Gleb Smirnov's book about Palladio's villas is, above all, rapidly talented. It tells about seven villas: Foscari, Poiana, Emo, Barbaro, Cornaro, Badoer and Rotonda. Although the book is called Seven Philosophical Journeys, the genre chosen by the author can rather be defined as a glass bead game in the most complimentary, Hesseian, meaning of the expression. Because around each villa Gleb Smirnov explored, and sometimes created, semantic fields from many arts and sciences: theological, musical, choreographic, poetic, of course, historical and biographical, numerological, and yes - philosophical. And these fields are not an appendix to the monument, but rather independent excursions. Which Hesse, the inventor of the glass bead game, would certainly have appreciated and approved. Moreover, keeping in mind the modern hobby for quests, Gleb Smirnov builds chapters as a search for clues to certain features and circumstances. And therefore they are read in one breath. Intersections with modern cinema also do not scare Gleb Smirnov: even his Sacred History has a formal resemblance to the structure of the series (the history of the earthly life of Christ as the main season and the lives of the saints as an endless continuation).
All this exists in the book not only not to the detriment of close art criticism gazing into the monument, but exactly the opposite - it becomes a consequence arising from it. Before us unfolds a very detailed, multi-day (long-term) life with a villa, which leaves behind a desire to get to know her even better. Isn't it the task of art history, so that, as Professor Mikhail Allenov said, to find such facts that further explain something else in the work? And, by the way, the image of Mikhail Mikhailovich hovers over the book. Because Gleb Smirnov, having graduated from the art history department of the history faculty of Moscow State University, could rightfully call himself a follower of Allenov, as far as can be judged from the profile in the FB, where it is reported that during his studies at the alma mater he admired Allenov and missed Grashchenkov's lectures or, to paraphrase Pushkin about the Lyceum, “I read Allenov willingly, but I didn’t read Grashchenkov”.
When I asked about the predecessors at the presentation of the book at MARSH, Gleb Smirnov confirmed that from the Russians it was Pavel Muratov. But the genre of seven journeys is still broader than the learned essayism of the early twentieth century. I would call it exquisite exegesis, especially since the second, theological, education of the author presupposes mastery of her skills. And at the same presentation, when asked how to write about art, Gleb Smirnov gave a formula that I reproduce not literally, but close to the text: "Keeping scientific tasks in mind, write about art in a manner between Nabokov and Borges." Since the topic of architectural criticism on Archi.ru is a hot dish that arouses undying interest, I would like to say that one should write about art (architecture) in such a way that one wants to read it, so that what is written is assimilated imperceptibly, gradually, with pleasure. "A mixture of science and essays," prescribed another university teacher, Alexei Rastorguev.
Special thanks to Gleb Smirnov for such examples of fine literature as: "columns muffled up to the ears", "nostrils in the tympanum" (this is about the Rotunda (!), Which the author unpredictably criticizes in order to "wade through the dense curtain of incense"), " the fintiflyushki of accidents”,“the autocrat of pure geometric combinations”. And there is a lot of that, and it is generously scattered throughout the text.
With regard to analogies with other arts: I consider this path fruitful. The parallels with the choreography (the columns of the portico at the Villa Foscari are assembled from lines into round dances, like the dancers of that era) seemed convincing to me, but the parallels with the music - not quite: the windows of the rear facade of Foscari are not very associated with the scale of the scale, in my art and musicological opinion. But the fact that Palladio was friends with the composer Tsarlino and was probably familiar with treatises on musical theory, fragments of which are given in the book, is a very valuable knowledge for which I am grateful to the author.
I won't spoil all the stories, but it was incredibly interesting to read about the villa customers. Beginning with Count Trissino, who noticed the young bricklayer Andrea, educated him, introduced him to the circle of his friends - scholarly humanists and potential customers, lobbied for the most important order for the basilica in Vicenza and patronized the architect until his death. Among the owners of the villas there are many persons of clergy, which they combined with education, artistic pursuits and freethinking. For example, the Patriarch of Aquileia, Daniele Barbaro, was a great connoisseur of ancient pagan stories captured in the frescoes of Veronese. “The Renaissance man thought, so to speak, with both hemispheres. In such a rapprochement of cultures, Christ appeared in the retrospective of Orpheus or Adonis, and divine Love was refreshed in the hypostasis of Aphrodite,”we read in the chapter“Villa Barbaro or Total Ecumenism”. Count Almerico aimed for the papal throne, but unsuccessfully, became a poet, settled in the village and, together with Palladio, endowed the world with not something, but the great Rotunda. It is remarkable that the portraits of the customers were given by Gleb Smirnov through a detailed literary and art history analysis of the subjects of the frescoes in their villas.
