Villa Cornaro in the Enlightenment: Adapting a Palladian Villa to Eighteenth-Century Ideals

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Book Description:

Villa Cornaro, in the Venetan village of Piombino Dese, was designed by Andrea Palladio in 1551 as a country manor for the Venetian patrician Giorgio Cornaro. Palladio is regarded as the most influential architect in the history of Western architecture, and Villa Cornaro's dramatic two-story projecting loggia-portico motif has been widely copied in later architecture, bringing recognition to Villa Cornaro as a particularly important structure in Western residential design. Villa Cornaro's architectural influence, however, my have limited the attention paid to the implications of a curious and dramatic decorative program executed there in 1716-17 by a descendant of its original patron. The elaborate eighteenth-century alterations included installation of 104 frescos; replacement of the terra-cotta tile floor in one room with a wooden floor in a pattern of squares; reconfiguring of the Palladian entrance steps; fitting of new elements into the villa's north and south pediments; and the addition of unusual outdoor statuary. The persistent presence, through the new decoration, of motifs often utilized as Masonic symbols may shed further light on the early expansion of Freemasonry from Great Britain to continental Europe in the early eighteenth century, making the villa itself a document in the history of ideas. Carl I. Gable is president of the Center for Palladian Studies in America and founder-editor of its journal, Palladiana. He and his wife acquired Villa Cornaro in 1989 and reside there in spring and fall.