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PALLADIO AND THE VENETO | Villa Emo - Fanzolo di Vedelago - (1558) | ||||||||||||||||
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The Palladian villa as the product of a new typology — where the practical necessities of agricultural life were translated into unheralded forms and a new language inspired by ancient architecture — without doubt finds its most definitive incarnation in the Villa Emo. At Villa Emo the buildings which functioned for the management of the estate, casually arranged around the threshing-floor of the Quattrocento villa, achieved an unforeseen architectural synthesis which united in a linear continuity the manorial house, barchesse and dove-cotes. The dating of the villa is controversial, but must be fixed at 1558, after the Villa Barbaro and Villa Badoer, with which it shares its general layout. Palladio, was by now accepted by the great aristocratic Venetian families, and constructed the villa for Leonardo Emo, whose family had possessed properties at Fanzolo since the mid-Quattrocento. The ancient Via Postumia crossed the area, and the network of fields still followed the grid of Roman centuriation. The villa’s orientation follows this ancient pattern as one can easily see from the building’s entrances, aligned on a very extended sightline. The composition of the complex is hierarchical, dominated by the prominent house of the patron, elevated on a basement and linked to the ground by a long stone ramp; on its flanks two rectilinear and symmetrical wings of barchesse conclude in two dove-cote towers. The design’s purism is as surprising as it is calibrated: it suffices to observe that the external columns of the loggia are absorbed by the wall for 1/4 of their diameters, thus graduating the passage from hollows in shadow to brilliantly lit walls. The order Palladio chose was Doric, the simplest, and even the windows have no cornices. In contrast to the stereometric logic of the exterior are extraordinary internal decorations, the work of Battista Zelotti who had already worked in Palladio’s Villa Godi and Villa Malcontenta. |
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