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10

The Villa as Paradigm James Ackerman

1 Roman relief showing town and suburban villa, Avezzano, Italy

1

Introduction

A villa is a building in the country-or at least outside the city - designed for its owner'senjoymentand relaxation.Though a villa may also serve as the center of an agriculturalenterprise,the pleasurefactor is what essentially distinguishesthis kind of residencefrom the farmhouse. Similarly, a villa estate differs from the farm.' The farmhousetends to be simple in structure and to perpetuateformal solutions that do not requirethe interventionof a designer. The villa, typically the productof an architect'simagination,asserts its modernity. Since it was first fixed by the patriciansof ancientRome, the basic programof the villa has remainedunchangedfor more than two thousandyears. The villa is therefore unique as a paradigm;other architectural types- the palace, the place of worship, the factory-have changed in form and purpose as the role of the ruler, the characterof the liturgy,the natureof manufacturehave changed, frequentlyand often radically.The villa has remainedsubstantiallythe same because it fulfills a need that never alters. Because it is not materialbut psychological and ideological, this need is not subjectto the influences of evolving societies and

technologies. The villa accommodatesa fantasy impervious to reality. The villa cannot be understoodapartfrom the city; it exists not to fulfill autonomous functions but as the antithesisto urban values and accommodations,and its economic situation is that of a satellite (fig. 1). The villa may be built and supportedwith monetary surplusesgeneratedby urban commerce and industry;or, when it is sustained by agriculture,the villa may be justified by urbancenters' need for the surplus it will produce. Consequentlythe fate of the villa has been intimatelytied to that of the city; villa culturehas thrivedin periods of metropolitangrowth (as was true in ancientRome, eighteenth-andnineteenthcentury Britain, and the twentiethcentury throughoutthe West) and has declined with urbandecline - indeed, to the point of extinction as urbanlife witheredfrom the fifth to the eleventh century in the West. But this generalizationis invalid for two moments in Westernhistory: the apogee of the republican city-statein classical Greece and the communes of central Europe and Italy in the period 1000-1300. Perhapsin these moments of communalidealism those whom the political institutionsmost benefitedfelt no need to escape the city; or it may be that life in the country was still too rugged and unsafe for anyone not raised to endureits rigors.

As satellites, villas have not always been near the cities on which they depended. Some colonial agriculturalcenters-such as those in Gaul, Britain, and Africa in Roman times and in the southernUnited States in pre-Revolutionarytimes -were established in areas almost devoid of urbandevelopment and became in themselves industrial and culturalcenters, importingthe values of urbanculture. They often grew to be large in scale, and their dependenceon the institution of slavery was due in partto their isolation. I shall exclude from what follows examples designed for rulers. While only persons of wealth, and usually of prestige and power, have been able to afford a villa (at least until the nineteenthcentury), the idea of a country dwelling is a bourgeois concept, responding to the perceived needs of the city dweller. The villas of kings and princes, built and supportedby public wealth, are essentially hybrids, rooted in bourgeois ideology but, by virtue of often unlimited economic means and the symbolic andrepresentationalrequirementsof supremepower, demanding a scale and an elegance in some degree antitheticalto the concept. The villa of the EmperorHadrianat Tivoli is the paradigmof this hybrid form.

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The Ideology of the Villa

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Today, as in the past, the farmerand the peasant, whetherpoor and oppressedor rich and independent, do not as a rule regard country life as an idyllic state;they accept it as a necessary and, more often than not, somewhat antipatheticcondition. In the folklore of all ages the country dweller longs- though possibly with some misgivings- for the stimulationand comforts of city life. The city dweller, on the other hand, has typically idealized country life and has sought to acquirea propertyfrom which it might be enjoyed if he could afford it. This impulse is generatedby psychological ratherthan utilitarianneeds; it is quintessentiallyideological.2

have been able to expropriateruralland often requiringthe care of a laboringclass or of slaves for the realizationof the myth.

