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PALLADIO AND THE VENETO | Convent of Santa Maria della Carità - Venice - (1560) | |||||||||||||||||
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Three years after the unfortunate debut at San Pietro di Castello and a few months after works began on the refectory of San Giorgio Maggiore, Palladio received another opportunity to work for a Venetian ecclesiastical patron. In March 1561 he was paid for a model of the Convent for the Lateran Canons. For these monks Palladio conceived a grandiose project, clearly inspired by his studies of the ancient Roman house, with an atrium of monumental composite columns and two courtyards separated by a refectory. From 1569 on, however, the ambitious works tailed off, after the execution of the cloister and the atrium, the latter destroyed by a fire in 1630. To understand the remaining splendid fragment, it is necessary to put one’s trust, albeit with some caution, in the illustrations of the Quattro Libri. The project for the convent of the Carità — which affected Giorgio Vasari so profoundly during his 1566 visit to Venice — finds its reference points in Palladio’s reflections on the baths and, above all, the antique Roman house studied and reconstructed in the 1556 edition of Vitruvius. According to Palladio’s conception, the antique house could only actually be reconstructed in terms of a large organised complex (like a monastic residence) or, in a lower key, of a private dwelling like the Palazzo Porto at Vicenza: something, in effect, quite different from the disorganic reality of ancient Roman houses. In any case, only three architectural episodes substantially survive today from this extraordinary project: the oval stair open at its middle, the church sacristy modelled like the “tablinum” of the Antique house and the great cloister wall with its three superimposed orders. The “tablinum” was, without doubt, one of the purist examples of Palladian classicism: the free-standing columns and the apsidal terminations were probably inspired by the remains of similar rooms situated around the frigidarium of the Baths of Caracalla and used by Palladio in his reconstruction of other bath complexes. Most particular is the chromatic contrast between the elements of the order itself: the frieze along the wall, of a red colour, sits upon a section of trabeation in white stone, supported in its turn by a column of red marble. The same accentuated bichromy can be found on the powerful cloister wall of superimposed orders, which owes much to the courtyard of the Palazzo Farnese in Rome. The wall fabric was realised in moulded fair-face brickwork protected by red paint, while the capitals, bases and keystones were executed in white stone. Such unheralded expressive freedom is one of the characteristics of Palladio’s maturity, when his assimilation of antique Roman architecture was such that he could afford himself the liberty of researching unusual effects, such as superimposing a Corinthian frieze with ox skulls and festoons (according to the model of the Temple of Vesta at Tivoli) over the Doric order of the courtyard’s ground storey. |
© CISA A.Palladio 2010