for a double reading on palladio's villas

What possible link could exist between A Palladio’s architecture, almost a symbol of classicism and clarity, and the veiled realms of the mist, where understanding becomes difficult and only suggested, transforming the accessible in  inaccessible, the clarity in chiaroscuro, the frontality in fragmentation ?
For we usually talk about Palladian architecture as an exaltation of geometry and formal rigour, the beauty, in the Palladian aesthetics, being understood as a mathematical category. Truly, for Palladio, as for Alberti and all the followers of M. Ficino’s neoplatonic philosophy, the number, the golden proportion and mathematics acquire spirituality and define what their antique master Vitruviu called "symmetria".
 

Under Italy’s burning sun, the villas spread on the Veneto’s hills appear shining and amazingly clear. Perceived as autonomous volumes they reveal themselves as visual centres, gathering around them what we could call the landscape vectors, that ensemble of forces devolving from the site composition. We are impressed by the static symmetry of the buildings, by the force of their structure centres, around which the buildings gather their own existence.
We can easily deduce the plane structure that originated the presented volumes. We can guess a certain gradation in the succession of interior spaces. Thus, the climax in a display of spatial experience is also clearly read in the external structure of  the building.

 There is however another side of the Palladian architecture, as obvious as the first one: that particular "grace" present everywhere in his buildings – the alignment of a portico, the roundness of a vault, the opening of a landscape, the surprise of a fountain or of a statue. We find again a Palladio intimately and secretly bonded by beauty and laws of the nature, trying to catch its charm and to valorise all the natural details of the site. Thus "architecture, like all the fine arts, being a copy of the nature  does not allow anything that could turn it away from the nature" (A. Palladio, "The four books of architecture")

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We recognise in Palladian villas two opposite aspects, still equivalent in force and presence: the frontality and the fragmentation as well, the formal unity resulting from axiality and a tridimentional reading of the structural elements, rigour and picturesque. There are two tendencies of opposite and equal forces, requesting both the conceptual and the sensible side. Vincent Scully, talking about Rotonda, has revealed this particular side of Palladio’s architecture:" its language offers the illusion of simplicity and rigour. Cubes, cylinders, triangular gables, columns, fillings and holes transmit a clear, almost human message. Still, the villa is wrapped in an intelligent ambiguity, being as well both compact and open, defenceless but invulnerable." ("Les villas de Palladio" Ed. Hazan, 1992)

For Italy and mostly Veneto means not only the sun, but also an endless succession of clarity and chiaroscuro, of sun and mist. The mist accompanying the cold and thin rain of the fall landscape, the smoke that spreads along with the scent of the burned stubblefield, totally transform the clear dialogue  between reality and appearance, between what it is and what it seems to be.Giulio Carlo Argan, referring to the Palladian aesthetic ideal, considers that specific for Palladio is "to understand, by subordinating it the function in representation and the reality in appearance" (Giulio Carlo Argan, Studi e note, Bulzoni, Roma, 1975)

 
Yet, the appearance is not only the brightness of adamantine clarity of the simple volumes but that said fragmentarity we spoke about.

Mist setting in means the closing of the perspective, of "landscapes looming at the horizon". (A.Palladio op. cit.) The images is that of end of the world beyond which nothing exists, the fog sets a boundary between the visible and invisible. Objects are hidden,  they inaccessible to the view and the horizon disappears. The landscape vectors which ordinated   around the building, reduce their existence till cancelling, they melt away , the only accessible reality remains just appearance, the volume is lost, only images are seen as paints, fragments cut in the fog. The view is no longer lost in the width of the horizons, but focuses only upon the object which becomes the only reality and reference point.

Looking outside from the inside, the world loses its consistency and the building remains suspended at the edge of the world, gathering tighter its existence around its own centre. The haze of the mist opens to the mind endless possibilities for imagination, the rigour changes into sensible and picturesque as well as in a certain ambiguity and deepening of the mystery, specific for the Mannerism.
 
 

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There is no doubt that Palladio understood the richness of this ambivalence (clarity/axiality, frontality/ambiguity, the isolation of sculptured objects, the effect of fragmentation), for an important source of inspiration for his works has been the landscape of the venetian lagoon, often covered by fog and smoke.

His villas belong to Italy and to the North as well, "wet landscape revealing classic forms with rounded corners, spectral statues wrapped in mist, irresolute presences, almost immaterial, raising their escutcheons in the steamy air. Then, suddenly, the sun warms them up, the vapours vanish and for a few hours a golden light absorbs the moulding  humidity until, a thin and piercing rain soften them once again. Everything seems drowned : the brickwork is imbued with the water that comes from the swampy soil, the marvellous high halls seem frozen, showing the same aristocratic contempt of comfort as the paper house of the samurai" (V.Scully, Les villas de Palladio).
 

Both proposed types of reading of the Palladian villas, only apparently in contradiction, do not exclude, but they continue , mutually deepening their charge of meanings.We met a Palladio of formal clarity, in which the force of frontality gathers around all the landscape vectors, where the hierarchy  of the structure is obvious.  But the apparent simplicity hides an ambiguity, a fragmentation and a picturesque revealing themselves especially through this veil of the view which is the mist.

Beyond Palladio, a clean, conceptual and rigorous Palladio is the vicentin architect belonging to realms wrapped in mist with statues and columns of a heartbreaking beauty, breaking out with the Veneto’s sun in a scatter of brightness, sensitive , picturesque, almost pastoral, revealing us the tragic and singular beauty of the Venetian lagoon.

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translated by maria constantinescu