Palladio’s puzzle

It has been suggested that the most enduring and characteristic contribution of Britain to Western civilisation is the country house.  Certainly, no other nation’s stately homes have quite that unique blend of graceful understatement and comfortable wealth.  Italian palazzi are too obviously built to be looked at rather than lived in, while the French chateaux sit nervously in their landscapes as if prescient of the future and its sans culottes.  In Britain the grandiose edifices like Blenheim are the exception, and look it.  Remarkably, most English country houses appear to be just that: a house.

But bring before the mind’s eye the archetypal stately home; it will be an imposing four-square building, perhaps with added symmetric wings, and a low roof.  Almost certainly your image will possess one other characteristic feature: a portico.  Whether free-standing or simply part of the facade, this element seems almost inevitable.  Think of the great houses that lack a portico – Vanburgh’s Castle Howard, Hawksmoor’s Easton Neston: they are obviously pure baroque, and not part of the great classical tradition of stately homes.  That classicism is almost defined by the presence of the portico.

Yet step back, take off those rosy spectacles of cultural nostalgia, look at that paradigm, and what do you find?  A functional, rectangular block of a house with a totally anachronistic portico stuck on like a label on a box.  Considered objectively, it simply will not do.  And yet it manifestly does, so total has been the victory of neoclassicism.

Porticoes are associated with temples.  The Greek and Roman temples are the epitome of classical architecture, often by default since little domestic construction survives from those times.  But what has come down to us serves to reinforce our prejudices that on the temple with its massive columns and bold, simple pediment, the greatest artistic effort was expended and effect achieved.

Naturally, in wishing to affirm that classical ideal, its latter-day evangelists seized upon what was most characteristic.  The problem then was to graft that element onto the architectural forms that were then in vogue.  The man who accomplished this, and in the process determined what the shape of the English country house would be, was Andrea Palladio.

And so it is that Palladio, through highly influential works ranging form the pure architecture such as the Villa Rotonda outside Vicenza, to the numerous more pragmatic solutions to problems of meeting basic domestic needs while at the same time evoking classical ideals, set his indelible stamp on the English landscape.

And that influence has continued down to this day as every pot-boiler architect sought to capture the serenity and solidity which those country houses radiate, by the simple, and usually futile, application of the magic Palladian portico to whatever lay haplessly on the drawing board.  It is a moot point whether it is more surprising that the portico trick has endured so long, or that nobody notices it.

(20.6.88)

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