 Good morning ladies and gentlemen Today we're going to move north and look at Venice and Venice is an interesting city for a number of reasons one It is the capital of a part of Italy called Veneto where a distinguished architect emerged named Andrea Palladio When we'll talk about at length in a moment, but we're going to begin by talking about Venice because Venice in itself is a pretty interesting town Venice is up here up here tucked in really to the area at the top of the Adriatic and Historically is it has had no connections with Rome unlike so many of these other towns that we've looked at like Florence and Milan and Rome for that matter that were Roman settlements and have this kind of detritus of Roman architecture and this history of of Roman planning and Roman civilization Venice Venice has none of that Venice is a marshy fishing village historically surrounding it on Various edges we have the town of Ravenna down here Which was a great Byzantine capital and to the north we had the town of Aquilea another Byzantine capital But Venice was nothing Venice was absolutely historically nothing until the great moment when they Launched the crusade to bring back the body of Saint Mark and to establish a prominent church Around the relic of Saint Mark's body and therefore the town grew to prominence But as you can see from this map, Venice is really in a awkward geographical situation. It is this marshy land It's an island. It's not collected connected to the mainland and really what you see here is artificial ground There is a tiny little piece of high ground right over here and a bridge was connected between these points of high ground Riva alta means high ground or high banks and the realto bridge jumps between those two little banks and historically Let me say until that until the 18th century that was the only bridge in Venice and the general belief was well Why would you want to go to the other side of the Grand Canal? What what purpose could there be if you need to buy potatoes you can get them on our side of the Grand Canal if you need to buy Fabric you can buy it on our side of the Grand Canal So the city was historically divided into really tight neighborhoods and the charm of Venice is that it still is I don't know if any of you guys have ever gone to Venice as tourists And if you have you either are gonna love it or hate it and you're gonna hate it if you're on the road that says to Piazza San Marco or to train station or to realto But if you get off that road the charm of Venice is that it is such a tangled mess That nobody ventures out there and then you find these wonderful little neighborhoods with Little squares with with cisterns and little cafes and it's and it's great is all that I can say I love Venice but it is easy to get lost in Venice because it is this tangle and Notice it's it's also not gridded. It can't be gridded. It's just a mess The fabric of Venice comes from water collecting rather than a kind of gridded strategy Because it's out in the middle of salt water They would have to collect rain water if you look at this plan You see all of these little squares all these little piazzas and each piazza would have an underground cistern So that would rain water would collect and that became the water source the charming Sponginess of the city fabric is really a practical convenience and it's amusing because for many years Dogs were illegal in Venice because if you were gonna collect your rain water from the pavement You didn't want dogs there for obvious reasons because of what dogs do dogs are awful But here's a good tip if you get lost in Venice Do what I do go like this and say oh well the train stations here St. Mark's is here the Santa Maria de la Salute is here and then you can figure out where you are and you can navigate this is Adam from the Sistine Chapel showing us how to make a map out of our hands of Venice Another thing about Venice is it's particularly geography gave way to a particular style of painting and style of architecture It's geography and its history. Let's say this is an example. This is Giovanni Bellini's pietà Fabulous painting we see here a Painting that's not so different in its compositional strategy from the Vatican pietà by Michelangelo this triangular woman Holding her her dead child But here Bellini is not using the Michelangelo's Diminution of the size of the Christ. It's a a large adult male But some things we can see that are quite different in Venetian painting with respect to the paintings We've seen before it's just the idea of where this is taking place This is taking place in an incredibly detailed incredibly specific landscape specific in terms of its geography specific in terms of the variability of the architecture Specific in terms of how space and plant life are rendered in this landscape And this is this is what you see in Venetian painting you see this attention to natural detail and in fact Those of you in the room who have a computer and I'm thinking that means everybody in the room probably know that you can format things Portrait or landscape and Venetian paintings for the most most part are formatted Landscape so that they get this broad horizontal sweep of the earth I think it's instructive to look at the same subject matter Handled at roughly the same time by a Florentine