, the neighbors do not come to call, it is always quiet and peaceful—advantages as great as the healthful situation and limpid air. I always feel energetic and fit for anything at my Tuscan villa, both mentally and physically. I exercise my mind by study, my body by hunting. My household too flourishes better here than elsewhere: I have never lost a retainer, none of those I brought up with me.9
Both patrons and architects shared an interest in ancient villas which affected the design of new buildings. Giuliano da Sangallo (c.1445–1516) won a competition to design a villa for Lorenzo de’ Medici (1449–92) on property he had recently acquired [130]. The land, about 20 km west of Florence, was a financial investment made by Lorenzo in order to diversify family holdings away from banking and toward real property. However, the purchase also allowed Lorenzo to build anew, working closely with the architect on the design and planning of the villa and its property.
The basic shape of the villa is a simple cubic form, reminiscent of local Tuscan farmhouses. Here the block-like form is amplified and like Bodiam placed against the landscape, raised on a podium evoking the great substructures of ancient villas as described by Bracciolini. This building was calculated to be seen, and to see from—a place to look out over the landscape and to impose on the landscape.
On the main façade, which originally would have been approached by two straight stairs, is the main entrance, marked by a vestibulum, an entrance hallway, set off by a loggia with classical columns and a pediment above. In ancient buildings, these elements would have been used on Roman temples; that is religious buildings, a completely different type of building from a villa. Yet a pediment served as a mark of ancient Rome, easily transferable from one building type to another. It conferred upon the building a sign of antiquity, and thus an aura of scholarship that could be associated with the patron. Yet there is no attempt to make an easy transition from the rest of the building to the pediment; the windows are crowded in on the left side, and the pediment surprisingly seems an afterthought, an addition meant to appear distinct. This first use of the pediment in a secular building would become a powerful sign of the owner’s status, much like the family coat of arms in the pediment or the general theme of the villa’s frieze, which suggested the cyclical return of time and the beneficent rule of the Medici.
130 Giuliano da Sangallo, Poggio a Caiano, begun 1485, near Prato, Italy
Lorenzo de Medici intended his new villa to be a modern interpretation of the villas of the ancients, and express his own interests in humanist learning. At the end of the fifteenth century, Poggio a Caiano marked a turning point in the design of rural residences in central Italy after decades of experimentation. The practical concerns of land ownership, agricultural economy, and traditional building practices remained the most important concerns of patrons and architects alike; and most builders eschewed innovative design in favour of time-tested formula.
In the last years of his life, Raphael was working on plans for a villa on Monte Mario in Rome for Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici (1478–1534), later Pope Clement VII. Close to the Vatican Palace and the dense city centre, the Villa Madama was placed on the side of a hill, with views across the city [131].
Superintendent of works was the architect Antonio da Sangallo (c.1460–1534), brother of Giuliano da Sangallo. The centre of the villa was to be a large round courtyard off which were the main rooms. A vast complex, it may have been intended as a great reception residence for foreign dignitaries coming into the city for the theatre. Stabling for 200 horses, and a hippodrome with gardens, provided amenities for the great retinues expected [132]. From the south a great open stairway was planned, leading up from the Vatican and connecting the building with the city. The building was never finished, and what was constructed was damaged during the Sack of Rome (1527), and only recently has it been renovated. Its present name was acquired when the villa passed into the hands of Margaret of Parma, the daughter of Charles V, in 1536.
131 Raphael, Antonio da Sangallo, Giulio Romano, and others, Villa Madama, from 1517, Rome
A vaulted substructure supports the upper terrace of the garden, reminiscent of ancient remains visible in Rome and the surrounding landscape. Springs from the hillside collected in fishponds on the lower level.
Only a small part of the villa was built but a surviving plan by Antonio da Sangallo (redrawn here) shows the sequence of rooms and planned outdoor spaces. The axial plan, running alongside the length of the hill, opens and closes into larger and smaller spaces, creating an unfolding experience that cannot be anticipated from one room to another.
