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Bob Vila's Guide to Historic Homes: In Search of Palladio™
Palladian Revival
Part 1 - Villas of the Veneto:
Bob Vila is back on the road again - only this time he travels to the magical city of Venice and, on the mainland nearby, to the region known as Veneto. It was there that the sixteenth-century Italian architect Andrea Palladio started an architectural revolution.
Palladio, the son of a humble miller, apprenticed as a stone cutter at thirteen. Later a client recognized great promise in the young stone mason and took him to Rome. Palladio went on to become a conduit for the ideas of antiquity. He researched and reworked them in his designs and in his profoundly influential publication, The Four Books of Architecture (1570). He was the first great architect to devote much of his practice to domestic architecture: the design of houses.
In Part 1, The Villas of the Veneto, Bob visits the pre-Palladian Villa Giustinian, with its gothic battlements and portcullis. Inside the imposing stone walls is a surprise, a Renaissance palace complete with barchesse and other farm buildings. The place has been called the most perfect villa complex in the Veneto, and it's a fitting first stepping stone for Bob as he explains the context for Palladio's innovative thinking.
Bob Vila on tour
Palladio's own Villa Pisani is next. Here the Classical and the Gothic converge. Pisani is a masterful act of homage to the temples of the ancient Rome that Palladio had just returned from visiting. With a descendent of the original owners as his guide, Bob tours the house and views its magnificent spaces and frescoes.
An American couple inhabit the Villa Cornaro, a house that Thomas Jefferson knew and which inspired his original conception of Monticello. It's a suburban villa, on a town street, a palatial residence that was also an on-site place of business for running a large farming enterprise.
Two of Palladio's most memorable villas follow, the Villa Barbaro and the Villa Emo. Barbaro, filled with frescoes by the Renaissance master Veronese and elaborate sculptures, has always been a virtual museum house; Emo is perhaps the most dramatic farmhouse ever built. The last house is La Rocca Pisana, a spectacular belvedere atop a hill with a bird's eye view of the Veneto. Built by Palladio's pupil Vincenzo Scamozzi, it's a true pleasure palace on high.
Bob takes his viewers on sights and sounds tours along the venerable canals of Venice and to Palladio's adopted home of Vincenza. The Villas of the Veneto is the genesis of a tour that will take the viewer on to other centuries and other settings where Palladio's influence is still to be felt.
Part 2 - The Palladians in England and Ireland:
Next Bob travels to London. There he begins an exploration of the great Palladian Revival in England where Palladio's grand designs had widespread appeal in the eighteenth century. The British Empire was emerging as the dominant world power, and at the same time the dominant architectural style became Palladianism. People wanted houses that made a statement, and Palladio, having studied the monuments of the Roman Empire, had integrated porticoes and pediments and domes into domestic architecture. The formula fit.
Chiswick House
At Chiswick House, Bob shows us an extravagant pleasure house designed by the Third Earl of Burlington, a wealthy and powerful patron of the arts who underwrote the publication of the definitive edition of Palladio's Four Books. His domed house, only a few miles from Trafalgar Square, was a temple to the arts, a container for Burlington's paintings and his library.
Not far away is Marble Hill House, a home built for Henrietta Howard, mistress to King George III. It's a simple rectangular house, three stories tall, yet it's the perfect Palladian manse, sitting on the bank of the River Thames.
Next is Stourhead, a spectacular house built in the image of Palladio's Villa Emo. Bob visits the great country house but also walks the paths of its famous landscape garden, a "pleasureground" that features a miniature Pantheon, Palladian bridge, Greek temple, and other architectural treasures.
In the city of Bath, often called one of the most beautiful cities in all of Europe, Bob takes us on a tour of a Palladian city. It features Queen's Square, the Circus (a circle of buildings), and the Royal Crescent--all of them experiments in both stylish architecture and urban development.
Across the Irish Sea, Bob visits the Casino at Marino, a garden house to top all garden houses. It's the architectural equivalent of a Faberge egg, an elaborately carved and decorated structure just outside of Dublin. In Northern Ireland, Bob's last stop is Castle Ward, the house with two faces (one Palladian, one Gothic) because the lord and lady of the house never could quite agree what style they wanted.
It's a Grand Tour, alright, and one that includes sights and sounds travels to the great eighteenth-century cities of London and Dublin where the spirit of Palladio survives.
Part 3 - The Palladian Legacy in America:
Bob Vila's travels continue - this time to the Colonies, where merchants and plantation owners also had the money to build stylish homes. In Philadelphia, America's first city of that pre-revolutionary era, a privateer named MacPherson built himself an imposing Palladian mansion in the countryside outside of the city, in what became Fairmount Park. Today, Mount Pleasant is an off-premise gallery for the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Bob admires its early American treasures.
Once Marblehead, Massachusetts was the sixth largest city in the colonies - and that was the era when the Jeremiah Lee Mansion was built. Bob takes us inside the massive wood frame house, another proud vestige of eighteenth-century Palladianism.
Moving into the nineteenth century, Bob's next stop is Gore Place, the 175 foot long brick home built for Massachusetts Governor Christopher Gore. If the earlier stops were examples of Palladianism by the book, Gore Place demonstrates how Americans reveled in their architectural, as well as political, independence.
Casino at Marino
Traveling to the Hudson Valley, Bob visits Boscobel, a high style New York country home with a towering view of the river. It was purchased in 1955 for thirty-five dollars, but today, meticulously restored and filled with a world class collection of New York furniture from the Duncan Phyfe era, Boscobel once again is a fine Federal house.
Bob's time travels take him next to Hartford, Connecticut. The Austin House is probably the first "post-modern" house, built in 1930 for museum director Chick Austin. Inspired by a Veneto villa Austin saw on his honeymoon, the house seemed peculiar to his neighbors but proved an agreeable gathering place for the likes of Salvador Dali, Ira Gershwin, George Balanchine, and Gertrude Stein.
To close the show, Bob visits South Bend, Indiana, home of the University of Notre Dame and an architectural school where Palladio and classical architecture are taken seriously indeed. There he visits the home of Professor Thomas Gordon Smith, Vitruvian House, where Smith has blended Indiana limestone, cement block, and classical detailing in building a most commodious home for his family of six children. Across town, the last stop is the Villa Indiana, an affordable starter house that another Notre Dame architecture professor, Duncan Stroik, built for his young family. The Villa Indiana brings us full circle: it was based upon Palladian villas Stroik himself measured and studied.
As Bob tours Palladian buildings in Italy, England, Ireland, and America, it becomes more evident with each site visited that the sixteenth-century Andrea Palladio was a genius in his time whose designs reverberate for all time.
Bob Vila's Guide to Historic Homes: In Search of Palladio airs periodically on A&E and can be purchased on video. For more information call 1-800-423-1212 or visit the A&E website.