painter Botticelli and Bellini and you can see what I mean about this this idea about the horizontal the idea about the landscape and The idea about specificity in the observation of nature Landscape in Florentine painting for the law for the for a large part tends to be generalized This lump represents a rock this thing represents a tree But here you could get botanists in and they would name every plant There's another difference going on here too and that has to do with the medium that they're using The artist Botticelli is using something called egg tempura, which is really what they used in the Middle Ages It's a it's an opaque medium You grind up your pigment and you have to find something sticky so that it will stick to the surface of the panel Or the canvas or whatever and egg egg yolk is the sticky thing If you don't wash your dishes frequently you will notice that egg yolk is incredibly sticky and painters notice that so this is really just Sitting on top of the panel. There is that kind of opacity the colors are incredibly brilliant The colors are incredibly deep because they're so they're close so close to the surface But the surface itself is a flat thing. There's no pictorial Monocity within the surface and in the case of the Bellini there's a completely different technique going on and that is oil paint And you think oil paint. I know all about oil paint, but you don't you don't know anything Oil oil oil painting came to Venice through this Sicilian guy called Antonello da Messina Who learned from northern artists the northern artists up in yeah Flemish country were already doing oil painting and and the technique was to do These monochromatic paintings like these these are incomplete oil paintings and then to glaze them with transparent washes So to get something like Bellini's pietà here There would be a kind of reddish brown and white monochromatic underpainting with maybe 30 layers of glaze and the effect of that is You get this incredibly deep incredibly room in a surface many people say that the idea about light or this love of light in Venetian Painting comes from the fact that in Venice you're getting two kinds of light You're getting light coming down from the sky, but you're also getting light bounced up off the water So there is a strange light that this this technique of painting captures very effectively If you go to a museum and you have a chance to get a look at a Venetian painting go close enough To get to see how this surface works It's absolutely worth you know getting a few inches away and getting tasered by the guard because you will have had a great Aesthetic experience up until that moment of horror Here's just another Bellini painting and I'm just showing this to you to give you another example of how Landscape becomes a participant in the idea of the Composition and not just as a neutral background where action takes place But really as an equivalent player in the drama This is st. Francis and the wilderness and the wilderness is Full of life here's his mule who seems to be as engaged in this Apparition of the of the burning cross as st. Francis himself and that's kind of a nice Nod to st. Francis's acknowledgement that animals have have stature This is widely considered to be one of the oddest paintings in the world. This is the Tempest la Tempesta by Giorg Giorna Joe Johnny is slightly younger than Bellini. What's the subject here? You might ask and nobody knows This is really one of the big enigmas It seems like it almost might be one of the first examples of a pure landscape painting where the subject matter goes away Over here we can say well, it's all about st. Francis or we could say It's all about the pita and and those are acceptable subjects for a painting. Those are religious themes You would have patrons that would pay for that But what's the subject of this? You know you have this Hunkering down naked lady kind of not posed very elegantly crouched like an animal suckling her child And then you have a soldier over here You know, what is the relationship between these people usually when you see a mother and child? It is the virgin and child this cannot be the virgin the virgin is chaste the virgin is pure the virgin sits in a lady-like fashion This is a naked hunkering almost animal woman in this wild Undomesticated landscape so something's happening and maybe it's some kind of confrontation Between what it is to be in a natural state and what it is to be in a cultured state We have here Architecture and here we have just nature and the architecture that we have is also kind of odd It's it's broken architecture. We see two little columns hard to know what they are. They could represent the the Overturning of the pagan civilization you often see broken columns meaning that or it simply could be a landscape It's really hard to know even the attitude towards the sky and weather becomes really specific in Jo Jo Ne This is a storm. This is a tempest. He's not simply painting the sky as a background against which we see his protagonist The sky is an active participant in whatever this enigmatic drama might be Fabulous and again, it's worth getting close to these paintings because if you thought the Bellini surfaces were interesting But Jo Jo Ne surfaces are even thinner It's it's like there's barely any paint