Villa Foscari
Villa Foscari called La Malcontenta is the name of a villa in Mira on one of the mouths of the Brenta River . It was built between 1550 and 1560 according to plans by the Italian architect Andrea Palladio .
location
The Brenta Canal , on which the villa is located, used to be an important transport link between Padua , the university of the lagoon city, and the city of Venice . The traveler on the way to Fusina found the villas on the Brenta River to be a suburb of Venice. The location made the Villa of Venice easily accessible by ship.
history
The Malcontenta is one of the representative villas that have been built by families of the patriciate of Venice since the 15th century as part of the Terraferma policy pursued by the Republic of Venice . The two clients, the brothers Nicolò and Alvise Foscari , named in the frieze, came from one of the most powerful families in the city, who had provided one of the great doges and war heroes of the republic with Francesco Foscari . Around 1550 they had bought the former properties of the Valier patrician family from the Procurators of San Marco , which had previously belonged to the nearby Abbey of Sant'Ilario. In the following decades they expanded the property through further acquisitions.
The villa was built for both representative and economic purposes. Like all Venetian villas of the Terraferma, it was originally equipped with stables, servants' and farm buildings, walls and gates and even a small church of its own. Only the mansion has been preserved, which, with its isolated location in a spacious park, no longer corresponds to the original intentions of the architect and client.
Easily reached by water from Venice, important guests came here, such as the architect Giorgio Vasari in 1566 and the French King Henry III in 1574 . Released from the jewelry ordinance by a special permit, the noble Venetians wore jewels, lace and robes of such magnificence on such state visits that the Danish King Frederick IV commissioned the Venetian portraitist Rosalba Carriera in 1709 to record the beauties in miniatures as a souvenir.
The palace was uninhabited in the early 19th century. In the decades that followed, the surrounding buildings crumbled into ruins and during the uprisings of 1848 the outbuildings were demolished by the Austrians. The villa no longer had doors or windows and was used as an agricultural warehouse. The previously unobstructed view of the river was impaired by the Padua-Fusina railway line and the parallel road.
At the end of the 19th century, the banker Frédéric Emile Baron d'Erlanger rented the villa and renovated it. In 1926 the bon vivant Alberto Clinton Landsberg bought it together with his friends Paul Rodocanachi and Catherine d'Erlanger (daughter-in-law of the previous tenant and wife of the banker Emile Beaumont Baron d'Erlanger ) and had it restored again; the owners held large summer salons there. Bertie Landsberg, the son of a banker of Jewish descent, had to flee from the Italian fascists in 1939 , while Kate d'Erlanger emigrated to Beverly Hills. Landsberg did not return to the villa for a few weeks each year until 1947. In 1965 Claud, 4th Baron Phillimore , inherited the property. In 1973 the architect and architectural historian Prof. Antonio ("Tonci") Foscari (* 1938) acquired the villa of his ancestors and carefully renovated it in collaboration with the Venetian villa authorities. The villa has since been owned by the Counts Foscari again .
Since 1996 the villa, together with the other Palladian villas in Veneto, has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site .
Surname
Tradition stubbornly sticks to the legend that the name “Malcontenta”, the dissatisfied one, goes back to a lady of the Foscari family who was banished here because of marital infidelity. In fact, the name derives from a dissatisfaction long before the villa was built, namely the protest by the cities of Padua and Piove di Sacco against the excavation of a new bed for the Brenta Canal, ordered by Venice in 1431, on which the village of Malcontenta is today.
architecture
The villa appears like a simple cuboid , only decorated with a graphic plaster pattern , with a facade in front of each. It combines motifs from the Venetian building tradition with classical architecture. As with the palaces of Venice, the main facade faces the waterfront. A portico with ten Ionic columns has a triangular gable with a tooth cut. A symmetrically arranged two-flight staircase leads to the height of the high base. The vaulted utility rooms are located in the basement. The main floor is closed by a 2-tier cornice . The facade on the garden side represents one of Paladin's most successful architectural achievements. The distribution of the window openings reveals the disposition of the interior spaces. The middle group of windows in the thermal baths depicts the cross-section of the main hall and gives the central cross-shaped hall plenty of light. Its ceiling is formed by two crossed barrel vaults. The other window openings are strictly rectangular. There is a mezzanine above the main floor . The conclusion is a flat tent roof with a gable . Palladio mostly used simple, inexpensive materials in his villa buildings. Plastered brickwork was also used for the Malcontenta, even for the columns. Here, too, Palladio proves to be a master at creating a monumental effect with inexpensive materials. The main floor is three to four meters above the bank level, allowing for a possible flood. At the side of the gable there are now shortened high outdoor chimneys.
Interior decoration
Some of the frescoes are by Battista Franco , who was highly valued by Palladio, and remained unfinished after his death in 1561. Giovanni Battista Zelotti then continued the work. His frescoes are also only present in remnants.
Palladio on the Villa Malcontenta
In the second book of his “Four books on architecture” Palladio writes about his work:
- “Not far from Gambarare on the Brenta is the following building of Mr. Nicolò and Luigi of Foscari. This house rises eleven feet above the ground. In its lower part there are kitchens and similar rooms which, like the upper ones, are vaulted. In the larger rooms, the vaults are based on the first type of vault heights. The square ones have a domed vault , and mezzanines are installed over the little chambers . The vault of the main hall is a cross vault of semicircular diameter and is as high as the main hall is wide. It is decorated with excellent paintings by Battista Veneziano. Battista Franco , a great painter of our time, would have started decorating the large rooms himself, but surprised by death he left the work unfinished. The loggia is of the Ionic order. The cornice runs around the whole house and forms the gable above the loggia and on the opposite side. Under the eaves is another cornice that runs across the facade. The upper rooms are similar to mezzanines because of their depth , as they are only eight feet high. "()
literature
- Andrea Palladio: The four books on architecture. Venice 1570.
- Manfred Wundram (ed.): Reclam's art guide Italy. Volume 2: Upper Italy East (= Reclams Universal Library . 10001/16). Edited by Erich Egg , Erich Hubala u. a. Reclam, Stuttgart 1965, pp. 241-242.
- Gerda Bödefeld, Berthold Hinz : The villas in Veneto. An art and cultural historical journey into the country between the edge of the Alps and the Adriatic arc (= DuMont documents. Du-Mont art travel guide. ). DuMont, Cologne 1987, ISBN 3-7701-1838-3 .
- Michelangelo Muraro, Paolo Marton: Villas in Veneto. Könemann, Cologne 1996, ISBN 3-89508-214-7 .
- Guido Beltramini, Antonio Padoan: Andrea Palladio. Pictorial atlas of the complete works. Hirmer, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-7774-9330-9 .
- Antonio Foscari: Frescos within Palladio's architecture: Malcontenta 1557 - 1575 . Lars Müller Publishers, Zurich 2013, ISBN 978-3-03778-370-2
Web links
- Palladio on the Malcontenta
- Villa Foscari, la Malcontenta
- Palladio Villa Foscari, la Malcontenta (visitpalladio.com). Retrieved January 4, 2013
- Palladio's Italian Villas
Individual evidence
- ↑ See: Felix Kucher, Malcontenta, Roman
- ^ A. Palladio: The four books on architecture . revised edition. Birkhäuser, 1993, p. 170 .
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Coordinates: 45 ° 26 ′ 12 ″ N , 12 ° 12 ′ 6 ″ E