zeppole

I have to confess that while I am a enormous fan of Palladio -- so much so I am finally making my pilgrimage to Vicenza and the Palladian beyond next month -- Il Redentore is one of my least favorite buildings in Venice, and I have that opinion independent of Ruskin. (I've sometimes worried I have it for the building having appeared in to many advertisements for things like banks and airlines). But I also think any critic needs to be taken for his overall passion as much as -- even more than -- any of his (or her) individual judgments.

Franco,

I will also need Fred Plotkin's Italy for the Gourmet Traveler, weighing in at several pounds.

Think we can hire this guy?

http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo...27eTk7s3-XvKMQ

franco

I think I'm going to hire one through my Venetian acquaintances... will cost a lot less than officially. But on dining in Venice, I swear you don't need Plotkin's pounds, it's just enough to print http://www.fodors.com/community/euro...estaurants.cfm

Now for the serious considerations... Il Redentore is one of my favourite Renaissance churches anywhere, not just in Venice. How Palladio blended a nave and a domed central-plan building here is just brilliant IMO. BUT it is a difficult church to visit, admittedly - it all depends on the time of the day when you're visiting, on the angle of the incident light. Arrive in the morning, and the interior seems relatively bland. Arrive in the evening, shortly before the sun sets, and it will come stunningly alive. Which is to say, in other words, that the opening hours (until 5 pm) are just plain silly: no way of doing it justice in the summer half-year! (Unless you go inside before an evening service.) It's really making a HUGE difference!

zeppole

I saw Il Redentore in winter, which may account for something. When I've sharpened by eyes on Palladio later this year, I'll have a better basis for my next look, which I will be sure to time per your suggestions. (I never mind sitting through a service if that's what it takes.)

Zerlina

I'm not sure that visiting the Palladian villas will sharpen your eyes to any useful extent for a better appreciation of Il Redentore. With a few notable exceptions, Palladio's villas were designed as working, self-supporting country houses, and he prided himself on the fact that they combined utility and beauty. Utility was not a factor much required or admired in Renaissance church design. Also, the inner space of one exception, the Villa Rotonda, has been almost totally disfigured by its subsequent decoration.

Of the ads I recall, many more featured San Giorgio Maggiore than Il Redentore;

zeppole

Well, I'm not sure either, but I'm going, and we'll see what I learn! I sometimes can make imaginative leaps and connections across the categories. Perhaps Palladio thought Il Redentore was immoral too, given your description of what he valued.

My recollections are of pictures taken from the bell tower of San Giorgio Maggiore. Essentially this shot:

http://images.travelpod.com/users/ze...m-the-dome.jpg

But I've actually never figured out why I had the reaction I did to Il Redentore first seeing it. That was just one guess.

Zerlina

The idea that Palladio thought Il Redentore was immoral is, with all due respect, more than farfetched.

As far as I know, he was a practicing Catholic and shared the views of the Catholic Church at that time, which were not those of a repressed Victorian Englishman raised as an Evangelical.

zeppole

I was joking, Zerlina. But apparently the pride that you describe as Palladio's was based on some ideas of what constituted morality in architecture (perhaps shaped by a repressive Catholic Church with an aggressive educational agenda.)

franco

Sorry, I don't get the part about the shot from the bell tower of S. Giorgio, zeppole. What has this picture to do with your reaction to Il Redentore?

Zerlina

Were you joking? I doubt it, as I doubt that you're joking about a repressive Catholic Church with an aggressive educational agenda.

Palladio's ideas about architecture were shaped largely by his studies of Vitruvius, who was not subject to the Catholic Church's ideas, mostly because he predated it.

zeppole

I responded in a post above to Zerlina that I sometimes wondered if my less-than-enthused reaction to Il Redentore had to do with the fact that before I saw it in Venice, I had seen many corporate advertisements in magazines that featured it as a photo. I gave Zerlina a link to the generic shot I was referring to, taken from San Giorgio Maggiore's bell tower.

Bokhara2

Thanks everyone for an interesting discussion.
And tips for my next trip to Venice.

Not a guidebook, but I very much enjoyed HV Morton's, "A Traveller in Italy."

franco

...but the church in the picture, zeppole, is S. Giorgio (seen from its own bell tower) - not SS. Redentore, which is hidden in the mist to the far left, and invisible on that photo.

franco

This one is Il Redentore:
http://cruises.about.com/od/mediterr.../venice075.htm - note the completely different layout and roof; inside, a rather successful try: http://www.unav.es/ha/004-IGLE/palla...terior-001.jpg

zeppole

Oh! Then Zerlina is right about the ads, and I have inexcusably mixed up the two churches. Now in addition to figuring out my puzzling feelings about Il Redentore, I will have to figure out why I have so long kept that picture in my mind as including Il Redentore.

