The Renaissance Villa in Italy

1. The Renaissance Villa in Italy The Renaissance Villa in Italy

2. The Age of Humanism Begins • The Renaissance was the rebirth of classical humanist values and intellectual pursuits in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. The changes brought on by the new market economies and world trade in many of the European cultural capitals created a wealthy merchant class who supported the work of great artisans and scientists. • In Italy, the Renaissance had its incubation in the province of Tuscany, a region of gently rolling and verdant landscapes, with a moderately dry climate and a rich agricultural heritage. It was populated by town centers that for centuries had been heavily fortified against foreign invasion and frequently diminished by widespread disease. As trade increased and wars subsided, cities such as Florence and Urbino in Tuscany and Venice and Vicenza in the Veneto grew in size and stature. The Renaissance Villa in Italy

3. Art, Science, and Perception • The art and science of recorded observation skills and perspective rendering techniques gave rise to the development of new spatial and visual perceptions, innovations and theories, and the advancement of new ideas for architectural form. Perspective drawings established the means of verifying design and planning speculation. This vision was coupled with the scholarship broadly available in the late 15th Century through the invention of the printing press and Gutenberg’s movable type. Whereas Medieval times were characterized by small, incremental advances, Renaissance scientists and artists made great leaps forward. 731 732 The Renaissance Villa in Italy

4. Perspective Space • The ability to visualize and articulate, on a planar surface, architectural space with mathematical accuracy brought a technical and cerebral focus to the art of representation that had earlier relied on intuitive responses to the perceived world. The Roman Church, prominent as both a religious and secular power, set about to encourage the precise illustration of three-dimensional space as a way to passionately tell the narrative of the life of Christ, seducing both the lower class and the rising merchant class to the ways of the Papal leadership. 733 734 The Renaissance Villa in Italy

5. Perspective Drawing and Classical Precedents • A renewed interest in the literary and visual arts of ancient Greece and Rome determined an architectural precedent for the forms and spaces created in this period. The art of perspective drawing led to the development of architectural relationships between a site, the building plan, the elevation and section and the mass and volume of the structure. 735 736 735 The Renaissance Villa in Italy

6. Villa Capra (La Rotunda), Vicenza • A growing freedom from fear of foreign invasions allowed the urban merchant class to pursue an interest in a landscape of agrarian productivity, Arcadian philosophy, scientific studies and associations with the cosmos, and the sensual pleasures of music, painting, sculpture, architecture, and the garden. Beyond the city walls and moats, the retreat from urban life followed the examples of Hadrian, Cicero and Pliny, and an ideal villa was pursued in earnest. In the Veneto region outside of Venice in the mid-16th Century, Andrea Palladio was the leading architect for a clientele that sought classical perfection in a meaningful relationship between architecture and landscape. 737 738 The Renaissance Villa in Italy

7. Villa Barbaro (Emo), Maser • The Villa Barbaro (now called Emo for the present family ownership) was designed by Andrea Palladio for Daniel Barbaro, a wealthy Ventian merchant, scientific scholar and benefactor of the fine arts. Unlike the Villa Rotunda, a central plan building that is located on top of a knoll in a position of isolated prominence, the Barbaro villa, even with its boldly enfronting facade, is integrated into its surroundings, resolutely a part of the landscape. It gracefully transitions between interior and exterior spaces with the colonnaded porch along its entire south face. 740 739 The Renaissance Villa in Italy

8. Painting and Landscape at Villa Barbaro • From the central room of the “piano nobile,” the second floor main living space, the bilateral symmetry of the interior is carried into the axis of the farm road that bisects the agricultural fields so closely linked to the villa. The fresco paintings on the interior walls, like those of ancient Roman villas and palaces, represent both the natural landscape and the ideal world of benevolent gods, plentiful nourishment and an accommodating environment. 742 741 The Renaissance Villa in Italy

9. One-point Perspective • One-point perspective painting was a popular graphic means of extending interior space through a masterful representation of the outdoors. Walls were painted to appear as windows with views outward, or as niches (shallow alcoves) that held sculptures of human figures, signifying an association with the beautiful and the powerful in mythology and art. This ability to “fool the eye” (the French call it “trompe l’oeil”) was often used in the Renaissance to accentuate distance and expand space, similar to how a long and narrow arcade seems to propel the user into the distance. 744 743 The Renaissance Villa in Italy