These and other prolific periods in villa history were also markedby a literaturedevoted to the design and improvementof villas and their gardens- an equally rich Because literatureis a primaryform expres- source for the interpretationof the myth. The rathermuddledprescriptionsof ancient sing myths, the ideology of the villa in is reinforced authorsstimulateda particularinventiveevery epoch richly by poetry and prose. Indeed, literaryworks have not ness in treatise writers of the Renaissance (Palladio immediately comes to mind). The merely reflected the villa cultureof their time; they have promotedvilla concepts de- publicationin Englandof books on the villa from the early eighteenthto the midveloped in later times. nineteenthcentury was literally an industry in itself, and there were those for whom it Major revivals of the villa from that of the fifteenth century in Italy to Le Corbusier was a primaryvocation. In America, from have been explicitly justified by referenceto the time of The Horticulturalistin the the Roman writers of the late Republic and 1830s to Sunset Magazine, House and Garearly Empire-Cato, Varro,Virgil, Horace, den, and House Beautiful in the mid- and I use "ideology" not in the currentcollolater twentiethcentury, instructionin the Pliny the Younger,Vitruvius, and others. Each villa revival has been accompaniedby nurtureof the suburbanvilla has attracteda quial sense, to designate a strongly held a revival of villa literature:in the fifteenth conviction, but ratheras referringto a large public. concept or myth so firmly rooted in the century that of Poliziano and Bembo; in unconscious that it is held as an incontroPaintingalso bolsters the ideology. In Pomeighteenth-centuryEnglandthat of vertible truth. Marxists interpretideology in Shaftesbury,James Thompson, Pope, and peiian and other Campanianvillas the walls this sense as the means by which the domi- ultimately the early novel (the writings of were often decoratedwith ideal gardenand nant class reinforces andjustifies the social villa scenes; it is chiefly from this source Jane Austen seem obsessed with the propand economic structureand its privileged erty and status problems of urban-oriented that we know of the appearanceof the seaside pleasure residences of the type called position within it while obscuringits moticountry life); in nineteenth-centuryAmervation from itself and others. In these terms ica, that of the Transcendentalists,Henry villa marittima. Tapestriesand wall paintthe villa is a paradigm,not only of architec- James, and Edith Wharton. ings in late-medievalcountry castles but of it is a or ture, ideology; myth fantasy depicted the delights of country life, anticiover the course of millenthroughwhich, pating the scenes of social gatherings, of whose is music parties, and outings on the walls of nia, persons position privilege rooted in urbancommerce and industry

2 Fresco of a pleasure villa from Villa Barbaro, Masir, Italy, by Paolo Veronese 3 "Badminton" by Antonio Canaletto

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classical landscape Seventeenth-century that of Claude particularly painting, Lorrain,rose to prominencein the following centuryand fostered the aesthetic of the picturesqueand the informalEnglish garden;at the end of the centurythe first Romanticvilla designers actuallytook the imaginarybuildings of the Roman Campagnain Lorrainpaintings as architectural models.The more modest ambitionsof the mid-nineteenthcentury suburbanvilla are reflectedin early Impressionistpaintings, especiallythose of Monet.

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Palladianvillas (fig. 2). Eighteenth-century Englandpioneeredin a new genre of painting, the portraitof the country house; its popularitywas stimulatedby the visit of the distinguishedVenetiantopographicalpainter Canaletto(fig. 3). Turnergot his startas a specialistin this genre which, though it admittedlygave prominenceto the great countryhouses of the landed aristocracy, musthave promotedbourgeois idealization of countrylife.

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The content of villa ideology is rooted in the contrastof country and city, the virtues and delights of the one being presentedas the antithesesof the vices and excesses of the other. The expression is fully articulated in the literatureof RepublicanRome, where it evolves from an early protovillastage in the agriculturaltreatises of Cato and Varro into the typical matureform of Pliny the Younger'stwo lettersdescribingto a friend the pleasures of two of his numerousluxurious estates-one on the Tuscan seashore and one at Laurentiumoutside Rome. The early stage, relatedto stoicism in its ascetic and moral tone, advises the urbanman of affairs to acquire a modest farmhouseon a small country propertyand to cultivate it himself with little or no help; the labor itself is seen as purifying him of the contaminationof the city. A similarpatternof evolution is repeatedin the later provincial villa culture of ImperialRome, with its transitionfrom the simple and almost unadorned country residences of the fifteenth century in the Veneto to the elegance of Palladianvillas. The same metamorphosisis traceablein Thomas Jefferson'sconcept of his farm at Monticello from the modest structureof the 1770s (itself surely influenced by the early Roman writers)to the lavish estate of the early nineteenthcentury (fig. 4).