franco

If it was, perhaps, actually S. Giorgio that you disliked, then you're certainly not alone. I think the impression that Palladio created a distorted facade here is unfair, but it's shared by many. My own opinion is that he created a facade that was (and is) to be seen from Piazzetta S. Marco, i.e. from a distance, across the water; and in this respect, it's a perfect achievement. Of course, standing on the tiny square in front of it, it's getting out of proportion, too wide and sturdy, and the base tier too tall. But that's simply not the right angle to view it.
What is true, though, is that the interior is afflicted; it's actually far too wide as compared to the height, following the necessities (and not the imperfection, IMO) of the facade. Perhaps it was really mistaken to make the interior as wide as the facade, instead of making the lateral parts a Potemkin facade like, say, S. Maria della Pace in Rome.
But I also disagree with Zerlina about being able or not to learn about Palladio's churches from his villas: one of his greatest achievements IMO was how he integrated landscape and resulting "natural" sight lines into his architecture; he's THE predecessor of baroque in this respect. Just think of Villa Barbaro in Maser; why is this relatively small and definitely low building so awe-inspiring when you approach it? Because he built it on top of a very gentle, barely noticeable knoll (the whole surroundings seem pretty flat to the unobservant visitor); impossible to envision Vaux-le-Vicomte, for example, without Villa Maser. Palladio teached his age to understand land forms as part of the architecture (drawing inspiration from ancient achievements, no doubt); that's more than obvious in his villas (Villa Rotonda providing another excellent example, as well as the two villas - the names don't spring to my mind at the moment - in Lonedo di Lugo, or La Malcontenta, of course), and it's also crucial for S. Giorgio Maggiore.

zeppole

Actually, I delighted in the choir stalls in San Giorgio Maggiore -- but at this point, I better hid behind Ruskin -- Il Redentore is not real! (But I will go back to double check.)

When I was in NYC this spring, I saw at the Morgan Library a beautiful exhibit with many original drawings by Palladio and first editions of I Quattro Libri dell'Architettura. plus many lovely plaster models of his buildings alongside historic American buildings in the Palladian style. I see that it just closed yesterday. It was done in association with the Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio in Vicenza so maybe it will eventually travel to Italy, where you and Zerlina can see it!

But this New York Times review of the show tends to go with Franco on the argument about whether analyzing Palladian villas will teach you anything about Il Redentore

"[Hi]s greatest gift may have been his balance of a mastery of classical traditions with an almost casual ability to reinterpret them when it suited his own needs. At a time when patrons were becoming increasingly at ease with public displays of personal wealth, for example, he began adding porticoes and domes to domestic architecture.

"The show includes exacting studies of Roman antiquity, including Palladio’s elegant pen-and-ink interpretation of a round temple described by Vitruvius and another of a decorative band grafted onto the base of a recycled column. The temple reflects Palladio’s idealized understanding of the rules underlying Roman architecture, the band the willingness of Roman architects to bend those rules when it suited them — both of which became fundamental themes in Palladio’s own architecture.

"This tension — between idealism and practicality — is what enlivens projects like the magnificent Redentore church in Venice. Palladio initially proposed a circular plan united under a central dome, but church leaders insisted on a more orthodox layout, with a formal nave and transept. To accommodate them without ruining his design’s formal purity, Palladio performed a kind of visual trick, pushing the altar farther back and adding two small side bays, which created the illusion of a transept where there is none."

The NY Times reviews closes by saying:

"Two centuries later, our memories of the architect have been so grotesquely distorted by the endless number of vulgar knockoffs that it’s almost impossible to find the idealism at the work’s core. It’s become nothing but a style."

Same could be said with a few changed words about Ruskin's legacy.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/09/ar...9palladio.html

zeppole

For anybody living in America interested in Palladio and his influence, the museum exhibit I mentioned above will open in Washington DC in September at the National Building Museum, and next year it will travel to the Milwaukee Art Museum and the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh.

Here's another review of the exhibit:

http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?in...&int_new=37192

But now I see that a much larger exhibit of the show appeared in Vicenza in 2008, and what I saw was but a fraction of it.

Did anybody see it there?

For Franco, here's a news article in Italian

http://www.archiportale.com/eventi/2...adio_6569.html

franco

Two btw's: first, sorry for the nonsensical reference to an (inexistent) "Villa Maser" above - this should be "Villa Barbaro" or "villa in Maser", of course.
Second, it's fascinating to compare SS. Redentore to S. Salvatore in Spoleto, an ancient Roman church overhauled by the Langobards. I have no idea whether Palladio ever visited Spoleto, or how he'd come to know S. Salvatore otherwise, but had he designed SS. Redentore without knowing it, this would be almost equivalent to a proof of god... the same ingenious blending of a nave and a domed central-plan building (which latter is a total fake in S. Salvatore, but so extremely well-done that it really makes you BELIEVE there is that central-plan part); even the dedication to the salvatore/redentore (which is essentially the same) is strikingly similar, but that's certainly the trivial part of the analogy. I didn't find any photo doing S. Salvatore's interior justice, so I'm listing three of the not-so-well-done:
http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo...Bf4zVV4oD0S3Bg
http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo...98pQwTBMFawMWA
http://www.settemuse.it/viaggi_itali..._salvatore.jpg

zeppole

Well, the Venetian tourism board thinks it is San Giorgio Maggiore that ought to remind you of S. Salvatore in Spoleto!!!!

http://www.turismovenezia.it/eng/dyn...sp?PAGINA=6381

semiramis

Don't knoe when I will get back to italy but I have always regretted missing Venice - so I am bookmarking this thread

Thx all