Villa Cornaro

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Villa Cornaro
Villa Cornaro

Villa Cornaro is a patrician villa in Piombino Dese, about 30 km from Venice, Italy. It was designed by the Italian architect Andrea Palladio, and is conserved as part of a World Heritage Site, "City of Vicenza and the Palladian Villas of the Veneto".

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[edit] Architectural Details

The villa was constructed from about 1553, was mentioned a-building in 1556 and finished around 1596, for Giorgio Cornaro, younger son of a wealthy Venetian family. It represents one of the most remarkable examples of a Renaissance villa. The north façade (illustrated) has a central portico-loggia that is a flexible living space out of the sun and open to cooling breezes. The interior space is a harmonious arrangement of the strictly symmetrical floor plans on which Palladio insisted without exception. Rooms of inter-related proportions composed of squares and golden rectangles flank a central axial vista that extends clear through the house; as Rudolph Wittkower noted,[1] by moving subsidiary staircases into the projecting wings and filling matching corner spaces with paired oval principal stairs, space was left for a central salone that is fully as wide as the porticoes (plan, left); this central core forms a rectangle in which there are 3 x 2 repetitions of an elegant standard module. The interior has 18th century frescoes by Mattia Bortoloni and stuccoes by Camillo Mariani.

Ground plan
Ground plan

Through its illustration in Palladio's I Quattro Libri dell'Architettura,[2] Villa Cornaro became a model for villas all over the world, particularly in England and in colonial America. Thomas Jefferson was influenced by Villa Cornaro in the design of Monticello. The villa is presently owned by Carl and Sally Gable, of Atlanta, Georgia, who purchased it from Dr. Richard H. Rush of Fort Myers, Florida, in 1989. Dr. Rush had purchased the Villa Cornaro in 1969 from an organization of the Italian Government dedicated to preserving the national monuments of Italy in the Veneto (L'Ente Per Le Ville Venete). He and his wife, Julia, restored the villa and furnished it with antiques over a period of twenty years. [3]

In the 1990s Villa Cornaro was featured in a television series Guide to Historic Homes: In Search of Palladio,[4] Bob Vila's three-part six-hour production for A&E Network.

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism (London: Tiranti) 1962:72.
  2. ^ Quattro Libri, Book II, p. 51.
  3. ^ The Gables have co-authored the book, Palladian Days: Finding a New Life in a Venetian Country House (Alfred A. Knopf, 2005)
  4. ^ "Bob Vila's Guide to Historic Homes: In Search of Palladio".

[edit] Reference

  • "Palladio and the Veneto" a catalogue of the villas maintained by www.cisapalladio.org, retrieved 4 April 2008. (English) (Italian)

[edit] See also

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Villas by Andrea Palladio