In 1352, Petrarch,
in a letter to his friend Lapo da Castiglionchio, wrote of his time spent at his
country retreat, reading the works of classical writers like Cicero :
This soothing, quiet, peaceful country,
and this delightsome retreat are situated to one side to the right of one
seeking it, to the left of him returning therefrom. . . .No one has ever
reached it except purposing to do so through certain knowledge of its
existence, drawn to the spot by the beauty of the Fountain, or by his desire
for repose and study. . . . In truth, study has this great virtue, that it
appeases our desire for a life of solitude, mitigates our aversion for the
vulgar herd, tenders us sought-for repose even in the midst of the thickest
crowds, instills in us many noble thoughts , and provides us with the
fellowship of most illustrious men even in the most solitary forests.[1]
Petrarch, through his poetry and
scholarship, sought to revive the classical world, whose concepts were embodied
by the works of classical writers such as Cicero, Horace, and Virgil. Among the
classical concepts he wished to revive was that of the villa, a countryside
retreat where one could live the contemplative life.[2]
“In the mid fourteenth century,” writes David. R. Coffin, “Petrarch had revived
the ancient idea that the contemplative life, the life of artistic and
philosophical creativity, the life of otium, could only blossom in the
quiet of the country side.”[3] The villa, in both its conceptual and
architectural forms, was born in ancient Rome ,
where it had become an integral part of social, economic, and cultural life. It
was here, during the Augustan era, that Virgil composed his pastoral poems idealizing
the concept of the villa as a country retreat away from the chaos of the city, where
one could live a life of otium, that is, a life of leisure in which one
can dedicate oneself to intellectual pursuits.[4] Villas,
which had disappeared in the fifth century with the fall of the Roman Empire,
began to reappear in the fifteenth century, replacing feudal fortresses, under
the Florentine Medici, who, as patrons of humanist scholars, many of whom followers
of Petrarchan ideals, were influenced by their interests in classical antiquity,
particular the concept of otium.[5] By
the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the villa had returned to Rome ,
where it became an escape for the pleasure-seeking patrician, rather than the
Tuscan retreat for the contemplative humanist.[6]
But while the concept of the classical villa, as a place of leisure away from
the city, had become an important aspect of both Tuscan and Roman life in the
fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the classical revival of the
Renaissance had yet to make its full impact on the architectural form of the villa.[7] Not
long into the sixteenth century, however, architects began to design villas
which consciously conformed to antique schemes. Two designs in particular,
Raphael’s Villa Madama and Pirro Ligorio’s Casino of Pius IV, demonstrated the
full impact of classical antiquity on the form of the Roman Renaissance villa. Both Raphael and Ligorio would attempt to
reproduce the ancient Roman villa in both its form and its concept, but because
of the architects’ different professional backgrounds and the different
functions that their respective designs needed to accommodate, they would establish
very different architectural idioms.