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In describing the sumptuousTuscanvilla, Pliny set the tone for later writers;the letter concludes with an encomium that clearly delineates the rural-urbanantithesis. For besides the attractionswhichI have mentioned, the greatest is the relaxation and carefree luxuryof the place - there is no need for a toga, the neighborsdo not come to call, it is always quiet and peaceful-advantages as great as the healthful situation and limpidair. I alwaysfeel energetic andfit for anythingat my Tuscan villa, both mentallyand physically. I exercise my mind by study, my body by hunting. My household, too, flourishes better here than elsewhere: I have never lost a retainer [slave?], none of those I broughtup with me.3 About 1600 years later Palladiodescribes the same benefitsfrom the architect's perspective. But the villa mansion is of no less utility and comfort [than the city house], since the rest of the time [the gentleman]passes there overseeing his possessions and in improving their potential with industryand with the skill of agriculture. There also, by means of the exercise that one can get in the villa on foot or horseback, the body may more actively be made to preserve its health and robustness, and there the spirit tired of the turmoilof the city may be greatly re-

stored and consoled and may peacefully attend to the pursuit of letters and of contemplation.For this reason, the ancient sages used often to retire to such places, where they might be visited by their virtuousfriends and relatives and where there were houses, gardens,fountains and similar relaxing places . . . so that they could easily pursue that blessed life so far as it may be achieved here below.4 And Le Corbusier,writing to a client in the 1920s, stresses the importanceof the landscape setting: The inhabitantscome here because this rustic landscape goes well with countrylife. They survey their whole domainfrom the height of their jardin suspenduor from the four aspects of their fenetres en longeur. Their domestic life is insertedinto a Vergilian dream.5 The same repertoryof the benefits of villa life echoes down the centuries:the practical advantagesof farming, the healthfulness providedby the air and exercise-particularly hunting-relaxation in reading, conversationwith virtuousfriends and contemplation, and delightfulviews of the landscape.

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Monticello, Charlottesville, Virginia, 1769, Thomas Jefferson

Gallo-Roman Villa Anthee, near Naumur, Belgium

Social and Economic Aspects

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Le Corbusier'sreferenceto his client's "domain" remindsus that the villa is by nature the possession of the privileged and powerful class in society, though at certaintimes in history, as in the mid-nineteenthcentury, the privilege has filtereddown to those of modest financialmeans. The social structure of most of the villas we are considering involves the proprietorand his guests on one stratum,servantson another,and in the case of agriculturalestablishments,farm laborers (often supervisedby bailiffs) on still a third. Whetherfree or enslaved, all of the latter were dependenton the proprietorand his estate for their subsistenceduringmost of the historical span we are considering, and they could not breakthe serf-master bond without great risk. The owner, however, had no reciprocalobligationtoward his retainers.In this respect the villa differs fundamentallyfrom the feudal castle, where the relation between the lord and his retainers was contractualand reciprocal;they providedgoods and services-including military service - and he providedprotection against common enemies. Long after the feudal system had been forced into the backgroundby a money economy and by urbancapitalism, the landed nobility resisted abandoningcountrycastles in favor of villas; this class had no reasonto develop a villa ideology until it became economically dependenton the city.

In those areas of the postmedievalwestern world in which the feudal system was most firmly established, therefore,a villa culture was slow to develop. The situationis clearly delineated in France, where the formatof country life for the privileged classes derived from the feudal chateau.The social characterof the chateaudid not change substantiallyas the monarchygained in power, drawing the aristocracyinto a dependent position at the court, where the competition for prefermentmade rustic retirementa risky option. Furthermore,the prestige of the aristocracyin Francewas such that, well into the nineteenthcentury,bourgeois proprietorsmodeled theircountryresidences on the aristocrat'schateau. Viollet-le-Duc's designs for country residences are called "chateaux"while CesarDaly's, for a lower social stratum,are called "villas."

on the economic resourcesof the city.

