The Villa Trissino is a villa

Villa

A villa was originally an ancient Roman upper-class country house. Since its origins in the Roman villa, the idea and function of a villa have evolved considerably. After the fall of the Roman Republic, villas became small farming compounds, which were increasingly fortified in Late Antiquity,...

 which belonged to Gian Giorgio Trissino

Gian Giorgio Trissino

Gian Giorgio Trissino was an Italian Renaissance humanist, poet, dramatist, diplomat, and grammarian.-Biography:...

, located at Cricoli, just outside the center of Vicenza

Vicenza

Vicenza , a city in north-eastern Italy, is the capital of the eponymous province in the Veneto region, at the northern base of the Monte Berico, straddling the Bacchiglione...

, in northern Italy. It was mainly built in the 16th century and is associated by tradition with the architect Andrea Palladio

Andrea Palladio

Andrea Palladio was an architect active in the Republic of Venice. Palladio, influenced by Roman and Greek architecture, primarily by Vitruvius, is widely considered the most influential individual in the history of Western architecture...

.

The building is of undeniable importance in the Palladio "mythos". Since 1994 the villa has been part of a World Heritage Site

World Heritage Site

A UNESCO World Heritage Site is a place that is listed by the UNESCO as of special cultural or physical significance...

 which was designated to protect the Palladian buildings of Vicenza. (In 1996 UNESCO

UNESCO

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations...

 extended the site "Vicenza, City of Palladio" to cover the Palladian Villas outside the core area and renamed it as "City of Vicenza and the Palladian Villas of the Veneto").

This villa is not to be confused with the similarly named Villa Trissino some 20 km away at Sarego

Sarego

Sarego is a town and comune in the province of Vicenza, Veneto, Italy. It is 20 km southwest of Vicenza. SP500 goes through the town of Sarego.-Main sights:In the frazione of Meledo, there are two incomplete villas designed by Andrea Palladio:...

, an incomplete building which Palladio designed for Ludovico and Francesco Trissino, as documented in I quattro libri dell'architettura

I Quattro Libri dell'Architettura

I quattro libri dell'architettura is an Italian treatise on architecture by the architect Andrea Palladio . It was first published in four volumes in 1570 in Venice, illustrated with woodcuts after the author's own drawings. It has been reprinted and translated many times...

("The Four Books of Architecture").

History

It is uncertain whether this villa was designed by Palladio, but it is one of the centres if not, in fact, the origin of his myth. For, tradition holds that right here, in the second half of the 1530s, the Vicentine noble Giangiorgio Trissino (1478-1550) met the young mason

Masonry

Masonry is the building of structures from individual units laid in and bound together by mortar; the term masonry can also refer to the units themselves. The common materials of masonry construction are brick, stone, marble, granite, travertine, limestone; concrete block, glass block, stucco, and...

 Andrea di Pietro at work on the building of his villa. Somehow intuiting the youth’s potential and talent, Trissino took charge of his future formation, introduced him into the Vicentine aristocracy

Aristocracy

Aristocracy , is a form of government in which a few elite citizens rule. The term derives from the Greek aristokratia, meaning "rule of the best". In origin in Ancient Greece, it was conceived of as rule by the best qualified citizens, and contrasted with monarchy...

 and, in the space of a few short years, transformed him into the architect

Architect

An architect is a person trained in the planning, design and oversight of the construction of buildings. To practice architecture means to offer or render services in connection with the design and construction of a building, or group of buildings and the space within the site surrounding the...

 who bore the aulic name of Palladio.

Giangiorgio Trissino was a man of letters, the author of plays for the theatre and works on grammar. In Rome he had been received into the restricted cultural circle of Pope Leo X

Pope Leo X

Pope Leo X , born Giovanni di Lorenzo de' Medici, was the Pope from 1513 to his death in 1521. He was the last non-priest to be elected Pope. He is known for granting indulgences for those who donated to reconstruct St. Peter's Basilica and his challenging of Martin Luther's 95 Theses...