on the canvas his washes are so transparent you can see the grains of the linen coming through and there's such a Disruption between the scale of reading the grain of the linen and this kind of incredibly deep space that you marvel Here's one more Jo Jo Ne and I think this Jo Jo Ne explains to us a little something about them as in a way That's instructive. This is a painting called the three philosophers. It's sometimes also called the three ages of man It's in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna Who are these three philosophers you might be inclined to ask and I think their costumes tell us something about who they are This guy wearing his toga or his his robes seems to represent classical philosophy And he's an old old man because classical philosophy took place in antiquity And so the fact that the aged man whose whose heyday has come and gone Represents the classics is pretty interesting Then over here we have this middle-aged man wearing a turban who could represent Islamic philosophy that the knowledge of the Middle East Which was much sought by the Florentines But readily available to the Venetians because the Venetians had such strong ties with the east that they never stopped trading with Eastern countries they never stopped having a strong population of people from from Turkey and and the entire Middle East as just part of the people that lived in their country and Islamic philosophy would be things like mathematics and science and things that that went to a high level of Sophistication during the very period that that Europe went into its thousand years of darkness and the young man we have over here could represent Neoplatonism or the Renaissance spirit the contemporary moment looking out toward the future It's as if these two have contracted into the thoughts that they've already thought This young man Representing the present not looking to books, but looking to nature is beginning to develop a new sensibility appropriate to the new age Fabulous just want to show you what kind of stuff was being done in Venice during the quattro Cento when Florence was launching its Renaissance and This is probably the most celebrated example of quattro Cento architecture the anonymous Quattro, which means Golden house boy Is it good is all that I can say and things that things that make it so good are the extremely refined level of craft in all the carving and all and all of the Detail on it But also the way in which this ornament and this kind of pattern is arranged because Venice is so mushy because Venice has no Really solid ground you build foundations by driving piles wooden timbers Perpendicular into the ground and so the structure of the bearing walls is perpendicular to the canal and the benefit of having bearing walls perpendicular to the canal is that the front facade of the building has no structural responsibility It can just be hung there so it's incredibly Dematerialized the bottom part is open to the canal so people can arrive by Gondola and the top part is equally open with these porches and lodges and a thing that is sort of amazing about the way The facade works is that it constantly Reorganizes itself at one moment you might think well This is the center and then suddenly you find pairings over here Well, this is the center and then you find pairings over here So that the facade doesn't stabilize itself in a kind of a b a System the way a Roman or a Florentine facade would but it dances and sparkles and renegotiate its Organization all over the place This of course is St. Mark's that we looked at before when we talked about Byzantine architecture Gentile Bellini's painting of the procession of the true cross and I just want to show you this because I think it's interesting to see How this takes the spatial nature of the quenconx of the of st. Mark's domes and Flattens it out and by looking at the way. He's painted this you can see how these domes and the image of the domes These rounded arches on the front Seem to make the front facade of st. Mark's almost looked like an orthographic projection of the space of st. Mark's and by orthographic Projection I simply mean all the information is projected onto one plane. It's all flattened under one plane you find in Quattrocento Venetian architecture people taking these themes that are already established in the older works like st. Mark's and Elaborating them even further. This is the Scuola grande di San Marco the school of st. Mark's and a school is something like a Lodge or a Rotary Club or fraternity whatever you might want to call it It's a service organization of gentlemen of Venice and there are a number of these different lodges And so this one is presently the hospital in Venice So if you fall ill in Venice look for a beautiful building with pigeons flying through it and they'll take care of you there It's a kind of funny-looking thing It's funny-looking in the same way that the Cadoro was funny-looking and by that I mean it Insists upon a center only to subvert that center for example here We have this tripartite organization that organizes itself around the central portal that seems fine But we then have a kind of doubling of that gesture right over here Double double double fine. This is the Scuola grande di San Marco These are people faithful to the church of