The villa frequentlyappearsin a colonial context, where a powerfulempirecontrols distant territoriesfrom whose produceit gains sufficientprofitto offset the expense and burdenof providingdefense and communications. Colonial villas tend to differ in type and scale from those in the homeland; being isolated, they must functionas social and administrativeunits in themselves, often serving as substitutesfor towns. Their proprietorsare, typically, economically dependenton the productionof their estates. The grandervillas on the periphery of the RomanEmpire-in Gaul, Pannonia,Africa, and the like-mostly built between the second and the fifth centuries, were more complex establishments than those on the Italianpeninsula;some, like the villa Anthee nearNaumurin of two villa falls into one Belgium (fig. 5), were small villages in Economically the themselves, containingcommunitybaths. categories: the self-sustainingagricultural The American colonies of the southernAtits for estate that yields not only produce lantic seaboardwere virtuallywithout any or own use but a surplusfor sale to urban nearby towns, so that the estates had to regional marketssufficientto sustainthe accommodateall the communalfunctions; proprietor'sdesired mode of life; and the as Battista Alberti villa described by Leone many included dependentsettlements,like Roman ancestors. The dwellings and their as conceived purely "per semplice diletto," a retreatand dependentfor its construcworkshopsof slaves and freedmenhave survived too selectively to permit a credible tion and maintenanceon surpluscapital of these settlements. reconstruction The ideourban centers. in earned normally and of city logical opposition country values is thus in part a responseto the dependence of the villa style of countrylife

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Drayton Hall, Charleston, North Carolina

"Villa in the Italian Style," from The Architecture of CountryHouses, 1850, by Andrew Jackson Downing

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In the course of time colonial villas in rural territoriesoften spawnedtowns, reversing the normal dependenceof the villa on the city. The far-flungImperialvilla-settlements of Rome and the Americanplantationcenters had originally been sited in places suitable for communication,transport,and in the case of the Romanexamples, defense; as urbanizationincreased, these considerationsencouragedthe growthof towns, as we are remindedin the etymological linking of "villa," "village," andthe French "ville." These were not the great metropolitancenters that grew up as administrative headquarters,but more modest markettowns. In the southernUnited States the domestic architectureof these towns retained some of the openness and ruralflavor of the villa-plantationresidence. Southernplantationmansions themselves were not designed to express autonomy from the mothercountry;on the contrary, their owners, eager to affirmtheir close ties to Britain, had their carpentersbuild from plans in books recentlypublishedin London; this intentionexplains the Palladian porch added to the facade of DraytonHall near Charleston(fig. 6), which was to have had symmetricallyplaced outbuildingsconnected to the central block by Palladian quadrants.The fact that these settlershad to subduethe wildernessof a new land at great physical and financialrisk cementedtheir

attachmentto the country life and architectural tastes of the British squire. The absence of a comparablevilla development in the northernAtlanticcolonies is initially attributableto the differentsocial and political orientationof the colonists, the majorityof whom, refugees from church and class dominationat home, had not attained positions of privilege and statuson which to reflect with nostalgia. They had, furthermore,chosen an area more adapted to family farming on small freeholdproperties, and they had establisheda society in which there were no slaves, peasants, or serfs to supporta gentlemanfarmeror to maintaina pleasurevilla. The contrastbetween the northerncolonial farmerand the southernplantationowner was even greater than thatbetween Cato and Pliny the Younger;Cato, a statesman,farmedfor ideological and philosophicalreasons, while his American counterparttilled the land to survive, with a certainCatonian(and Protestant) pride in successful crops and in the sweat they representedbut withoutthose mythic trappingsthat find expressionin the literature,art, and architecturalsymbolism of a properideology. Eventuallythe polarity in both the Romanand the American social and ethical attitudesbecame seeds of civil war.

The most radical mutationin the history of the villa occurredin the early nineteenth century, when the villa ideology became democratizedand accessible to the growing body of lower-middle-classcity dwellers.6 The causes were complex: the rapidgrowth of central cities at the expense of the countryside; industrialization;rail and trolley transportation;the effects of eighteenthcentury egalitariansocial philosophy; Romanticism;and others. The development was anticipatedin British villa literatureof the later eighteenthand early nineteenth centuries (most effectively by JohnClaudius Loudon in GreatBritainand by Alexander JacksonDavis andAndrewJacksonDowning in the United States), which firstprovided model plans for small and inexpensive country houses; the texts accompanying these plans promotedthe elements of the traditionalmythology suited to proprietors below the rankof gentleman(fig. 7). Once the villa had been presentedas a commodity, it was a short step to its manufactureby entrepreneursfor the open market,and another short step to its mass productionon the peripheryof great cities and ultimately of smaller ones. The garden-citymovement of the later nineteenthcentury appropriated as much as possible of villa ideology into its blurredvision of urbanand ruralvalues. Ultimately the term "villa" came to be applied to any detachedor semidetached residence in city, suburb,or countrywith

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Style and Form

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a little more open space aroundit than could be found in dwellings in the densely populatedstreets of the urbancore. This development,however, did not affect the evolution of the villa in its traditionalsense, except perhapsin helping to disparagethe use of the word "villa" to designatethe type. Nineteenth-centurycountry houses in the villa tradition-such as those of Scott, Richardson,Viollet-le-Duc, and Voyseywere not called villas, and in the present century Le Corbusierwas exceptional in reviving the designation.