There were both ancient precedents and modern examples of this kind of villa planning that fused architecture and natural forms. Ancient Roman villas had often, as here, been built into the sides of hills with arched substructures to support the building. And the recently completed Belvedere by Donato Bramante incorporated vast terraces running across the hill to connect the Vatican Palace to existing buildings on the Mons Vaticanus [133].
133 Donato Bramante, Cortile del Belvedere, begun 1505, Vatican
A vast building project, on the scale of the work of the ancients, the Cortile del Belvedere connected the Vatican Palace with the Belvedere of Innocent VIII (elected pope in 1484) with its newly completed sculpture garden (completed 1506). From the papal apartments in the Vatican Palace, the Belvedere offered an unparalleled view of the performances and pageants that were also viewed from the terraces that lined the garden on both sides. Bramante carefully considered the movement from level to level, arranging ramps and stairs to take advantage of the change in height and view.
The complex bears witness to a desire to recover not only the forms but also the planning of ancient villas. For symmetry does not order the villa plan, as it had in the quattrocento villas for the Medici; or as the Belvedere had so grandly attempted to make order and sense out of the existing structures on the Vatican. The Villa Madama was laid out on the axes of a cross, each arm of the plan independent in its adaptation to the site and terrain. Thus the proposed theatre was to be built into the hill and only seen when one arrived at it, not to be a part of a whole scenic perspective, as in the Belvedere which relies on a strong visual perspective. Nor is it a building to be taken in at one glance, like the compact cubic forms of Tuscan villas, as at Poggio a Caiano. Instead the Villa Madama is experienced as a sequence of spaces and rooms. Architecture here takes a turn toward a different kind of spatial experience, a potent idea about architectural space and its emotional and psychological possibilities, as Pliny himself had described his villas as a succession of varied rooms, views, and experiences.10 This seems to propose a relationship of architecture and nature, in which nature makes architecture into a series of disjunctive moments disrupting the boundaries between the natural and the man-made world [29].
134 Raphael, Antonio da Sangallo, Giulio Romano, and others, Garden Loggia, Villa Madama, from 1517, Rome
When Raphael died in 1520, much of the villa remained without decoration and the project was left to Giovanni da Udine and Giulio Romano. The ornament on the walls and vaults imitated what Renaissance artists had seen in the remains of ancient buildings, and called alla grottesca for its appearance in underground grottoes. The scenes incorporate the Cardinal’s coats of arms in a range of mythological motifs. The work was done in stucco, a revival of an ancient technique that allowed for a rich, sculptural decoration that could be moulded over less precious building materials such as brick.
The terrace gardens demonstrate this [131]. Water from springs on the hillside collects in three niches hollowed out of the retaining wall of the main terrace, and then runs down into fishponds on the lower terrace. The grouping of arches and niches follows a triumphal arch pattern. As architecture and nature were to be united in the villa, so too were all the arts to be present in the decoration and design of the villa. In the garden loggia, the boundary space between inside and outside, the decoration closely reproduced the decoration of ancient Roman building in the grotesque work [134].
Very often villas are grouped together, one family building near another in the same area (suggesting the almost tribal nature of country house building). This is true in the Veneto where families from Vicenza, Verona, and Venice moved into the terra firma, reclaiming land through drainage and other technological improvements, and establishing rural residences there. The need to be close enough to travel back into the city or town where business was conducted dictated a certain relative distance between city house and country residence. However, the connection to other families, the need to maintain ties to the same group as in the city, was important for economic and political reasons.
Ideas from Italy, known from the publication of villas as in Andrea Palladio’s I quattro libri dell’architettura (1570) and travellers’ accounts, offered new models to patrons and their architects throughout Europe, yet the importance of these books should not be overstated. Smaller country houses, in contrast to the royal examples, remained fiercely loyal to local precedents. Within the framework of the smaller house, economics dictated that builders use predominantly local materials, and rely on local talent. Moreover, within a particular region, houses were in dialogue with one another. As reflections of their owners, houses were understood to be both part of a social network yet marking out their individuality from that same group. Patrons looked to other houses nearby as models to emulate, and surpass.