st. Mark That is the church that sponsors this charitable organization And so the flattening of the domes here the flattening of these half circles in some way reprises the basic organization of San Marco The point that I want to make is that it seems to be referring to the church that it represents San Marco by having this Hornets of rounded arches that seem to be presenting like the facade of st. Mark's itself the deep Perspectival space of st. Mark's and this idea of orthographic projection or three-dimensional information being collapsed onto a two-dimensional surface Is also happening in other ways? I'm going to show you a detail of this lower area down here Which you probably can't see very well and this is what it looks like it looks like fake perspective that there has been this bar relief panelized representation of deep Perspectival space flattened on the building which already looks like an ortho Orthographic projection of a domed quinconk space. So clever you want to say This is another Venetian church quattrocento Venetian church by another one of the great Venetians And I think this is really beautiful also Mauro Bellucci and All the Venetians have their names spelled in two different ways one is the Venetian spelled in one is the Italian spelling So you'll never keep them straight But what I think is so nice about this is it more or less picks up this Dematerialized language that we saw in the cadoro and that you get by having your foundations done in this very specific directional way and It uses it to sort out the problem of the Basilica facade like how do you create a facade that allows? You to represent light coming in at the upper story clearer story But still creates a facade for the whole building and in many ways Koduchi here is doing something that we'll see Palladio doing in stronger Classical terms when we look at the Palladio churches in it in a moment and that is he's superimposing two figures little guy Which is round arched temple and big guy which is round arched temple He's not doing it in a very classical way his method of articulation tends for the most part to be stacking There's not so much that's a large figure organizing the whole thing But it's pretty interesting some details of Koduchi's language a bit classical because he knows the Renaissance is going on And one reason he knows that the Renaissance is going on is that Venice is the publishing capital Every treatise that got published on architecture during the Renaissance got published in Venice He also knows the Renaissance is going on because at roughly this period the Medici were driven out of Florence because they were always in Trouble they were always gouging people for money They were always usurping more power than they should have so Cosimo the Medici and his entire court of Florentines came and set up shop in in Venice for a few years and they built a library at the monastic community of San Giorgio maggiore and The minute cosy in beautiful Renaissance style and the minute Cosimo left they tore it down They just hated having this Florentine thing in the city and this Florentine thing in any ways is this Roman thing this thing That seemed out of place This is my favorite Venetian church Santa Maria dei Miracoli Pietro Lombardo is my favorite Venetian architect and this is really a spectacular building this one Santa Maria dei Miracoli, this was a votive church built to celebrate the end of a plague They basically said oh virgin, please intercede and the plague and we will build you a church St. Mary of the Miracles the plague ended and they built a church You see it on the site and it looks almost like a boat floating along the canal Which is an appropriate image for a building in Venice this great city of Shipbuilding this great arsenal city this great port from which the Crusades Launched many a voyage and here it is more or less in the district of Canareggio running through here at the very edge of Canareggio as it approaches the Rialto Bridge It's the most beautiful church in Venice. I will fight anyone who argues otherwise Even in plan it almost looks ship-like. It's this long thing perched between two different canals and the vault The barrel vault was constructed by the carpenters of the arsenal Right the same men who built the hulls of the many ships sailed in the Mediterranean Sea If you look at this thing, it's an ambiguous reading that you get In one sense you see clear geometry Kind of a square kind of half a circle clearly a circle classical orders, but the dominance of pattern the incrustation of surface texture and ornament undermines any sense of classical gravitas and he undermines any sense of gravity for that matter and Instead you see something that is more akin to the Byzantine architecture of Rowena or Aquilea Than anything that you might see in Rome. Lombardo is playing with material Polychromatic marble encrusted together to create this incredibly rich surface that is somewhat decked out in classical articulation But somewhat giving you the sense of that mosaic encrusted surface that we saw in Byzantine architecture, which is quite nearby in the town of Rowena These kinds of devices are of interest I think what we see here in these circles are columns Frequently spoils Treasures taken away from a vanquished city that have been sliced