The distinction between the farmhouseand the villa is not simply one of purposeand of program;it is rooted in differentcultures and in differentrates of evolution. Just as agriculturalpractices change more slowly than those of industryand commerce, so the farmhousechanges more slowly than the villa. Frenchhistoriansof the Annales school have called this phenomenonof gradualismthe longue duree and have opened new historicalpotentialitiesin studying its processes.7 Farmhousesin many parts of Europe today retainforms that have remainedunchangedfor millennia- though they are rapidlybeing replacedby contractors' villas and will soon be threatenedwith total extinction. The debased economic and social position of the peasant(as well as the contadino and the sharecropper) have, until recent times, kept him from altering his agriculturalmethods or the physical setting in which he lives and works; but even on the rareoccasions when he became wealthy and worldly, his sense of proprietyand pride of class led him to retain traditionalforms. The villa is quite the opposite; it seldom displays an effort on the part of the proprietor or the architectto conform to past custom; with rare exceptions it strainsto be the paradigmof the architecturalavantgarde. The rule is illustratedby the celebrated milestones of modernistarchitecture:

the Ames Gatehouse, the Coonley House, the Villa Savoye at Poissy (fig. 8), the suburbanretreatsof the New York Five (fig. 9), and Venturi. Granted,Renaissancearchitects sought to revive antiquevillas, and British eighteenth-centuryvilla architects were fanatic Palladians;but in both cases the revival was a progressive statementthat explicitly rejected a prevailingstyle. There is hardly a moment in the history of architecture when villas were less innovative than other architecturaltypes. Though urban residences have sometimes kept abreast of villas, generally they follow a more conservative tradition, even in instances where urbanand ruralresidences were designed for the same patron. The differenthousing styles are consistent with the proprietors' usual fashions of dress in the city as opposed to the country. The villa is less fixed in form than most other architecturaltypes because the requirementsof leisure lack clear definition. But two contrastingmodels were firmly established in Roman times: the condensedcubic and the open-extended.The former was better suited to such crowdedsuburbs as Pompeii, where the line between the city house and villa was - as in the residencesof Le Corbusieror Peter Eisenman(figs. 8, 9)- not firmly drawnand to the initial

8 Villa Savoye, Poissy, France, 1929-1930, Le Corbusier

9 House II (Falk House), Hardwick, Vermont, 1969, Peter Eisenman

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settlements on the peripheryof the Empire, where considerationsof defense demanded consolidation. The compactedPompeiian form, as in the Villa dei Misteri, just outside the city walls (fig. 10), is due also to the fact that the villa had not yet gained its independencefrom urbanmodels by the first century B.C.; the vaguenessof the contemporarywriter Vitruviusin describing villas (his main point is that the orderof rooms at the entrancediffers from that of the city houses) confirmsthis suspicion. When the condensed villa faced a farmyard or a view, it tended to acquirea loggia along its facade, in Romanexamples typically framedbetween two projectingblocks or towers. This type reappearsin the small early Renaissancevilla, like the Belvedere of Innocent VIII at the Vatican,or the Farnesina in Rome (fig. 11). Tropicalforest conditions produceda variantof the cubic type in the plantationhouses of seventeenthcentury Brazil and in the eighteenth-century Caribbean,a unique veranda-surrounded block that seems not to have been exported from Europe;it found its way into the plantation-housedesign of the early-nineteenth-centuryMississippi valley, as at Home Place in Louisiana(fig. 12).8

