Paradise regained

Alasdair Palmer marvels at a series of Veronese frescoes at Palladio’s Villa Barbaro

It has included repairing the roof and strengthening the walls, as well as redecorating the interior, and it has taken almost as long as it took to build the original structure — but work on Andrea Palladio’s last building, the Tempietto at Maser, is finally complete. And what a glory it is!

The building was finished in 1580, the year Palladio died, and he may never have seen it in its final form. It is the only church that he designed which isn’t in Venice. Marcantonio Barbaro, who commissioned it to be the chapel for his villa, was a long-time friend of Palladio. He was also a powerful advocate of Palladio’s architecture, and helped him get commissions from the Venetian Senate.

The deep conservatism of Venetians irritated, depressed and ultimately infuriated Palladio, but there wasn’t a thing he could do about it. When a fire damaged the Doge’s palace, he offered to demolish what remained of the Gothic building and replace it with an entirely new edifice of his own, designed in accordance with rigorous adherence to classical principles of harmony. The Senate rejected his offer, and hired another team of architects to restore the old building exactly as it had been. Palladio wanted the church of Redentore, one of his greatest masterpieces in Venice, to be based on a circle — but Venice’s Senators turned down that idea, too. They wanted a church based on the traditional cruciform plan and, if Palladio wouldn’t provide designs for one, they would go to another architect who would. At which point Palladio relented and within a week provided the Senators with designs for the sort of conventional-shaped church that they wanted.