Architects who worked for a family in the city were also hired to build their country estates, and often worked for a group of families. This phenomenon is well known in the Veneto, but was also an important part of the concentration of country houses in areas such as the Loire Valley of France, prized by Francis I and his ministers for the excellent hunting, the Weser River Valley (Germany), or the county of Northamptonshire in England. There was often competitiveness between families, a desire to outdo the other in elaborate houses.
Of all the architects who designed country houses, Andrea Palladio (1508–80) is certainly the best known, and the most studied by later architects and patrons. His reputation spread quickly in his own lifetime, based on the quality of his building as well as through the publication of his own designs in his treatise. His buildings were already a destination for visitors to the Veneto soon after they were built. In the early seventeenth century, Thomas Coryat describes the elegance of their decoration and construction. And in 1613–14, the English architect Inigo Jones made a careful study of his architecture with Palladio’s own treatise as a guide to his visits [149].11 Architects to the present day have continued a fascination with Palladio’s buildings, especially his villas, finding them rich and compelling models that reward careful study. The characteristics that attract architects and visitors to Palladio’s buildings—they are among the most visited buildings in the Veneto—may stem from their elegant classical details, used with restraint and unity. It may also be the careful attention Palladio gave to the buildings’ location: aligned axially to fields, set against a vista of hills, alongside the canal or river. Many of Palladio’s villas are lavishly decorated in the interior, a contrast with the self-possession of the exterior ornamentation. It is also, certainly, that a visit to more than one of his buildings brings a sensation of a repeated theme, heard again but with subtle changes and variations.
The unique quality of Palladio’s architecture, difficult to pinpoint even if it is possible to pick out particular features, has been described by scholars as Palladio’s attention to proportion. Rudolf Wittkower in a detailed analysis of Palladio’s use of mathematical proportion in all aspects of his buildings (plan, elevation, ornamental details) ascribes to Palladio a highly refined use of proportional relationships in his buildings, a characteristic that Wittkower thought gave them a universal aesthetic appeal.
Once [Palladio] had found the basic geometric pattern for the problem ‘villa,’ he adapted it as clearly and as simply as possible to the special requirements of each commission. He reconciled the task at hand with the ‘certain truth’ of mathematics which is final and unchangeable. The geometrical keynote is, subconsciously rather than consciously, perceptible to everyone who visits Palladio’s villas and it is this that gives his buildings their convincing quality.12
For Wittkower, number was a Platonic truth that emerged through the rigour of Renaissance scholarship. Palladio’s use of mathematical proportions in his buildings was evidence of his intellectual sophistication applied to the problem of building, a demonstration of theory applied to practice. The popularity of Wittkower’s ideas in the context of twentieth-century architectural modernism, which most likely stimulated his own ideas, has since been challenged. Few, if any, of Palladio’s buildings follow any rigorous mathematical systems.13
However, if Wittkower held to a fundamental belief in the role of numbers in the creation of a universal architecture that we now find too rigid, it is still possible to see Palladio’s interest in number and proportion as an essential part of his architecture. For numbers do, as Wittkower suggests, lie at the heart of Palladio’s architecture. Throughout the treatise, Palladio takes special care to insert numbers into the illustrations so that the careful reader can see not only the overall effect of the design but also its relative parts. For example, villa plans are marked with their dimensions, so that readers could transpose that design into their own local system of measurement. Yet to stop at this level does not take Palladio’s understanding of the implications of number far enough. If number does exist on the semiconscious level as Wittkower suggests, then it surely is also present in the very real and immediate demands of architecture as it mediates between people, places, and things.14 Let us take one of Palladio’s villas as an example.
Villa Emo in the village of Fanzolo belonged to Leonardo Emo, a Venetian noble whose family had owned property here since the fifteenth century [135]. There was an older house on the property, and the land still shows traces of its ancient Roman heritage in the layout of the fields and the presence of a Roman road. Palladio sites his villa, and its adjoining buildings, to take full advantage of this agricultural heritage, aligning the main entrance to the house along a dominant axis through the fields and elevating the entrance one storey above ground level. Leonardo Emo commissioned Palladio in conjunction with major land reclamation work on the property, draining fields in order to farm grain in the area.