to make little round medallions So this becomes a way of showing off the prominence of Venice the treasures that Venice has conquered and also in adding another color and another texture to this wonderful mosaic pattern created at a varied marbles Fabulous, you have to say here's a good detail of a little green chipolina marble and a red marble and so forth I think an interesting thing about the facade and the whole Way that the building sits in the city is its double reading We see here from plan that it has two faces one face That's all about facade and creating some kind of order and another facade that Contracts to relate to the apps the squared off apps in the back as it relates to the squared off apps spaces contract and you get this funny sort of Sliding over of one device to another here's what I mean about the sliding over This window centers on the interior architectural space But slides inward and displaces itself with respect to the exterior One reading is that it's kind of squintide cross-eyed funny looking But another reading is that it is Perspectival in the same way that the trompe l'orges of the school grande di San Marco were perspectival He's also playing with this collapse of perspective Perspectival space onto the facade and into the interior here We see how this funny little building sits on the site canals whooshing by on both sides And this is the squintide facade that we just admired a moment ago You go into the church here is probably the best example of conchini toss that that Vitruvian desire that interior respect the ambitions of the exterior It's like a lantern when you go inside because there's this thin-cut marble that lets light come in and it's it's you You see the entire expression of the volume of this church, and it's really beautiful also notice these rounded vaults Aren't simply a style idea that the Venetians are using but they also have to do with the fact that Venice is this great Maritime city Venice Venice had this arsenal that could produce giant ships faster than any other arsenal thousands of ships a year were produced in Venice and The same people who built the ships the same carpenters who built the ships the underbodies of the ships built the roofs So when you walk inside one of these Venetian churches, it's like looking inside a ship. You see all the timbers and it's really beautiful Magnificent And you also have the word nave to speak about the central part of the church and it's interesting that that Naval architects and naval carpenters build the knaves of the Venetian churches These are just examples of some of the treatises that are being published in Venice during this period Sebastiano Serlio's seven books on architecture and More of it and Vignolas rules of the five orders and This is the town that Palladio is More or less associated with and when I say more or less associated with Venice he's from Veneto and Veneto is the solid land the terra firma Right next to Venice. So you have Venice this island of mosh And then you have the farmlands and the estates and the agricultural terrains held by the wealthy Venetians that are called the terra firma And so he's from there near Vicenza as a young boy He was discovered to be prodigious in his skill at mathematics and his skill in drawing and he was taken in under the wing of a nobleman and taught the Classics and kind of similar story to Michelangelo's relationship with the energy family where Michelangelo was discovered to be a particularly talented boy And given this extra instruction or Giotto for that matter discovered by Chimabue given special instruction His patron is this guy called tricino who is a great classicist and who takes Palladio to places like Rome Or he can look directly at the Roman ruins and sketch them and study them and all of this results Not only in a great body of built architectural work But in a treatise the four books on architecture that Palladio wrote. Palladio is probably best known for his villas And what makes the villas so great is that we have a collection of variations on a theme Villa is kind of a standard building type what Villa means basically is country house We've spoken about Palazzo and Palazzo means large urban house and Villa means large country house This is a sketch that Palladio did where he is more or less Rehearsing variations on the theme of villa and so what kinds of things is he is he thinking about well One thing he's certainly thinking about is the idea of geometry the idea of proportion and and Palladio is Good enough at math and late enough in the history of architecture that he's thinking about complex geometries like harmonic proportions You know, how can these things be tuned to have the most sophisticated Relationship possible. He's also thinking about decorum Like what is the appropriate expression for a country house? And this is this is a tough question because we saw people looking at Palazzo's and thinking What is the appropriate expression for Renaissance minded people who want to build a country house a city house? And they began to say well, what about the Colosseum that gives us stacked orders that gives us a way to articulate the parts But what about a country house? What do you do? And so this is the first project that may have been collaborative with Trucino here's mr. Trucino