The open villa is more congenial to the ideological engagementwith nature.It expands informally in extended asymmetrical blocks and porticoes, and in the variedprofiles of changing levels; it often grows organicallyas the wealthy proprietoris temptedto continuouslyextend the initial structureby adding rooms, courts, and porticoes. Pliny must have done as much, and Jefferson(who in the course of forty years never ceased to alter the shape of Monticello), as did FrankLloyd Wrightat the Taliesins (fig. 13). To fulfill its ideological mission, the villa must interactin some way with nature,and the two majortypes I have definedare roughly coordinatedwith two types of interaction. The compact-cubicvilla is often a foil to nature, standingoff from it in polar opposition; the open-extendedtype is integrative, imitatingnaturein the irregularity of its layout and profile, embracingthe ground, assuming naturalcolors and textures. A paradigmof the first is Lorenzode' Medici's villa at Poggio a Caiano, outside Florence (fig. 14). Inscribedwithin a cube, it is faced with white stucco to emphasize its total polarity to the irrationalityof trees and rolling hills; to underscorethis message, it is raised on a high podiumto assure that the contact of the residentswith nature would be not intimate but removedand in perspective.9

10 Villa dei Misteri, Pompeii, Italy, first century B.c.

11 Villa Farnesina, Rome, 1509, sixteenth-century view 12 Home Place Plantation, Louisiana, 1801

13 Taliesin East, Spring Green, Wisconsin, begun 1911, Frank Lloyd Wright

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14 Villaof Lorenzo de' Medici,Poggioa Caiano,Italy,1489 15 VillaGodi,Lonedo,Italy, 1537-1542

The white-stuccoedpodium-villabecame a major twentieth-centuryparadigm,notably in the Villa Savoye at Poissy (fig. 8) and in the TugendhatHouse in Bmo. Palladioalso followed this traditionin the design of his first villa, that of the Godi family in Lonedo (fig. 15), which is also sharplygeometrical in form, avoiding even window framesor moldings; there is no podium, but the entrance stairwayleads to the upperfloor (later Palladianworks are more engaged with nature-even the entirely cubic Villa Rotunda in Vicenza, which is designed to reflect the varied views and which seems to crown the hill on which it is placed). The effort to respond to natureby antithesisexplains the apparentparadoxof melding the sharplygeometrical and classical Palladian style in early eighteenth-centuryBritain (at Lord Burlington'svilla at Chiswick, for example) with the inventionof the informal English garden in reaction againstthe imposition of geometric orderon plant life.

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16 Imperial villa, Piazza Armerina, Rome, third century

17 Villa Lante, Ragnia, Italy, 1568

18 Villa d'Este, Tivoli, Italy, 1565 (etching by Venturini)

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Pliny's descriptionsof extended, even sprawlingstructuresoffer a model of the more collaborativeresponse to the landscape, but the appearanceof these villas is difficult to reconstructfrom his letters;the villa at Piazza Armerinain Sicily, unearthedin recent times, providesa better opportunityto visualize this exceptionally large and lavish "organic" type (fig. 16).

den design; for the first time the centralaxis of the composition is occupied by landscaping elements- watercourses, fountains, and stairways- while the shy, cubic residential casinos are pushed to either side.

Renaissancedesigners would have been disappointedand disorientedhad they discovered that Romanvillas were not classical. Most of the ancient models (none of of villas were too Renaissance which was known priorto the discovery Designers fixed on the polarity of natureand culture of Pompeii) lacked the axial symmetry, to devise schemes in which the barriers rational integration, and proportionthat between the two were blurred;what intersupportedtheir conception of the heritage action did occur was, rather,between the of antiquity.WhetherRomanvillas, like architectureand the garden, which remany in later times, expressed their commained firmly in the artist'scontrol. The munion with natureby a richness of color formal garden of the Renaissancewas freand of texture is hardto tell even today, because of the condition of the remains. In quently complementedby a barco, or hunting park, where the wildness of nature any event, Renaissancearchitectsfrom could be accepted;the nature-artdialectic Giuliano da Sangallo throughBramante, was transferredto the contrastof wild and Raphael, and Palladiodid give the villa a tamed greenery and water. An early engrav- classical form by imposing a rule of order, number, and symmetrythat fixed the type ing of the Villa Lante in Bagnaiashows a small "wild" area in the lower right corner until the moment of naturalistdisruptionin the eighteenth century (SebastianoSerlio, (fig. 17). In nonagriculturalRenaissance in his manuscriptfor a book on villas and villas, such as those of the Papalcourt in Rome, the artifices of the formal garden palaces, even classicized the peasant'shut). took precedence even over the architecture; This achievementgreatly narrowedthe distance between the two Romantypes by the Villa d'Este in Tivoli concedes all empulling the extending arms and wings of the phasis to the garden(fig. 18), while the building itself is exceptionally inexpressive open villa in symmetricalorderabouta and bland. The architectureof the Villa central block, as in the porticoedvillas Lante in Bagnaia is overwhelmedby its gar- of Palladio.

