Villa Rotunda in Spring

Precision in the Wild

The architect Palladio’s most well-known private residence was as admired in the Renaissance as Emperor Hadrian’s Pantheon temple was admired in ancient Rome, and is modeled on it. The central part of the building is a set of rooms in the form of a square, and they give on to a central hall in the form of a circle, originally with an oculus in its dome to let in light, just like the Parthenon. The building is perfectly symmetrical, and on all four sides you see the same ‘portico’, an ancient Greek roofed porch, often with columns, and Palladio, aiming at reviving the antiquity of Greece and Rome, went all the way and added triangular pediments on each, as in the Parthenon, and statues of Greek deities. The building’s mathematically precise symmetry, as at the Apollo Temple at Bassae but not quite so wild, faces out of its four symmetrical sides in four directions, each toward a different kind of landscape—a forested slope, a gradual hill slanting downwards, a valley, and a distant view. This picture of it in springtime, with fruit-trees in blossom, reminds us that its name in Italian, 'villa', originally meant a farm with a handsome main residence. It is a deep instinct of classicism to put mathematically precise formed buildings in the wilds or among fertile landscapes. Thus geometrical beauty created by man is set next to organic forms given us by nature —as in the stage settings of The Sleeping Beauty.

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