and Here we can begin to see the terra firma all this darkish green stuff is Veneto and Venice is just floating off here The house for Trucino, you might say doesn't look as though he's he's nailed it yet And when it comes to the question of how do you make what does this thing look like? What does this country house look like because in many ways it looks like a little fortified house with towers at the corner? We have a little bit of a classical loge going on here with around-headed arches, but the external expression is not Really coming into its own and becoming So definitive as a style that we can begin to associate it as something new Palladio plans become I think really interesting and this is again Palladio's drawing But what we see next to it is a page from the vitcour book that you guys are Reading which looks at the Palladio plans and begins to say there's a method to this This is not simply the accretion of variations But there is a kind of rational way of moving through the permutations of what this could be and figuring something out Jared yes Stand up look at his shirt How would you describe his shirt his shirt is basically plaid right? And beautiful plaid also I just am so pleased that your shirt is so nice actually no I wanted you to see plaid or tartan plaid because what vitcour identifies when he begins to look at all of these Palladian villas is that the basic Substructure that can be understood to motivate all these variations is the notion of a grid But not just a neutral grid, but a tartan grid and by tartan grid What he means is that the cells of the grid aren't equal, but they're in varied bays big bay little bay big bay little bay big Bay and what that begins to give you is not simply a module like Brunelleschi would have where he had same same same same But you have the possibility of recombining these cells in different ways to get different proportional systems and different kinds of rooms And so here vitcour begins to just run through a number of the villas by Palladio and see ways that the system of big bay Little bay becomes useful frequently in the little bay and let's call little bay interstitial space And interstitial just means in between So interest interstitial space is the space in between things Major room major room interstitial space and in the interstitial space Palladio tends to do things like throw service spaces. Here's a stair. Here's a stair or sometimes Palladio will say I'm going to take part of the interstitial space and absorb it into the figure of a major space So that's how in the Villamel Contenta for example we get a cruciform space It's a good strategy because what the idea of little bay or interest interstitial space allows him to do is Multiple one he can vary the proportions without having to reinvent the system every time and two he can accommodate things that are messy like stairways or little Closets and storage spaces without Biting into the clarity of the of the major spaces that he's made a big effort to proportion in an ideal way Here is what we get after a little bit more study from mr. Palladio The Villa Goldie in Lonedo, and you have to say oh Palladio my god Because it's still not good, right? I mean it's nice. I like it a lot It's really severe, and I think Palladio is being decorous because what do you do? We know from from Vitruvius. We know from Alberti We know from Palladio's treat us that you cannot treat a country house as though what we're a city house You have to use different materials. You have to use a different way of articulating it So still to a large extent it's a farmhouse with a loggia rammed in it and here the towers which were so expressive and so let's say medievalizing in the Villa Trucino Become subsumed into the body of the building so the geometry is clear. He's getting modern He's he's getting with it and eventually Palladio gets this great idea in around the 1550s that in fact the the country house the villa could become a composite of multiple types One type could be the farmhouse, which is what he'd been using in his earliest villas, but the other type could be the temple So this is the Villa Emo and You can see from the Villa Emo this superposition of temple and farmhouse by the way down here. We have the client I Amon mr. Emo by Bellini kind of great Portrait of really grumpy looking guy Here's the plan of the Villa Emo It's this really tough representation of the Vidcour diagram of the Big Bay little Bay Big Bay little Bay Big Bay although squashed together and you have this idea of a temple Running all the way through the Big Bay as though a temple has been slid through the building Fabulous and you might want to say how dare he use a temple is he some kind of pagan savage Is he's some kind of worshiper of Zeus and No, he's not he's not obsessing about exactly what the language is I think in the days of Alberti in the days of Brunelleschi The question about temple was much much more challenged but by this point he's using the temple making it a facade element and Thinking about this notion of the superposition of the farmhouse and the temple as something that begins to govern pretty much the rest of his Villas from that point forward Notice here. We have all these ancillary buildings and here's where you keep the chickens and the goats and The grain and