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PALLADIO AND THE VENETO | Villa Serego - Santa Sofia di Pedemonte - (1565) | |||||||||||||||||
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The Villa Sarego at Santa Sofia, isolated in the extreme west of the “Palladio country” of the Veneto, and one of the last buildings designed by Palladio, represents an exceptional architectural event in many respects. In contrast to the Palladian villa-type, generally a strongly hierarchical organism dominated by the “mass” of the manorial house, here Palladio preferred to articulate the space around the great “void” of the central courtyard, probably taking his own reconstructions of the antique Roman villa as the model. Instead of brick and render, the great Ionic columns were realised with blocks of calcareous stone, just roughed out and assembled one over the other to create irregular piles: the type of material used (which comes from the quarries the Sarego owned not far away) and the gigantic dimensions of the columns contribute to generating a sensation of power which was never attained in any other executed villa. The patron was the Veronese Marcantonio Sarego, who entered into possession of the properties at Santa Sofia in 1552, but only after 1565 decided to radically renovate the building complex he had inherited from his father. Information concerning the building history of the complex is unfortunately scarce and fragmentary. It was only realised in small part, compared to the great expanse drawn by Palladio in the Quattro Libri: less than half the rectangular courtyard, in fact only the northern section. In 1740 Francesco Muttoni could still see traces of the courtyard’s outline delineated by the bases once set up to receive the columns which should have completed it. One may therefore hypothesise that works were definitively interrupted on the death of Marcantonio in the 1580s, even if the will to complete at least the part of the complex reserved for the noble apartments seems demonstrable. By the mid-nineteenth century the villa had suffered notable alterations at the hands of the architect Luigi Trezza: new habitable spaces were added along the building’s western range, grafted onto the original Cinquecento section and partially altering it, while the courtyard arms which had been left as amputated elevations, were given their definitive form by continuing the trabeation and balustrade around their ends. |
© CISA A.Palladio 2010