 Medici

Medici

The House of Medici or Famiglia de' Medici was a political dynasty, banking family and later royal house that first began to gather prominence under Cosimo de' Medici in the Republic of Florence during the late 14th century. The family originated in the Mugello region of the Tuscan countryside,...

, where he had met Raphael

Raphael

Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino , better known simply as Raphael, was an Italian painter and architect of the High Renaissance. His work is admired for its clarity of form and ease of composition and for its visual achievement of the Neoplatonic ideal of human grandeur...

. An able connoisseur of architecture

Architecture

Architecture is both the process and product of planning, designing and construction. Architectural works, in the material form of buildings, are often perceived as cultural and political symbols and as works of art...

 (his drawings for his own city palace and the draft of a treatise on architecture still survive), he was probably personally responsible for the remodelling of the family villa at Cricoli, just outside Vicenza, which he had inherited from his father.

Trissino did not demolish the pre-existing building, but redesigned it to give priority to the principal facade

Facade

A facade or façade is generally one exterior side of a building, usually, but not always, the front. The word comes from the French language, literally meaning "frontage" or "face"....

 facing south. This gesture was a sort of manifesto of membership in the new constructional culture based on the rediscovery of ancient Roman architecture

Roman architecture

Ancient Roman architecture adopted certain aspects of Ancient Greek architecture, creating a new architectural style. The Romans were indebted to their Etruscan neighbors and forefathers who supplied them with a wealth of knowledge essential for future architectural solutions, such as hydraulics...

. Between the two existing tower

Tower

A tower is a tall structure, usually taller than it is wide, often by a significant margin. Towers are distinguished from masts by their lack of guy-wires....

s Trissino inserted a two-storey, arcaded

Arcade (architecture)

An arcade is a succession of arches, each counterthrusting the next, supported by columns or piers or a covered walk enclosed by a line of such arches on one or both sides. In warmer or wet climates, exterior arcades provide shelter for pedestrians....

 loggia

Loggia

Loggia is the name given to an architectural feature, originally of Minoan design. They are often a gallery or corridor at ground level, sometimes higher, on the facade of a building and open to the air on one side, where it is supported by columns or pierced openings in the wall...

 which was directly inspired by Raphael’s facade of the Villa Madama

Villa Madama

Villa Madama is situated half way up the slope of Monte Mario Which faces directly north-east and because the hill is curved the part which looks towards Rome faces south and the opposite faces north-west...

 in Rome

Rome

Rome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated city and comune, with over 2.7 million residents in . The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.Rome's history spans two and a half...

, as published by Sebastiano Serlio

Sebastiano Serlio

Sebastiano Serlio was an Italian Mannerist architect, who was part of the Italian team building the Palace of Fontainebleau...

 in the Terzo Libro dell’Architettura (published in Venice

Venice

Venice is a city in northern Italy which is renowned for the beauty of its setting, its architecture and its artworks. It is the capital of the Veneto region...

 in 1540). Trissino reorganised the spaces into a sequence of lateral rooms, which differ in dimensions but are linked by a system of inter-related proportions (1:1; 2:3; 1:2), a matrix which would become a key theme in Palladio’s design method.

Building works were certainly concluded by 1538. At the end of the eighteenth century the Vicentine architect Ottone Calderari heavily modified the structure, and in the first years of the twentieth century a second campaign of works cancelled out the last traces of the Gothic building by accomplishing its belated “Palladianisation”.

Sources

Centro Internazionali di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio (with kind permission).

See also

• Palladian Villas of the Veneto
  Palladian Villas of the Veneto
  The City of Vicenza and the Palladian Villas of the Veneto is a World Heritage Site protecting a cluster of works by the architect Andrea Palladio. UNESCO inscribed the site on the World Heritage List in 1994. At first the site was called "Vicenza, City of Palladio" and only buildings in the...