Villa Gazzotti Grimani

Architecture

The villa was designed and built in the 1540s for the Venetian Taddeo Gazzotti and, like a number of Palladio's buildings, it incorporates a pre-existing structure. In 1550, before the building was completed, Gazzotti was facing financial problems and sold the villa to Girolamo Grimani.

The external form of the villa shows the person who commissioned it to have been a man who wanted to make his influence clearly visible. For the first time Palladio presents the body of the building as a clearly defined cube. The three-fold arcade in the central section, which is reminiscent of Villa Godi, is crowned by a pediment and is the dominant shape of the facade. It is less the embodiment of an original body of thought of Palladio's – comparable examples can be found both in Villa Agostini in Cusignana and in the architecture of Giovanni Maria Falconetto – than of his endeavour to give existing forms of new expression. What is new is that the three-fold arcade takes up the entire height of the one-story building. Equally, the use of a pediment as a symbol of dignity has no counterpart in Venetian secular architecture of that time. A wide flight of steps was originally meant to lead up to the loggia; the narrow flight of steps which now leads up to the center arcade in the loggia is a latter addition.

The body of the building rests on a base, from which it is divided by means of a ledge which runs along the entire width of the facade. On the one hand, this serves to protect the working areas from damp, but on the other hand, it also raises the villa above the surrounding landscape. This use of a base is to be found in a number of Palladio's villas, but it was not his invention; Giovanni Maria Falconetto placed the Villa Vescovile in Luvigliano, which was begun in 1534, on a base. …