135 Andrea Palladio, Villa Emo, begun 1559, Fanzolo di Vedelago, Italy
The residence is connected to the farm buildings yet distinguished by its raised elevation and classical temple front. The service buildings to the side have simpler arches wide enough to accommodate a farm cart. The deep porch provides shade, and thus cooler air to circulate into the living quarters.
The agricultural function of the building is clear: the main house, the casa di villa, is attached to the barchesse or service buildings by arcades which stretch out like arms toward the landscape [136]. The covered portico not only serves to aesthetically tie the house to the farm buildings, but also to provide further storage area for the farm with a protected area for equipment, produce, and animals. The ramp that goes from ground level to the main entrance to the house most likely served as an area for threshing the grain, close to the barns and storage areas.
If mathematical number is at the heart of the Villa Emo it is expressed in the lucid way Palladio attends to the mass of the building and its ornamentation. The main block of the building is almost entirely devoid of ornament (there are not even any cornices or mouldings around the windows) except for the Doric portico. The pure wall of the house makes the classical elements all the more striking, and serves to demarcate the elevated status of the house over the more functional buildings at the sides. While rigorous in its simplicity, and therefore mathematical by implication, the architecture of the villa should also be appreciated for its corporeal qualities.
Finally, the interior of the villa is surprising in its rich painted decoration that interacts and responds to the building. The artist Battista Zelotti executed the paintings as he had done for other villas, an aspect of the building that Palladio did not attempt to dictate, and it is again the contrast between the parts—exterior to interior—that provides the effect for both owner and visitor.
136 View through loggia toward fields, Andrea Palladio, Villa Emo, begun 1559, Fanzolo di Vedelago, Italy
The columns of the porch frame the long vista through the fields. The painted decoration by Battista Zelotti extends the structural beams of the ceiling, and creates a rich and imagined landscape.
In villas and gardens the most successful architecture, according to the principles developed in the Renaissance, responded to its setting in the landscape. Nature was a potent force, a living presence that shaped the experience as well as the form of building. Not only were the materials understood as the product of organic processes that must be cultivated and shaped before they could be incorporated into a building, ornament itself might reflect that same fecundity of the earth. Rustication, a term derived from the Latin ‘rus’ meaning ‘country’, was rough stones that may in fact have been carved to look that way, allowing architects to express the vital character of the natural world in buildings themselves. The Grotte du Jardin des Pins (1541–3) at Fontainebleau has arches with unhewn stone serving as the voussoirs and Atlantids, mythical giants embedded in the rock [137].
Rustication was a mode of building, according to the writer Serlio, and was most often used in combination with either the Doric or Tuscan, the simplest of the classical orders. It had a powerful effect when used in combination with more refined masonry, playing off the finish of the capitals and mouldings against the rough stones. At the Palazzo Te, a villa suburbana on the edge of the city of Mantua (begun in the mid-1520s), Giulio Romano exploited the full expressive potential of rustication [138] Rough stones appear. appear almost to grow out from the surface of the building or break through the pediments over doorways. The visual puns work because they play on the expectations of the viewer who might expect a more regular and sedate use of the orders, with no surprises.
Serlio wrote that rustication agreed with the character of a soldier or ‘a scholar or a merchant with a robust life’ (Bk. IV, p. 332) and was particularly appropriate for the architecture of a fortress. Rustication may have been no more impenetrable than regular stone, and in fact would be easily damaged by cannon fire, but its character evoked strength. This quality of protection made rustication perennially popular for any building that was to appear fortified. In Florence, rustication was used on the façade of the Palazzo Medici (1444) and the Palazzo Pitti (from 1457), continuing a local tradition in Tuscany, though updated in combining smooth and rough surfaces in a play on the medieval precedents.
By the sixteenth century, as architects and theorists sought ancient Roman precedents for current practice, models in the perimeter wall of the Forum of Augustus (dedicated in 2 BC) and temples from the time of the Emperor Claudius (10 BC–AD 54) were cited as authorities that justified the growing interest in the evocative and emotional power of architectural forms.
