Marriage of intelligence and intuition
Andrew Wordsworth on Palladio in Vicenza and Velazquez in Rome
0 ' n the Venice skyline one church is all too familiar. Turner painted it in the golden light of dawn, while Monet showed it to us in the mauves and violets of dusk, floating as weightlessly on the lagoon as a waterlily on the surface of a pond. Since then San Giorgio Maggiore has been relentlessly observed and photographed, and must be the single best-known work of Andrea Palladio (1518-90). The architect himself would probably have been surprised at this, as both Venice and churches were secondary in his output, whose main concern was the designing of palaces and villas in and around Vicenza, a beautiful town just an hour from Venice.
This summer Vicenza is celebrating Palladio with an exhibition that considers all the 66 buildings he designed in the Veneto region. A variety of techniques — in particular elaborately detailed models and large photographs with explanatory texts — offer a comprehensive survey of his production, as well as highlighting some of the finer points of his style. But what makes this exhibition special is its context: the palazzo in which it is held is itself by Palladio, while a short walk around the town allows us the chance to appreciate a further 16 examples of his work. By seeing so many buildings in the round we are better placed to understand the vital relationship between theory and practice, between the two-dimensional drawing and the three-dimensional building for which the drawing was intended.
At a theoretical level Palladio was something of a purist. He studied intently the orders and principles of Classical architecture, and, with a sense of measure and proportion similar to that of Bach in music, elaborated a long series of variations on those harmonies. His work was balanced without being predictable, and symmetrical without being repetitive. Squares are set in counterpoint to circles, convex forms curve into concave, and weight is carefully distributed between solid elements and empty space.
The result of this marriage of intelligence and intuition is an architecture which is sober but always graceful, and refined without being pompous. Palladio's buildings were never heavy or rhetorical in the way that Roman architecture could be, and this stylistic difference was far from incidental. In social terms, the Venetian Republic had evolved quite separately from the Papal States (independence was a point of honour for the Venetians who had, for example, refused to accept the Inquisition). For the most part Palladio's clients came from the local landowning aristocracy — men who had no interest in religious dogma, and instead wanted country villas which were functional (in terms of estate management) as well as beautiful.
Palladio rose to this challenge superbly, creating a whole new style of architecture. Like a bird, the nucleus of the building acquired wings: outbuildings — which could be used as granaries, barns or stables — integrated the villa effortlessly into the surrounding countryside. For the first time ever a truly harmonious relationship was established between architecture and nature. Needless to say, the English, for whom a garden has always been a dialogue between the man-made and the natural, took Palladio to their heart; he became their favourite architect, and had an unparalleled influence on English architecture for almost 200 years.
Here too social conditions played their part: in England, as in the Veneto, power and wealth lay as much in the hands of the landed gentry and the bourgeoisie as with the king or the church. And then — gardens apart — the English felt a natural
sympathy with Palladio's style: they liked its cool elegance, its lack of rhetoric, its practicality . • . whatever the reasons for his popularity, the fact remains that Palladio is the only architect to have a whole style named after him in the English language. That is a remarkable tribute to a man who not only was not English, but had started out in Vicenza as a stone-cutter with no formal education.
Palladio's fame was underpinned by his Four Books on Architecture in which he set out his thoughts on the subject along with specific examples of projects he had undertaken. The writing was concise and easily understandable, and the book sold widely (Inigo Jones, who first introduced Palladio into England in 1615, had his own annotated copy). The fact that such a book should be written is in itself revealing: as the Italian Renaissance drew to a close, there was a general desire to take stock of what had been created, as artists felt the need to understand this extraordinary phenomenon and to measure themselves against the models that Italy had produced.
By 1600 Italy had become a reference point for artists all over Europe, who went, whenever possible, to study the culture at first hand. Rubens lived in Rome from 1601-6, and Poussin was a resident for almost 40 years, dying there in 1665. Claude Lorrain, Poussin's complementary opposite, lived almost all his adult life in Rome; and it is a curious paradox that the two great masters of French 17th-century painting should have worked almost exclusively in Italy.
Velazquez visited Rome twice, from 1629-30, and from 1649-51. An exhibition now on in Rome considers the time he spent there, and offers a fascinating insight into the complex interplay of cultures that was evolving then. Velazquez learnt from the Italians, but he was also friends with Rubens and made friends with Poussin while in Rome; influences were many and various, and painters began to borrow widely as they developed their own personal styles.
Poussin and Claude accepted wholeheartedly the Classical vocabulary of gods and goddesses, nymphs and shepherds, temples and togas. Not so Velazquez, who was never quite convinced that that world could remain a source of inspiration for an artist working in the age of Galileo. The Spaniard's scepticism is particularly clear in his 1642 portrait of Mars who, with his ornate helmet and totally unclassical handlebar moustache, looks more like a captain of dragoons than the god of war.
Velazquez was a man of his time, and his finest Italian painting — the portrait of Pope Innocent X — is the least literary and most direct. Here the only reference is to Titian's great portrait of Pope Paul III; for the rest the masterpiece is born out of the confrontation of two men meeting on equal terms. As a study of authority Velazquez's painting has a Shakespearean quality — of piercing insight tempered by understanding — which goes beyond the aesthetics of the Renaissance. And just as Shakespeare's kings continue to speak to us today of the mechanisms of power and politics, so Francis Bacon had no difficulty in using Velazquez's Pope as the model for a series of powerful and provocative variations painted in the 1950s.
Velazquez was the first truly European painter. His early work was clearly influenced by Caravaggio, but he also felt close to Rubens. His portraiture reveals his admiration for Titian, while its unflinching intensity, at the same time sober and rich, reminds us of Rembrandt. His painting 'A Woman Sewing', of about 1640, anticipates Vermeer's `Lacemaker' by 30 years; here, for the first time, a great painter's vision is formed not by a particular school but by a fusion of different cultures, techniques and styles. Similarly 17th-century Rome was less the centre for a particular school of painting than the context in which a wide variety of artists, speaking different languages and brought up in different cultures, could meet and share ideas without losing their personal styles or vision. Rome in 1630 prefigured Paris in 1910, or New York in 1950. The modern condition of art had begun.
Andrea Palladio, at Palazzo Barbaran da Porto, Vicenza, till 16 September; Velazquez in Rome, at Palazzo Ruspoli, Rome, till 30 June.
Previous page
