Palladio's Rotonda: a villa built as an image of the cosmos
Villa Almerico Capra, known as La Rotonda, is Andrea Palladio's masterpiece near Vicenza: history, harmonic proportions and the circle in the square.
On a small hill on the outskirts of Vicenza stands a villa that has neither a front nor a back. Four identical façades, each with a portico of Ionic columns and a flight of steps, look towards the four quarters of the countryside. At the centre is a circular hall covered by a dome. This is Villa Almerico Capra, known throughout the world as La Rotonda, and perhaps the most imitated building in the history of Western architecture.
A canon and his architect
The patron was Paolo Almerico, a Vicentine churchman who had served at the papal court and who, on returning home, wanted a residence for display and for otium, the learned leisure of the ancients. Palladio began work around the mid-1560s. At his death, in 1580, the villa was not finished: it was completed by Vincenzo Scamozzi, who among other things built a lower dome than the hemispherical one foreseen in the design. In 1591 the property passed to the Capra brothers.
Palladio himself described the villa in the second of his Four Books of Architecture, published in Venice in 1570, emphasising its position on a gentle rise, surrounded by other hills and washed by a river, from which views can be enjoyed in every direction, as from a very great theatre. For this reason, he explained, he had given the building loggias on all four sides: the villa is conceived as an observatory over the landscape.
The circle within the square
The plan of La Rotonda combines a square and a circle in a perfectly symmetrical way. It is the same combination that Vitruvius had described when speaking of the proportions of the human body, and that Leonardo da Vinci had illustrated in the famous drawing of Vitruvian Man. For Renaissance thought, circle and square represented heaven and earth, the divine and the human: their union was the sign of a harmony binding man to the cosmos.
The central hall, lit from above, was a place where this idea became experience. The space gathers around a centre, beneath the frescoed dome, and then opens, through the corridors, towards the four porticoes and the landscape. Whoever stands there is literally at the centre of a system of oriented axes, as if the house were a small map of the world with man at its heart.
Proportions as music
The art historian Rudolf Wittkower, in his study Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism of 1949, showed how Palladio used numerical ratios derived from musical theory, the same that produce consonant intervals. This research belongs to a tradition going back to Pythagoras and Plato, according to which the universe is ordered by harmonic proportions. A well-proportioned room, for Palladio and his contemporaries, resonated like a chord.
This is not esotericism in the strict sense, but a philosophy of form in which mathematics, music and architecture are expressions of a single order. The same cultural climate had produced, a few decades earlier, Luca Pacioli's treatise De divina proportione, printed in Venice in 1509. It is in this sense that La Rotonda can be read as an image of a habitable cosmos, measured on the scale of man.
The villa, included with the other Palladian villas of the Veneto in the UNESCO World Heritage List, has inspired architects in England, the United States and Russia: Chiswick House in London and Thomas Jefferson's Monticello in Virginia are its direct or indirect descendants. Before its four façades one understands why so many wished to copy it: it is one of the rare buildings in which a philosophical idea can be seen in a single glance.