the you know apples and all the harvest This is a working farm and here in the center you have the farmhouse So it's fabulous and the interiors of all these Pilate and villas are Richly painted and richly elaborated on the inside many years ago And let me say when computers could barely type I had a student who made a program based on this hot new video game that was out called miss Pac-Man It was brand new such a good video game So if you could incorporate something that cutting edge into what you were doing in your architecture class That would be great and the and the project was little miss Pac-Man would march through the Pilate and villas and Every time she hit a room She would make a sound and the sound would be the relation the cord that you got from Height to width to length so three notes would be played And then when you went through a threshold you got a cord that was two notes being played The ratio of this thing to this thing and you could march around the Pilate and villas making music Isn't that a good project? I have a floppy disk with that on it But I cannot play my floppy disk anymore But if you look at the Palladio plans and maybe this one's not clear enough to see it you'll see that he's very very attentive to write numbers inside each room and These represent the these harmonic proportions that he's put as as part of the generative idea of his scheme Here's another one the Villa Badoer a More elaborated variation on the same theme and again another kind of working farmhouse with these colonnades coming out and beginning to claim a landscape with a villa popping behind Palladio's most famous villa of course is the Villa Rotonda and it's probably his most eccentric villa because we've noticed that the other ones are pretty emphatic about what's the front and what's the back and What's distinctive about the Villa Rotonda is that it's not so picky And when I say not so picky, I mean it really sets off these ideal porches in in both directions And in four directions and all the cardinal directions It has as its basic diagram perfect geometrical forms the perfection of the square The perfection of the circle the perfection of the circle inside the square here. You can see a couple of things one really likes the idea of those temple fronts and is running with them again and also This thing is not what you think it is you probably want to correct it in your brain to be a perfect Nine-square grid with a circle in the center, but there tends to be a kind of directionality to it So that here we see one of those temples completely dragged through the building and on these edges We see facades that have been clipped on so it's a little bit different notice also the detail of what happens when the Temple front meets the farmhouse building Plavio has a very very specific way of doing this and it's not just taking his cue from temple But really thinking about what is the interaction between these two conditions of the farmhouse and the temple? And so a piece of wall Drags out with it. So instead of simply having the fully plastic Liberated three-dimensional temple front that you might have on a temple like the Maison Carré or the temple of Fortuna Realists a piece of wall a piece of the building comes with it Fabulous, this is a plan a site plan showing you a couple of things And I think one thing is although you have these four equal porch it porches Engaging the cardinal directions. They really have different landscapes. They really have different qualities in part north is north South is south east is east and east and west is west and you're gonna get different kinds of sunlight and different kinds of views From each of those directions But also you have different conditions of containment like when you approach the house You're coming through this sunken road and you really only get the portico and the dome as your first things that you see And it's not until about here that your purview expands From this side you see this wide Landscape with this house crowning it from here. You have this little carved Secret garden almost and from here you're looking into agricultural fields So it seems as though gee wouldn't one porch be enough wouldn't that be better? He's he's gaining a lot in terms of different ways that the landscape can be appreciated by running it through these different iterations Magnificent here. This is the approach road where you see this very contracted view of it And this is the view from the far side where you see this thing Surmounting the hill as though the hill itself Terminates in this perfect Pilatean villa. This diagram shows you that every little thing in the villa is organized by strongly controlled geometries The the villa rotunda as it's built does not represent the same geometrical principles that the villa rotunda as drawn represents because Pilateo died before it was completely executed and a different kind of dome was built on it so Too bad Pilateo another villa by Pilateo that's frequently cited as Spectacular is the villa rotunda and this one is just on the outskirts of Venice on the Brenta Canal And it's a it's a different condition because instead of facing farmland This one faces a canal This is really much more of a Venetian building because of the fact that its main address is to the water and not to land And