The triumphof natureover architectural form was ultimately achieved in the eighteenth century, when the fashion of the picturesqueemerged. The desire to make the real environmentlook like pictureswas stimulatedby the landscapepaintingsof Poussin, Claude Lorrain,Ruysdael, and others, in which the architecture,while frequentlygeometric in its forms, was designed to be seen as part of the landscape and to respondto it in mood. Authorsof books on architectureand landscapedesign-such as RichardPayneKnight, Uvedale Price, and their heir Humphrey Repton- urged clients to build villas that borrowedfrom the landscapesomethingof its irregularity,its contrastsof light, and its shadows and textures. The asymmetriesof Gothic proved sympatheticto this aim, and the "ItalianVilla" style (fig. 7) abruptly emerged, not from any actualmodels in Italy, but from the canvasesof the French and British painterswho had workedthere (Schinkel'sCharlottenhofgardener'svilla was one exception; its motives were authenticallyItalian). From this point on, a picturesque, nature-integratingspirit dominates the naturalistlineage of villa architecture-from the publicists Papworth, Loudon, andDowningthroughPhilipWebb's Red House, Shaw and Richardson,Lutyens, Aalto, Wright, the Greens, andMaybeckto Moore.

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The View

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In reflecting on the ways in which villas respondto the landscape, one must remember to look not only at them, but out from them. The choice of prospectis almost as subject to myth and the rule of taste as is the choice of design-I say "almost"because villa buildersare limited in the choice of land formationand floraby the natureof the particularterritoryin which they intend to settle and by the propertyavailableto them. The environs of Tivoli, west of Rome, offer paradigmaticexamples of three genres of villa siting. Hadrian'svast villa extends over a low-lying escarpmentat the base of the hills thatrise out of the wooded Campagna,just barely above the level of the plain; it is a nestling villa in the lap of the hills, with views just over the treetops. The villa of QuintiliusVarusand the Renaissance Villa of the Este family are perched high on the slopes-not on the very peaks, but high enough to gain a vast panoramaof the countrysideand distantmountains.A view towardthe formerfrom the terraceof the latter (fig. 19) shows both to be commanding, extrovertedvillas (the famed gardens of Villa d'Este, incidentally,are barely

visible from the villa itself: they drop away sharply, and attentionis drawnonly to the distant panorama).By contrast, Horace's "Sabine Farm" is back within the mountains on an extraordinarysite suited to a poet (fig. 20): a saddle, only large enough to hold a small cubic structure,deeply embedded between two sharplyrising hills, with a valley on one side of the cross-axis and conical peaks on the other, atop one of which a village seems almost to cling (the surviving one is believed to occupy the site of its Roman predecessor). Surely the architectureof each of these four structures is designed aroundwhat can be seen from them as much as aroundwhat is done in them. The villa view that in one sense most fully illustratesthe urbanroots of the villa myth is the one that looks back on the city from a high and distantpromontoryoutside its walls; such villas once dotted the slopes of Mount Vesuvius when Pompeii flourished, and Cosimo de' Medici built one of the earliest Renaissancevillas on a man-made terraceabove Fiesole, so that in his leisure hours he could enjoy visual commandof the city he controlledpolitically.

The impact of the prospecton the conception of the villa was intensifiedin eighteenth-centuryEnglandwhen the vogue for the informal gardenwas extendedto embrace the entire agriculturallandscape. The effect was achievedby removingwalls, hedges, and fences so that the lawn and planted trees would merge imperceptibly into pastureand bosc. The innovationwas due not merely to a change of taste, as its promotersmade it out to be, but also to a radical change in agriculturaleconomy and society resulting from the Acts of Enclosure, which wiped out the ancientcommon pasturesand peasanttillage, as well as many villages on the great estates, and concentrateddevelopmentof the entire landscape in the hands of the landowners. Extended fields with cattle and haystacks could now become embellishmentsof a pastoralelegy.

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19 View from Villa d'Este, Tivoli, Italy, 1565

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Horace's Sabine Farm, Tivoli, Italy, first century

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