137 Grotte des Jardins des Pins, 1541–3, Fontainebleau, France
This rusticated arch leads into a grotto, originally inlaid with shells and crystals and decorated with mythological paintings. That play with nature and artifice is still present in the exterior arches, with stones consciously carved in rough blocks. Male figures form part of the architecture, their well-developed muscles appropriately formed by rocks still replete with all their natural vitality. The Grotte des Jardins des Pins is variously ascribed to Francesco Primaticcio (1504/5–1570) and Sebastiano Serlio. Both worked at Fontainebleau and designed architectural works with a rich vocabulary of the orders and rustication.
138 Giulio Romano, Palazzo Te, from 1524, Mantua, Italy
In his work for the Gonzaga in Mantua, Giulio Romano served as court architect and artistic adviser. He developed a highly personal use of the orders and especially rustication, adopting an architectural vocabulary based on the nature of the building and its intended audience. For Federico Gonzaga (1500–40), Giulio Romano renovated and expanded the Palazzo Te on the edge of the city. The building amazed and delighted its owner and his guests. Each room offers a different architectural experience, painted with wild banquets of the ancients or portraits of the Duke’s beloved horses. The rustication on the exterior and along the walls of the courtyard is unexpected and sophisticated.
One way we might think about proportion in Palladio’s architecture is not to see it as a covert aspect of the architecture, waiting to be revealed through complex and erudite texts or the explication of architect and patron. Rather, proportion is an aspect of building that sees elements in relation to one another, this is to that, as one would parse out the mathematical ration of, say, 2 : 3. That ratio may define the dimensions of a room, or the diameter of a column to its height. Ratios are also shorthand for describing objects in dialogue with one another. Silvio Belli, a contemporary of Palladio who was a fellow member of the Accademia Olimpica in Vicenza, published a book, On Proportions and Proportionality, in 1573 where he described proportion as a fundamental property ‘of beauty and of health’.15
If we look again at Palladio’s villas we can see how that idea of objects in dialogue can apply to elements of the architecture in the relationship of the building to the landscape, the house to the barns, the ornament to the structure, and the book to the building. Decorum, a central issue in Palladio’s architectural approach, dictates the suitability of a house to its owner, and places the building in an active role between patron and architect.
Women played an important role as the direct or indirect patrons of architecture. If the male head of the family, having commissioned a building, dies before its completion, the widow may push on with the project, as often happened with Palladio’s patrons. Palaces built for female royalty, as in the palace at Mechelen for Margaret of Austria, can be directed to reflect her wishes, within certain limits of court protocol. There are, however, cases where women are able to take the lead, conceiving of a project from its start through to the end, working with the architect, asserting their own personality directly into the project as constructed. Often, this sort of direct architectural involvement, for both male and female patrons, took place with architecture in the country. Away from the limits (social and spatial) of the city, rural building offered patron and architect more freedom to invent new solutions for traditional problems. How much of these innovative buildings can be ascribed to the dynamics of gender is difficult to determine, though it can be seen where the issues of imagery and inventive planning come to the fore. This section will look at two remarkable women and their remarkable buildings: the chateau at Anet by Philibert de l’Orme for Diane de Poitiers, the mistress of Henry II (1547–53); and Hardwick Hall, the great house by Robert Smythson for Elizabeth Shrewsbury (1590).
The country houses of Francis I and Henry VIII were primarily hunting lodges, built on an extremely grand scale. They were designed to take advantage of the rich reserves of game in the woods and valleys of the Loire Valley or the southern counties of England. In an age when the skills of hunting came ever more to define masculine status, in part as a replacement for the military tests on the battlefield, the houses were the setting for display of masculine identity, now codified through ‘new’ medieval castles and grand lodges. Yet, the taste for the hunt was not restricted to men.
