VILLA PISANI (MONTAGNANA)

'The 'Villa Pisani' outside the city walls of Montagnana^[1] was designed by Andrea Palladio about 1552, for his friend Francesco Pisani, who was also a patron of Paolo Veronese, Giambattista Maganza and Alessandro Vittoria, who provided sculptures of the ''Four Seasons'' for the villa, which is in fact provided with fireplaces to dispell winter chill. Unlike more typical Palladian villas— and their imitations in Britain and Germany— the Villa Pisani at Montagnana has the more typically Italian setting of an urban front (''illustration'') facing a piazza of the ''comune'', and a rural frontage extending into gardens, with an agricultural setting beyond. Unlike many of Palladio's villas in purely rural settings, it has an upper storey, set apart from more public reception rooms on the main floor; twin suites of apartments are accessed by twin oval staircases that flank the central recess on the garden side. On the exterior, little differentiation between floors is made: there is no obviously visible ''piano nobile''. On the garden front, access to the park is from the central recessed portico only; a balustrade above a deep ditch keeps out informal wanderers.

Construction of the villa was under way by September 1553, and it was complete in 1555. The central block is an uncompromising rectangle, with a pedimented tetrastyle portico, Ionic over Doric, that has been sunk into its wall-plane so that the columns are embedded half-columns. On the garden front, the similar structure instead forms a screen across the fronts of a recessed portico surmounted by a loggia, which become in single recessed central feature. The Doric frieze^[2] runs uninterrupted round the building, further binding all elements together.
There are no surviving drawings related to this project, which Pallado presented in his ''Quattro Libri di Architettura'' in an idealized, amplified form, in which the central block is flanked by arched gateway structures that end in tall, three-storey tower-like pavillions.
Villa Pisani at Montagnara continues in private ownership.

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Notes

1. The more prominent Villa Pisani, among numerous villas that belonged to this Venetian family, is the baroque villa at Stra.
2. It is fully-developed, with bucrania and paterae in the metopes between the triglyphs.

External links

★ Centro Internazionale di Studi Achitettura Andrea Palladio: Villa Pisani di Montagnana