in part because of that it opens up It's portico Doesn't have that little piece of wall sliding through but instead the stairs wrap through it and fold through it and begin to Allow you to enter the building regardless of how high the water is because you have to realize that these canals vary in height If you get a bad weather pattern The winds will blow in a certain direction and and Venice and the whole canal system associated with Venice will back up Like a bad toilet. This is called aqua alta and it can often be the case that you well If you lived in Venice, you would have rubber boots and you would wear them at least 50 days a year because you would need them to get Through the water, but it's solved here because the door is not down here The door is up here, and if the water floods you just get on a different stair and up you go Here's the plan Beautiful plan very much what vitcara would expect us to see big bay little bay big bay little bay But with this interesting transformation of finding a figure within this neutral bay system and the figure is cruciform Cruciform figure is two barrel vaults intersecting and all of these rooms have these sort of really wonderful sculpted ceilings Barrel vaults domes and so forth and this is a plan We I think you can see quite clearly how Palladio inscribes the geometrical system onto the plan itself This building really has two faces one face faces the water, and it really looks spectacular and by spectacular I mean fully plastic this temple pulling out becoming a Object behind which we read the block of the villa. We can also see hovering above it is another little temple Which is coming out of the upper story now when you go to the back facade, which is the garden facade over here a Very different condition takes place You can see that there's this kind of little gesture this little bump in the wall that acknowledges the notion of Temple dragging through the farmhouse and begins to show you that something is there But not much because most of what it is there has been pulled forward and expressed with all this plasticity on the canal facade So this is what you get on the back facade, and it's kind of amazing I mean Palladio is being a good archaeologist you might say and by good archaeologist I mean he knows that Rome is full of stuff Rome doesn't just have temples Rome's got all kinds of things Rome has thermal baths for example, and this kind of window is called a thermal window This is the kind of window that would have brought light into the vaults of a Roman bath The thermal window that he has over here brings light into the cruciform barrel vault or cross vault that he has over His main hall there's a nice contrast between the flatness or the Suppression of the figure onto the surface in this facade and the expression of it on the other facade You read them as the same thing but variations on a theme It could even be suggested that it's as though something's been cut off And you just see the cavity that represents the loss of the figure to make that really attractive to you This is the Bohemian astronomer Tico Brahi who had his nose cut off in a sword fight And therefore strapped a wooden nose onto his face so that he would look more attractive I'm suggesting that maybe this is what you would see if you got a front view of him Don't know Palladio is looking at archaeological examples that broaden broaden the range of things that he can do He's not just looking at the cannon. He's going beyond the cannon So this is a little temple of Clotunus in Spoleto a little town the north of Rome where the stairs Slide in through the side and he's sort of picking up on those models for his method of organizing this another one of his most Magnificent villas is the Villa Barbaro in the town of Masseter And this is another one of these great humanists that he's working for Daniele Barbaro who wrote his own Commentary on Pio. So this is not a neutral client And this is highly elaborated in terms of the Villa and the support buildings The Villa becomes almost a minor player in in the degree to which the support buildings have been amplified and Expressed these are little dovecots that you have over here on the far side one of which has a sundial So it really looks like nice, you know a b c b a Rhythm of these things with the dovecots variations on the theme of temple It's sad like about eight years ago the people that lived in the Villa Masseter the Villa Barbaro in Masseter had 500 dogs and that was fun I'm gonna have to scan old slides of the Villa Masseter because there were so many dogs here That the dogs would sleep on top of the bushes to get away from the other dogs They were just everywhere and the last time I went I asked the woman Who was selling tickets, you know, where are the dogs? What happened all the dogs and she said dead all dead So no more dogs the dogs are still there in the painting because This is an example of kind of really really great painting on the interior here And and it's full of dogs and it's full of all these kinds of Trompe-Loi perspectives extensions of the space that you're actually in into the pictorial space of the house We'll continue talking more about Palladio and his villas next time And we'll talk about Palladio in terms of how he makes an impact on contemporary practice also