For Diane de Poitiers (1499–1566), widow of Louis de Brézé (d. 1531) and mistress of Henry II, Philibert de l’Orme designed an extraordinary chateau at Anet, about 75 km west of Paris [139]. Like the great parks owned by Francis I, the woods at Anet were excellent for hunting, a passion shared by Diane de Poitiers. What had been a modest house, created under an earlier architect, was now expanded into a multi-courtyard residence that projected Diane de Poitiers’s elevated status once Henry II ascended to the throne in 1547. Each element of the chateau, of which only a part remains after much was destroyed in the French Revolution (1798–1811), reveals de l’Orme’s interest in creating an architecture which is innovative in its projection of a French style, perfectly suited to his royal client. In the invention of the trompe, the richness of the décor, or the complexity of the chapel’s dome, each element of the chateau was a tour-de-force, a gem that reflected the talent of the architect and the prestige of the patron.
139 Drawing by Jacques Androuet du Cerceau, Chateau of Anet, before 1576
This drawing was ultimately engraved and included in Androuet du Cerceau’s book of houses, Les Plus Excellents Bastiments de France (1576–9), a celebration of national style and the influence of French patrons and architects. The birds-eye view shows the buildings of Anet with its protective walls and enclosed gardens. The corner towers, prominent in Androuet du Cerceau’s drawing, recall earlier French chateaux, an aspect of the building that reinforced its historic ties. The symmetry of the design, an aspect of the overall planning by Philibert de l’Orme, is evident from the alignment of the entrance gate with the three-storey frontispiece in the main courtyard. Anet evoked both new Italianate tastes and the importance of building within the national traditions.
In the entrance gate to the chateau, de l’Orme engages every available aspect of architectural and ornamental language to create a French building that explicitly represents his patron [140]. While the gate has the form of a triumphal arch, along with the attention to material consistent with classical building (regular blocks, flat and finely finished ashlar masonry), there are few explicit classical details. Only the Doric columns on either side of the entrance derive from a classical vocabulary. At the same time, the architect brings in architectural citations from older French buildings: the curved wings recalling the turrets of fortified houses and the pierced parapets that were common on Gothic houses. Yet the smooth surface of the stonework with its regular stringcourse and the geometrical patterns of the balustrades have the feel of architecture derived from a classical source. In the tympanum is a bronze sculpture by Benvenuto Cellini. The over-life-size plaque, created for the chateau of Fontainebleau but never installed there, was given to Diane by Henry II. The reclining nude, with one arm draped over the neck of a stag, in this context becomes Diana, the huntress. The explicit imagery of the sculpture projects the patron, in her allegorical identity, crafted as with the architecture from sources both classical and French.
Through a series of four strategic marriages and great political savvy, Elizabeth, Countess of Shrewsbury (1521–1608), became the second most powerful woman in England (after Queen Elizabeth I). Although the Queen descended from a lineage of great builders (her father Henry VIII had over fifty country estates), Elizabeth herself built little. In order to ensure the loyalty of her nobles and solidify her political power, she encouraged her courtiers to build grandly in anticipation of a royal visit. These royal progresses required vast estates to house the Queen and her retinue in grand style.
140 Philibert de l’Orme, Gate, Chateau d’Anet, 1552, Eure-et-Loire, France
The architect imagined the gate like the entrance façade of a Romanesque cathedral, an architectural type that prepared the viewer for the full experience of the building through a consistent narrative. The story here is not religious but mythological and personal: Diana as huntress. Each aspect of the building can be read as referring to her and an aspect of her life story. The sum of all the architectural parts is the residence for a member of royalty, but the details lay out a biography connected only to Diane de Poitiers.
Elizabeth Hardwick employed the most important architect of the era, Robert Smythson (1534–1614), to design her new house.16 She purchased Hardwick, her ancestral home, around 1583. Although she spent time having the existing house restored 1587–65, after the death of her fourth husband, George Talbot, 6th Earl of Shrewsbury (?1528–90), she employed Robert Smythson to design a new house [141]. The new Hardwick Hall was nearly adjacent to the old hall, and the side-by-side juxtaposition of family home and new home was a practical decision that reinforced her own family heritage.