In 1518, Cardinal
Giulio de’ Medici, cousin of Pope Leo X (Giovanni di Lorenzo de’ Medici),
commissioned Raphael to build a villa on the slopes of Monte Mario in Rome, which
would later be named Madama after Margaret of Austria, who acquired the villa
after the assassination of her husband Alessandro de’ Medici in 1537. “Proceeding
from an idealization of the antique Roman villa,” notes Guy Dewez, “its purpose
was evidently to provide an enchanting Medici residence at the gates of Rome
where prominent visitors might be greeted, properly accommodated while making
ready for their ceremonial entry and, during their stay in the city, lavishly
entertained.”[8] Raphael and his assistants
began the construction of the villa in either 1518 or 1519. When Raphael died
in 1520, Antonio da Sangallo the Younger succeeded to the superintendence of
the project while Giovanni da Udine and Giulio Romano contributed stuccowork
and painted decoration, respectively. In 1527, Giulio de’ Medici, who in 1523
had ascended to the papacy as Pope Clement VII , watched from his hide-out in
the Castel Sant’Angelo as Charles V’s mutinied army set flame to his unfinished
villa during their Sack of Rome.[9] While
Raphael’s reinterpretation of the ancient Roman villa would never be realized, the
heritage of his classical vision was to be continued by the Neapolitan architect
Pirro Ligorio, in his villa complex for Pius IV.[10] “In Rome ,” notes Wolfgang Lotz, “Pius IV’s Casino is
the most important example of those antiquarian trends which we have already
seen in [Raphael]. . . .”[11]
In addition to being a painter and an architect, Ligorio was also one of the
greatest antiquarians and archaeologists of his day. His passion for, and
extensive knowledge of, classical antiquity is reflected in the unprecedented
archaeological accuracy of the Casino’s classical form and decoration, which,
according to Coffin, “would seem to mark the climax of the impact of classical
archaeology upon the Renaissance villa.”[12]
In May 1558, Paul IV commissioned Pirro Ligorio to build a small villa
in the bosco di Belvedere at
the Vatican to serve as the Pope’s private summer
retreat. The project was interrupted in November, but revived in 1560 by Paul’s
successor, Pius IV. It was under Pius IV, born Giovanni Angelo de’ Medici, that
Ligorio’s classical vision for the architectural complex, now called the Casino
of Pius IV, was realized.
Ligorio and Raphael both devised plans for
their villas that are centered on a round inner court, Raphael’s in the shape
of a circle and Ligorio’s in the shape of an oval, which may have come from a
misinterpretation of a letter by the ancient Roman Pliny the Younger, in
which he describes the architectural form of his Laurentine Villa:[13]
“You first enter a courtyard, plain and simple without being mean, and then
pass into a colonnade in the shape of the letter D, enclosing a small but
cheerful area between. . . . Opposite the middle of the colonnade is a very
pleasant inner court, which leads into a handsome dining-room.”[14]
During the Renaissance, this letter D was mistakenly identified as the letter O,
which architects therefore interpreted as a circular or oval-shaped court.[15] But
Ligorio, more than likely, also based his oval-shaped court on non-literary
antique sources, such as the ellipse of the antique amphitheater.[16]
This brings us
to one of the main differences between Ligorio’s and Raphael’s design; while
each made use of both literary and archaeological antique sources, Ligorio based his designs mostly on his hands-on
observations of antiquities, whereas Raphael based his designs mostly on
written accounts from antiquity. Raphael and his assistants certainly studied
the Pantheon and the Basilica of Maxentius and Constantine, and applied the
former’s pedastaled, columnated and pedimented tabernacles to his design for
the elevation of the circular court, and the latter’s vault-enclosed threefold
fenestration system to his design for the main hall and the radiating arcades
of the North-east façade.[17]
However, it was primarily the architectural principles outlined in the treatise
of the Augustan-era architect Vitruvius, as well as the accounts found in the
letters of Pliny the Younger, that formed the basis of Raphael’s classical
design. Raphael’s plan for the villa’s theater, for example, comprising a
circle with four inscribed triangles, was derived from Vitruvius’s description
of a theater, and the classical garden houses, called daetae, and the underground
Doric portico, called a cryptoporticus, which he incorporated into his
design, all come from Pliny’s descriptions of his villas.[18] “In
fact,” writes Coffin, “Pliny’s later depiction of the Tuscan villa set in
amphitheater crowned with woods above the meadows through which the Tiber
flows could almost be a description of the setting of the Villa Madama.”[19] In
his villa design, Raphael sought to bring to life the villas of Pliny’s
letters, the classical principles and forms of Vitruvius’s treatise, and
various motifs from the monuments of ancient Rome ,
and bring them together according to his own artistic vision. The result is a
complex of structures, each an independent recreation of a particular antique
model, that, when taken together, form a villa that is both grandiose in scale
and innovative in design.
Whereas
Raphael’s vision was that of an artist, Ligorio’s was that of an archaeologist.