Tons of books have been written about Palladio in the West and very little literature in Russia. Russian Palladianism was studied by Viktor Grashchenkov and Natalya Evsina. The first one has a rather detailed conversation about English, French, Italian and actually Russian versions of Palladianism in Russia. (By the way, the chapter on Russian Palladianism, which concludes Gleb Smirnov's "Seven Journeys", seems to me an optional addition, because the previous chapters are so fascinatingly arranged according to the principle of musical form - neither subtract nor add that Russian Palladianism looks foreign, not so consistent in elegant glass bead game genre). The 500th anniversary of Palladio in 2008 was hardly celebrated in Russia, but in 2015 there was a large exhibition “Palladio in Russia. From Baroque to Modernism "in MUAR and Tsaritsyno (curated by Arkady Ippolitov and Vasily Uspensky), a catalog was published with articles by different authors, in which, in particular, Dmitry Shvidkovsky and Yulia Revzina expanded their understanding of Russian Palladianism: in their opinion, Ruska, Geste and Stasov introduced Palladianism into exemplary buildings, and it became an all-encompassing urban system, creating the civilized appearance of the Russian Empire. But all these are special scientific publications for a narrow circle of specialists, and they are not so much about Palladio as about his trail. Therefore, the role of Gleb Smirnov's book can hardly be overestimated. Probably, it will be converted into a guidebook (especially since the addresses and websites are given at the end), because a solid format will not allow taking it on a trip, but it would be very useful to look into it when examining the Palladian villas, as in a score at a classical music concert …
Gleb Smirnov
An excerpt from the chapter "Villa Poyana, or New Proof of the Existence of God"
“… If we digress from the transient and external details of Palladio's projects, his lovely decor, referring to Antiquity, and look at the structural practice of our master, his syntax, we will discover a completely unheard-of, almost subversive revolutionary nature of his language. This applies not only to the most "modernist" of his villas, Poiana. Take a look at the planimetry of all his buildings: this is a dice game, Pete Mondrian. In the project of Villa Cornaro, he treats the loggias like the lid of a school pencil case, shifting them off the axis. A dizzying planimetric game in Malcontent and Villa Pisani-Bonetti. In his Treatise, he developed elementary modules, from which, by means of simple combinatorics, more and more new building projects can be added. He offers future architects a set of matrices: take and compose from them as much as you want something of your own, original ("montage method", as Shklovsky would say).
In fact, he was the pioneer of "block" architecture, long before Le Corbusier. He thinks in a body, a wall, a volume, a cell, a box, and not in “columns”. The true structural basis of the building is a cube. The design model of the reconstruction of the Vicenza Municipality building, the so-called Basilica, is unmatched in modernity, even in postmodern thinking: he proposed, without destroying the old building, how to wrap it up, as if with a new shell-crust, with transparent arcades (to divert eyes order decoration in the form of a serlian). Rem Koolhaas recently behaved in a similar way, elegantly mothballing the building of the Soviet restaurant "Vremena Goda" in Gorky Park.
To the detriment of the Renaissance ideal of complete symmetry, Palladio, like a modernist architect, monitors the individuality of a particular space and makes different heights of the ceilings of the rooms in the Pisani and Poyana villas - depending on the cardinal direction, in order to rationally capture the sun's rays. Like any modernist, he dreams of crushing the landscape and making it work for the building. On the other hand, like Wright and feng shui advocates with their "organic architecture", Palladio fits the building into the landscape with extreme thoughtfulness. One of the persistent signs of modernism is attention to new materials and construction techniques. Almost all of Palladio's buildings were built from the poorest material, brick. Even the columns are made of bricks. Saving money turned into an aesthetic program, giving the language lapidary and purity. "The material determines the aesthetics of the building" - this is one of the main tenets of modernist poetics. The most sensational modernism lurks under the floor of the Poyana villa: ultra-modern lines of the ceilings of the utility rooms. And finally, the conceptuality of architecture. Palladio has every house, a manifesto of some idea, as we will see in the examples of all the villas in this book."
Gleb Smirnov
From the chapter "Villa Badoer, or the First Commandment of Art"
“… The appearance of a residential building outside the city walls gets an amazing trait in the performance of Palladio: he is the very peaceful insecurity, he even has no thoughts to hold a siege. The Palladian villas are completely devoid of the militaristic severity of the baronial forte - they are already confident in their strength. And, as we can see, their durability confirms their correctness. In a paradoxical contrast to the ruins of impregnable castles, defenseless "fragile chambers" ("delicatissimi palagi", as Trissino called such non-medieval architecture) turned out to be stronger than all strongholds and stand to this day, not ravaged and not destroyed. It will be said that the reason for such confidence in the future was the already mentioned stability that the Venetian Republic was able to provide to its lands for several hundred years. But there is one more, more metaphysical explanation for this.
The guaranty of the villas' fearless openness was not so much a wise government, but another subtle aspect. It is difficult to articulate. Let's listen to what P. P. Muratov about the Venetian fortresses built by the expert on military fortifications Sanmikeli: “Wherever the lion of San Marco threatened the enemy or was threatened by them - in Dalmatia, Istria, Friuli, Corfu, Cyprus, Crete, Sanmikeli erected or rebuilt bastions, forts, citadels, equally satisfying the requirements of war and the tastes of grace. Venice, thanks to him, dominated the East not only by the strength of the walls, but by the harmony of their proportions. Exactly.
