Fig. 76.—Window of Palazzo Branzo.
Palladio was an earnest devotee of his art as he understood it, but he had what may be called a theatrical ideal of architecture. The superficial appearance was what chiefly concerned him. He had great versatility in scenic and structurally meaningless composition, and his numerous palace fronts in Vicenza are remarkable for their superficially varied character. The Palazzo Valmarana, with its colossal pilasters on a high podium overlapping a lesser order embracing the basement and mezzanine, while the great entablature is broken into ressauts over the pilasters; the Palazzo Colleone-Porta, with its basement wall rusticated over a plain dado and an Ionic order on the face of the superstructure; the Palazzo Porta-Barbarano, with its superimposed orders and elaborate ornamentation in stucco relief; and the Loggia Bernarda, with its gigantic composite order and balcony corbels in the form of Doric triglyphs (Fig. 75), are sufficient illustrations of this. The skin of stucco with which many of these buildings were originally covered has broken off in many places, revealing the poor materials of which they are built.
Palladio's compositions are, indeed, based on order and symmetry, but order and symmetry of a mechanical kind. On these and other kindred qualities grammarians in art are prone to lay great stress, but unless accompanied by many others, which for the most part elude all human powers of analysis and description, though they are instinctively grasped by the true artist and appreciated by the discerning and sympathetic beholder, they have little value. Palladio and his associates were not true artists, they were grammatical formalists without the inspiration of genius.[1] As for Scamozzi, little need be said.
- ↑ They were grammatical, not in the sense of using the classic orders with correctness,—this, as we have seen, they did not do,—but in the sense of arranging their architectural details, such as they were, on a basis of grammatical order.