10. Villa Lante, Bagnaia (1566-1578) • The ideal Italian villa usually placed the residential structure in the center of the villa garden compound. The axis that was so often used to order the spaces of both buildings and gardens was often initiated in the building. At Villa Lante, the architect Vignola took a different tack, breaking the residence into two “casini” and emphasizing the garden in the meaningful narrative. In this plan, the connection between nature and human accomplishment is a clearly legible concept articulated through a series of fountains along the axial order. 745 746 The Renaissance Villa in Italy

11. Vignola’s Design • Vignola had established his fame as an architect of elegant country villas in a retreat he designed for the Farnese family in Caprarola. At the Villino Farnese, located in the hunting park of the grand Villa Farnese, he employed many references to the mysteries of the underworld and the spirits of nature that were later used at Villa Lante. Unlike the Villino Farnese which had only a single casino as the focus of the central axis, Villa Lante’s symmetrically balanced casini frame the central axis and give greater significance and attention to the garden. 747 748 The Renaissance Villa in Italy

12. Bagnaia and Villa Lante • Bagnaia, a medieval town about fifty miles north of Rome on the way to Siena, was the summering place for the Bishop of Viterbo, a member of the wealthy Gambara family. The relationship between the town of Bagnaia, the Villa Lante, and the wooded hillside is an important one. The Villa’s physical position between the town and the hunting grounds sets up a dialogue that continues in every detail of the garden design. The garden, totally walled within the wooded park, tumbles down the slope toward the village square and accumulates the scale and character of an artful built environment as it descends. 750 749 The Renaissance Villa in Italy

13. Water at Villa Lante • The water course that directs that descent is sculpted in a variety of vessels, culminating in a grand quadripartite fountain, centrally placed on a broad, flat and intricately decorated plain that recalls the cultural achievement of the Islamic paradise garden. The source of the garden’s water display is depicted as a darkly mysterious grotto, home to the underground nymphs and gnomes who spirit the natural realm. On the left, above, is an image of the mossy, dank pool, rustically sculpted in layers of shade-loving plants and rugged concrete forms. It is located between two small, highly refined and proportionally elegant pavilions (one of which is in the photograph on the right). 751 752 The Renaissance Villa in Italy

14. Scorpion Fountain • The Scorpion Fountain, or water chain, marks the axis from the upper terrace gardens, with the Fountain of Dolphins, to the Fountain of the Giants at the terrace that houses the Bishop’s Table (see next images). This scalloped chain fountain concept is borrowed directly from the entrance ramp fountain of the Villino Farnese, even as it introduces the river gods and giants. 753 754 The Renaissance Villa in Italy

15. Bishop’s Table • Located on and emphasizing the axis, the Bishop’s Table, a practical invention for outdoor banquets, efficiently uses the flowing waters to cool the wine in the trough on top of the table. At the guests’ feet, on both sides of the long table, unwanted scraps of food could be conveniently tossed into a narrow, water-filled canal that carried the debris to the lower end where the servants picked it up. Hidden in the stone pavement at each seat were small water jets that could be controlled by the host whose humor or rancor determined who would be his object of sport or ridicule. 755 756 The Renaissance Villa in Italy

16. Fountains on Axis • On the left, the Fountain of the Giants, also referred to as the Fountain of the River Gods, accepts the waters from the Scorpion Fountain above it and transforms the water flow through a series of tiered basins. From here the water passes through the Bishop’s Table and into the concentric circles of the Fountain of Lights. This graceful fountain, beautifully sculpted in stone, is formed of interlocking convex and concave forms that unify the upper and lower terraces. 757 758 The Renaissance Villa in Italy

17. The Parterre • The brilliantly colored and intricately “embroidered” patterns of the lowest terrace garden before the town of Bagnaia are created from a simple palette of evergreen boxwood hedges and broken terracotta gravel. The design relies on the contrast of complementary colors and the bold geometric pattern for its strong graphic effect. The aerial photograph demonstrates the large, open scale of the gridded garden layout and exaggerates the rational geometry of the “parterre” with the narrow medieval street configuration of the town. 760 759 The Renaissance Villa in Italy

18. Plan and Section • Drawing from Shepherd and Jellicoe, Italian Villas • Redrawn by Jack Sullivan The Renaissance Villa in Italy

19. Resources • Jellicoe, Geoffrey and Susan. The Landscape of Man: Shaping the Environment from Prehistory to the Present Day. The Viking Press: New York, 1975. • Newton, Norman T. Design on the Land: The Development of Landscape Architecture. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1971. • Moore, Charles W., William J. Mitchell, and William Turnbull, Jr. The Poetics of Gardens. The MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1988. The Renaissance Villa in Italy