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PALLADIO AND THE VENETO | Villa Cornaro - Piombino Dese - (1552) | ||||||||||||||||
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Together with the virtually contemporaneous Villa Pisani at Montagnana, the villa realised at Piombino Dese for another powerful Venetian patrician, Giorgio Cornaro, marks a definitive promotion in the prestige and spending potential of Palladio’s patrons who until then had been essentially Vicentine. Building works were already in full swing by March 1553, and by April of the following year the building — even if incomplete — was habitable, such that Palladio is documented as having passed “an evening at dinner” there with the patron. In June of the same year Cornaro, with his newly-wed bride Elena, took formal possession of the villa, or rather the building site. For, by this date only the central block had actually been completed. Neither the side wings nor the loggia’s upper storey had been built, and the latter was undertaken in two successive campaigns of 1569 and 1588. The second was conducted by Vincenzo Scamozzi who was probably also responsible for involving Camillo Mariani in the execution of the statues in the salone. The Villa Pisani and the Villa Cornaro are linked by much more than a simple chronological coincidence and the high status of the patron. Before all else the Villa Cornaro possesses a structure and decoration very similar to a palace, and it is more a country residence than a villa: it is isolated from the agricultural estate and its dependencies, while its pre-eminent position on the public street underlines its ambivalent character. Furthermore, the fireplaces present in all the rooms prove that its habitation was not limited to the summer, and it is no coincidence that the structure was virtually replicated a few years later in the “suburban” palace of Floriano Antonini at Udine. As with the Villa Pisani, the plan of the Villa Cornaro is also organised around a great space with four free-standing columns, here moreover shifted more to the centre of the house and therefore more properly a salone. Access to this room is mediated by a loggia or a narrow vestibule. The two levels of the villa are connected by twinned elegant staircases, which completely separate the ground floor (for the reception of guests and clients) from the two upper apartments (reserved for the Cornaro couple). The extraordinary, projecting, two-storey pronaos reflects Palladio’s design for the loggia at the Palazzo Chiericati in Vicenza, completed in the same years, with the side opening again blocked by a wall which confers rigidity on the structure just as in the Porticus of Octavia in Rome. It should be also be borne in mind that the theme of a two-storey façade loggia is frequent also in the Gothic architecture of the Lagoon, as are free-standing columns bearing the floors of the saloni in the great Scuole of Venice: one therefore witnesses a sort of “translation into Latin” of traditional Venetian themes. |
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