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Bernini and the superb fountain of Trevi derive from Michelangelo on one side; Vignola's cold classic profiles and Palladio's resuscitation of old Rome in the Palazzo della Ragione at Vicenza emerge upon the other.
It is lined on the right hand by a row of poor dwellings, swarming with gondoliers' children. A garden wall runs along the other side, over which I can see pomegranate-trees in fruit and pergolas of vines. Far beyond are more low houses, and then the sky, swept with sea-breezes, and the masts of an ocean-going ship against the dome and turrets of Palladio's Redentore. This is my home.
He did not try to bind future events together in a connected sequence leading to a result; on the contrary, he seemed to hear the very words he would soon be speaking, and Cecilia Palladio's answers to them; he saw her face and noted her expression, and the interview grew violent by degrees till he felt the inward coolness stealing through him which he had often known in fight.
All is cold and calculated in the many palaces and churches of this master which adorn both Venice and Vicenza; they make us feel that creative inspiration has been superseded by the labour of the calculating reason. One great public building of Palladio's, however the Palazzo della Ragione at Vicenza may be cited as, perhaps, the culminating point of pure Renaissance architecture.
Vignola, Palladio's elder by a few years, displays in his work even more of the scholastically frigid spirit of the late Renaissance, the narrowing of poetic impulse, and the dwindling of vitality, that sadden the second half of the sixteenth century in Italy. Scamozzi, labouring at Venice on works that Sansovino left unfinished, caught the genial spirit of the old Venetian style.
A number of Palladio's other works we saw that night, softened and glorified by the moonlight. And we saw also an old French house, not twenty-five feet wide, but a gem of French architecture erected before the discovery of America.
So is the nightly rendezvous, the coffee-house, and casino; for whilst Palladio's palaces serve to adorn the grand canal, and strike those who enter Venice with surprise at its magnificence; those snug retreats are intended for the relaxation of those who inhabit the more splendid apartments, and are fatigued with exertions of dignity, and necessity of no small expence.
Altogether, and chiefly in Cecilia Palladio's honour, there was a very pretty little revival of winter gaiety, which is not always very gay in Rome, nowadays. The young girl accepted it all much more graciously than her mother had expected, and was ready to enjoy everything that people offered her, which is a great secret of social success.
The masonry is no longer covered, but carved, rendered uneven with the cavities and protrusions of perspective. In Mantegna's frescoes the wall becomes a slanting theatre scene, cunningly perspectived like Palladio's Teatro Olimpico; with Correggio, wall, masonry, everything, is dissolved, the side or cupola of a church becomes a rent in the clouds, streaming with light.
They are built like Palladio's Theatre at Vicenza, where the perspective converges toward a single seat. In order to be subject to the illusion, the spectator must occupy the duke's place. The colors are dropping from the poems already. The feeblest of them lose it first.
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