Fifteen Eighty Four

On Wednesday, the 29^th of October 1567, the Venetian patrician Francesco Pisani lay mortally ill in his country house in Montagnana, 50 miles southwest of Venice. He summoned his long-time notary, Giovanni Maria Corradin, to draft a codicil to his final will. Corradin called six witnesses to Pisani’s bedside: a cast of characters including his estate manager, a manservant, the doctor, and even a local baker. One name stands out: “messer Andrea Palladio, son of Pietro, Vicentine architect.” Fifteen years earlier, Andrea Palladio (1508-80), arguably the most influential architect of the Renaissance, had designed the building in which the men were gathered. My book argues that this building can help us to better understand Palladio’s approach to villa design as well as the social life of the villa in the sixteenth century.

Modern scholarship inherited a dual typology set forth in the prescriptive texts of Vitruvius, Alberti, and even Palladio himself that placed the country house and the city house in distinct categories. The Renaissance palace or town house, moreover, is usually interpreted as the primary residence and family seat, the center of family representation, while the villa has been understood as secondary and peripheral – the “second home,” as we might call it today. The central case study of my book, Palladio’s Villa Pisani at Montagnana, challenges this view. I used dozens of documents, alongside the evidence of the building itself and its site, to understand Villa Pisani as a lived space and what it meant to its original occupants. Here I will show how Francesco Pisani’s 1567 codicil can help us to trace a few key strands of my book’s argument.

Francesco explained in this document that he had written his final will and testament by hand and had stashed it in a walnut chest in his study in Venice. We know from the will that when in Venice he was living at a swanky address on the Riva degli Schiavoni, steps away from the Palazzo Ducale. He rented part of the Gothic palace known as Ca’ Dandolo (now the Hotel Danieli). But the codicil states that Pisani lay on his deathbed in Montagnana, a subject town of the Venetian mainland empire. The two documents thus reveal to us the two main geographical poles of Pisani’s life: Venice, his native city, and Montagnana, the location of his family’s large agricultural estate and his Palladian villa. Unlike many noblemen of his day, Pisani did not possess a stable domicile – an ancestral palace or casa da statio – in the city. Ca’ Dandolo was the third palace he had rented since 1552, though he would build a second mainland house, what I call a “stop-over” villa, in the town of Monselice to facilitate his regular travels. Although his way of life was mobile, his Palladian villa in Montagnana came to serve as his primary residence and family seat.

The notary Corradin specified that the act was drawn up “outside Montagnana in the Abbastita in the palace where the Magnificent testator resides [pallatio residentiae], in the upper chamber towards Montagnana.” The term palace suggests Villa Pisani’s size and splendor compared to the modest neighboring houses in Montagnana’s extramural district known as the Bastia Piccola, or Abbastita. Nor does it look like most of Palladio’s other villas, which usually possess only one main living story. As we learn from the reference to the “upper chamber,” Villa Pisani rises two floors, like a city palace. Its two principal facades are composed around Palladio’s signature device: a triangular pediment (adorned with the Pisani coat of arms) that crowns a row of columns, as in an ancient temple front. Here, however, he doubles the columnar order, employing the Doric on the ground floor and the Ionic above. On the street facade, he applies this temple motif to the wall, giving the facade a closed character more typical of city houses, while on the north side, the columns screen two loggias, which open the house to its environment in the manner of a villa house. This hybridity– it’s both a villa and a palace – shows us the lack of fixed typological boundaries in Palladio’s design thinking and his sensitivity to site and programmatic needs.

The hybrid architecture responded to the dual nature of the extraurban setting. The “upper chamber towards Montagnana” overlooked a busy street corner and the medieval Porta Padova, Montagnana’s eastern town gate. The house stands in dialogue with this venerable structure and adjoining tower of Castel San Zeno, then the headquarters of Venetian magistrates who oversaw hemp production in the region. (Hemp was an essential raw material for Venice’s shipbuilding industry.) To the north of the house lay the family’s farm court, where Pisani’s tenants and sharecroppers came to deposit their annual intakes in the barn and where the grain was later threshed. Already a major landowner and landlord in the region, Pisani also saw himself as a benefactor and patron of the sometimes-reluctant local community.

As he lay in bed, Francesco perhaps could have glimpsed another of his major acts of patronage hanging in the adjoining sala, or central hall. Veronese had recently installed his magnificent The Family of Darius before Alexander (London, National Gallery) on the east wall. A canvas history painting, of the kind Venetians hung in the portego, the main reception hall, of their city houses, was an unusual choice to decorate a country house. Veronese himself had worked in the more common medium of fresco in other Veneto villas (most famously at Palladio’s Villa Barbaro, Maser). The choice of medium and subject also spoke to Villa Pisani’s status as the family seat.

Villa Pisani played a multi-faceted role as the center of the agricultural estate, a place of rural business as well as hospitality, and the locus of familial representation. It was a villa and a palazzo, a hybrid that complicates simple typological categories. Another artist in Pisani’s circle, the poet-painter Giovanni Battista Maganza, penned a eulogistic poem upon his patron’s passing, just days after the codicil was signed. It evoked the house as a grief-stricken mourner:

Since you, Pisani, are gone, it seems to me

That tears bow the stones of your palace

At Montagnana, which was a paradise

Of pleasure, virtue, and repose.

My book chronicles the life, afterlife, and lived spaces of Villa Pisani at Montagnana, from its farmyard to its Doric entrance hall, and from Palladio’s unrealized original design to how it was reimagined in colonial America. The palace may well have been a place of pleasure, but its story is hardly one of repose.