Four corner towers recall English fortified castles. Yet the house is nothing like English medieval houses. Much of the surface of the house is windows, increasing in size on the upper floors. The amount of glass, originally set in faceted, undulating patterns that would have caught the light, dematerializes the façade and asserts the patron’s wealth in her use of such a costly material. The patron’s initials and coat of arms, prominently displayed along the roofline, identify the house as Elizabeth’s alone.
Both Smythson and Elizabeth Shrewsbury owned architectural books, including Palladio’s recently published treatise (I quattro libri dell’architettura, 1570). The plan at Hardwick is symmetrical, following the general schemes in Palladio, with a large hall at the centre [142, 149, 151]. Halls were a traditional part of an English country house, the space where hospitality was given to guests and the extended household. In the hall, as in the enclosed courtyard of an earlier castle, visitors were received and the family was on display.17 At Hardwick, however, the plan was designed so that the traditional longitudinal hall, found in great houses like Penshurst Place (dating from the fourteenth century) or even the nearly contemporary Wollaton Hall, was now turned to go across the plan, a cross-hall plan. This allowed Elizabeth to direct and observe the events of the household from the bridge on the upper floors that linked her bedroom to the adjacent chamber. In this way she was able to be present and keep a watch over the house, while being separate from it.18
141 Robert Smythson, Hardwick Hall, 1590–7, Derbyshire, England
Set against smooth ashlar walls, the windows at Hardwick Hall increase in height on the upper floors. The experience of moving through the house, therefore, is a passage from darkness into light as the rooms increase in importance and grandeur. Cresting and Elizabeth Shrewsbury’s initials appear along the roofline, a variation on the medieval tradition of the pierced parapet. Robert Smythson was well aware of developments in continental architecture, including the work of Palladio, Serlio, and Philibert de l’Orme, and the theory and practice of the orders. Yet the orders only appear here in carefully prescribed locations: at the entrance and on the hall screen in the hall.
The upper floor is the grandest in the house, with the fewest and largest rooms, all intended to impress the Queen should she visit the house. The great upper chamber was designed to hold a set of tapestries purchased for the house. The long gallery, one of the largest in England at the time, provided a place to exercise in inclement weather, and a room with tremendous views over the land controlled by Elizabeth Shrewsbury [143].19 It also held portraits of both Elizabeth, other members of her family, and the Queen, who never visited the house and was here only in her image.
Houses in the country always interact with nature, but the garden was a formal construction that tempered nature to particular ends. In this way, gardens are a close relative to agricultural land and the hunting park. Yet the garden existed, like architecture itself, both in the world and in the mind of its beholders. In addition to kitchen gardens, medieval houses had other gardens, walled in, and symbolically connected with the biblical garden of Eden or the Holy Jerusalem as a sacred site. From its medieval sources, the Renaissance garden was already endowed with a functional role and a symbolic potential [100]. Contemporary with changes in rural architecture, the Renaissance garden could evoke ideas of ancient gardens, known from Roman texts by Pliny the Younger, Cicero, and Varro. These classical associations, however, were at heart yet another route for Renaissance patrons to promote their own power and erudition.
142 Plan, Hardwick Hall
The plan is loosely symmetrical around the central hall, and the rooms increase in size and importance on the upper floors.
143 Long Gallery, Hardwick Hall, 1590–7, Derbyshire, England
The gallery extended the full length of the house, with views out over the landscape from the tall windows along the eastern wall. This was a space for movement, important in a cold climate where it is better to keep active even indoors, and a highly social space. There was ample opportunity for conversation while walking, and time to admire the work of the full-height fireplaces, carved out of rich materials and displaying the owner’s coat of arms.
Descriptions of gardens in ancient writings and religious books offered a context for a symbolic reading of the garden. The garden itself, however, might include sculpture, inscriptions, and statues that linked it to well-known mythological stories and ancient precedents. In its narrative and images, Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499) [5] presented a garden populated by fantastic creatures, half-living, half-sculpture. Nature and artifice coexist there, and the garden is a major character in Colonna’s story of longing, adventure, and delight.