“Ligorio harks back to the poetic and formal tradition of antiquity in the same
way as Raphael in his designs for the Villa Madama,” writes Lotz, “but while
Raphael assimilated the heritage of antiquity in his own masterly fashion,
Ligorio’s villa looks like a book of quotations in which antique forms are
reproduced with a maximum of accuracy.”[20] Ligorio
had performed excavations of Hardrian’s Villa from 1550 to 1568 and even
prepared a plan of the complex. It is likely that Ligorio’s Casino was intended
to be a reconstruction of the ancient villa’s island nymphaeum[21], or as Coffin
suggests, an antique musaeion.[22]
As an antiquarian, Ligorio also studied late antique sarcophagi, which he
imitated in his design for the Loggetta with its Ionic caryatids, pediments,
and aediculae.[23] The
facades of the Loggetta, the Casino proper and the entrance portal are covered
with rich stucco decoration, designed by Ligorio himself, which he derived from
his studies of antiquities and classical iconography.[24] In
contrast to Raphael’s monumental villa, Ligorio’s Casino is very intimate in
scale and set in the seclusion of the Vatican gardens,
making it the ideal setting for the ancient Roman concept of otium.[25] The classical archaeological
decorative and architectural idiom that Ligorio establishes with his Casino was
to be continued by the Villa Medici and the Villa Borghese,[26]
but it would not be adopted with the same scholarly approach until the
neoclassicism of Robert Adam in the eighteenth century. But with the rise of
absolutism, the grandiose and luxurious architectural idiom that Raphael applies
to his classical, yet monumental, villa is adopted in the same fashion by
Renaissance princes who transfer their seats of power to the country,
culminating in Louis XIV’s Chateau de Versailles during the seventeenth
century.[27]
[1] Francesco Petrarca, Petrarch’s
Letters (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1910), 40.
[2] James S. Ackerman, The
Villa: Form and Ideology of Country Houses (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1990), 64.
[3] David R. Coffin, The
Villa in the Life of Renaissance Rome
[4] Ackerman, The Villa,
39.
[5] Ibid., 63-6.
[6] Coffin, The Villa in
the Life of Renaissance, 86-7.
[7] Ibid., 241.
[8] Guy Dewez, Villa
Madama: A memoir relating to Raphael’s project (New York: Princeton
Architectural Press, 1993), 9.
[9] Roger Jones, and Nicholas
Penny, Raphael (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983), 234.
[10] Wolfgang Lotz, Architecture
in Italy New Haven , CT
[11] Ibid., 108-9.
[12] Coffin, The Villa in
the Life of Renaissance, 277.
[13] Louis Cellauro, “The
Casino of Pius IV in the Vatican ,”
Papers of the British
School Rome
[14] Alfred John Church, and William
Jackson Brodribb, eds., Pliny’s Letters (Philadelphia: J.P. Lippincott,
1875), 131.
[15] Cellauro, “The Casino of
Pius IV,” 200.
[16] Ibid., 199.
[17] Dewez, Villa Madama
[18] Coffin, The Villa in
the Life of Renaissance, 248.
[19] Ibid.
[21] Graham Smith, The
Casino of Pius IV (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), 21.
[22] David R. Coffin, Pirro
Ligorio: The Renaissance Artist, Architect, and Antiquarian (University
Park , PA Pennsylvania
State University
[23] Ibid., 39-40.
[24] Cellauro, “The Casino of
Pius IV,” 183.
[25] Coffin, The Villa in
the Life of Renaissance, 273.
[26] Ibid., 278.
[27] Lotz, Architecture in Italy
 |
| Raphael, Central court of the Villa Madama, Rome, begun ca. 1516 |
 |
| Raphael, Final project for the Villa Madama, before 1520 |
 |
| Pirro Ligorio, Façade of the casino proper, Casino of Pius IV, Vatican, 1558-62 |
 |
| Pirro Ligorio, Loggetta, Casino of Pius IV, Vatican, 1558-1562 |