The design of gardens went in tandem with a study of nature in all its diversity and wonder. Not all gardens depended upon a deep knowledge of exotic varieties of plants, though some did, but gardens were one site of knowledge, much like the library or the laboratory in the early modern period.20 Plants were traded and collected, and received as diplomatic gifts.
The use of symbolism in gardens might be explicit. When Philibert de l’Orme created the chateau at Anet for Diane de Poitiers, the design included extensive gardens to the north of the moated house [139]. Twenty-four parterres are planted in patterns that depict the patron’s initials and emblems. The garden continued the strong central axis from the gateway and through the house.
The labour expended upon gardens, in their creation and maintenance, rivalled that of architecture for it was often on a larger scale and demanded greater resources to see it through to completion. When Donato Bramante planned the Cortile del Belvedere at the Vatican Palace, he was transforming the landscape into a defined outdoor space that would rival ancient constructions in Rome [133]. The Belvedere served later sixteenth-century architects as a model for the architectural garden, shaped through man-made structures into a vast earthworks that extended control out into the landscape. Raphael’s Villa Madama, built not far from the Vatican, was a similar type of garden, using the steep hillside as an important feature of its design [29, 131, 132].
The view over the landscape was a sign of ownership. In the early seventeenth century, Sir Henry Wotton described a ‘royaltie of sight … [a] ranging, and imperious, and … usurping Sense, [that] can endure no narrow circumscription; but must be fed, both with extent and variety’.21 The roof terraces at the chateau of Chambord (1519–50) [68] offered a view into the wood and hunting park, and extended the royal prerogative out into the distance. The development of theories of perspective offered scientific theories for this control of nature (and the urban landscape) through rationalized vision.22
Palladio’s use of the temple front on his rural houses identified the residence of the villa with appropriate dignity. The elevated platform and columns framed the view of the agricultural lands that surrounded the house. In that way, the order of the architecture repeated, as at the Villa Emo, the regularity of the fields and created a dialogue between architecture and nature [136].
The history of the garden at Castello, just north-west of Florence, is typical of many rural estates of the sixteenth century. It was purchased in the late fifteenth century by the Medici, and inherited by Cosimo de’ Medici in the early sixteenth century. At the time, there were a range of agricultural features including vineyards, farmlands, olive orchards, and a residence referred to as a ‘palace’.23 Niccolò Tribolo designed the garden that extends beyond the house, though not initially on a direct axis with the building. Situated on a slight hill, backed up to Monte Morello and overlooking the basin of the River Arno, the house and garden could be seen from the distance and reinforced the position of the Medici as the rulers of this territory. In contrast to the earlier Medici villas and gardens, Tribolo included sculpture that referred to the local geography of the mountains and rivers, tamed and brought under the control of Medici rule [144].
In the grotto, carved into the hill of Monte Morello, barrel-vaulted niches frame basins over which are sculptures of animals. The walls and ceiling drip with stalactites carved from sandstone. Much of this decoration was supervised by Giorgio Vasari, working at Castello 1565–72, and the extraordinary decoration of inset marble, shells, and cut stones was his design. All known animals are here in the grotto, some recalling exotic gifts given to the Medici, others native species, and still others newly discovered in explorations to the New World. Here, they all live in the bounty of natural harmony, a mirror of the world in the arrangement of the garden.24
144 Niccolò Tribolo and Giorgio Vasari, Grotto of the Animals, Villa Medici, 1538, Castello, Italy
The grotto at Castello was covered with stalactites from the hill of Monte Morello nearby, recreating nature in this carefully controlled environment. Stones like this, rough and unfinished, were described as ‘congealed water’ and were evidence of the fluidity and fecundity of the natural world. Water was an important part of the design of the gardens at Castello for Duke Cosimo de’ Medici. The fountains and plantings allude to the mythological and ancient origins of the city of Florence nearby. The animals in the grotto, along with the riches of stones and minerals used in its decoration and the startling effect of water that could be sprayed from the floor, were evidence of the vastness of nature brought together and tamed in this garden.