Villa Badoer, standing alone on the edge of the Venetian domain, in the middle of the endless valleys between Po and Adige, on the outskirts of the empire, was not protected by the "fortress of walls" and in general by nothing but "harmony of proportions", except for its harmonious beauty. The real heroism of this architecture lies in the conviction that beauty is indisputable, that it carries the law in itself. In a sense, a classical building is not so much a building as a principled statement.
The phenomenon of a person's submission to the dictates of sovereign beauty is a separate difficult topic, and in the lines of Palladio with his "dazzlingly slender" (Akhmatova) columns, great power is laid. Precisely because they contain the law of harmony, it is criminal to go against it, as against any legitimate authority, and this is felt by the human heart. In this case, the power of these columns is legitimized by the Absolute (beauty). So in the indifferently calm tone of the columns, an imperative sounds more imperious than any command.
Akhmatova calls in one poem of Tsarskoye Selo smart nudity: "So smartly naked." One could say "victorious." The visitor to Villa Badoer is greeted by two eternally naked bodies, a man and a woman. Actually, Villa Badoer itself is a metaphor for Nudity. This is the argument of cultural power: in order to be durable, it must be transparent, non-secret, naked, like the truth (we are now talking about political power). She becomes victorious when she has the dignity of beauty. Here again it is appropriate to recall Giorgione and all the other Venetian masters who followed him in the victorious nude in the bosom of nature.
Italian student Mario Praz tried to find the reasons for this phenomenon, explaining why Palladianism took root in England so much: “The very aristocracy that swore allegiance to the ideal of a gentleman from the“Court”of Castiglione found for itself an exact external and material equivalent to it - in tranquility and pure ordered whiteness palladian facades. Strict symmetry and balance in the behavior of the individual and - the building, which is a material continuation of his character and which has become, as it were, his ideal face; the facade seemed to simulate the face of a true gentleman - the same solemn, impenetrable, but at the same time friendly (a paradox that lies in the so-called traditional English character). The façade is clear-serene, but not laughing - laughter was condemned as plebeian swagger, and this is the real reason why the Baroque could not take root in England … The Palladian façade was for the English aristocracy what snow-white uniforms were for the Austrian officers, - a symbol of moral hierarchy, feudalism, crystallized into the coolness of geometric abstraction, a kind of some tangible form of infinity that always accompanies a man in white. Dressed in sacred white, the columns, especially in the wilderness, produce a hypnotic and bewitching effect on souls with their strict slenderness and whiteness. The scenography and caesura of these columns and the softly creeping steps of the stairs in the slowly solemn cadence of the coronation march are capable of latently flexing any will.
“… Sacred trembling runs through our hands, and the proximity of the deity is undoubted"
I. Brodsky
The educational function that Plato attributes to beauty was one of the most powerful means of Venetian propaganda and a way of retaining power by the aristocracy. "Harmony is a mysterious power …" The Venetians understood before anyone else that the axiomaticity of beauty, the very "noble simplicity and serene grandeur" in which Winckelmann saw the ideal of classicism, is an effective weapon, a kind of psychic attack. Classical beauty is indisputable, which causes a childish and fearful reverence in souls. Blake, in his famous poems about the bewitching beauty of the tiger, unexpectedly mentions its fearful symmetry - "frightening symmetry." Symmetry is the worst thing about a far from safe tiger, according to Blake's paradoxical thought. The power of Venice was just as transcendentally terrible, subtly transmitted to the world from the symmetry of these snow-white harmonious columns. Amorosa paura, Petrarch once said, "loving fear." “'Beauty is terrible,' they will tell you,” and it turns out that even the most unprepared hearts can feel this intimate intimidation by culture.”
One story by Borges tells of a barbarian who, during the siege of Ravenna, was conquered by the beauty of its classical architecture and went over to the side of the Romans, and begins to fight for the city, storming by his relatives. “He came from the impenetrable thickets of wild boar and bison, was fair-haired, brave, simple-minded, merciless and recognized not some universe, but his leader and his tribe. The war brought him to Ravenna, where he saw something that he had never seen before, or seen but did not notice. He saw light, cypresses and marble. I saw the structure of the whole - variety without confusion; I saw the city in the living unity of its statues, temples, gardens, buildings, steps, bowls, capitals, delineated and open spaces. He - I'm sure - was not shocked by the beauty of what he saw; it struck him, as today we are amazed by the most complex mechanisms, whose purpose we do not understand, but in whose structure we feel the immortal mind. Maybe a single arch with an unknown inscription in eternal Roman letters was enough for him. And then Droktulft leaves his own people and goes over to the side of Ravenna. He dies, and on his gravestone words are knocked out that he, most likely, would not have been able to read: "For our sake he neglected his dear relatives, recognizing our Ravenna as his new homeland." He was not a traitor (traitors usually do not receive reverent epitaphs), but one who had received his sight, a convert."
about the author
Gleb Smirnov-Grech - art critic, master of philosophy, writer. Graduated from the Faculty of History, Moscow State University. M. V. Lomonosov, Department of Art History, after which he retired from Russia to aesthetic emigration, wandered around Europe, reached Rome, entered the Pontifical Gregorian University at the Vatican, where he graduated with honors from the Faculty of Philosophy. Lives in Venice. Composes fairy tales, scientific prose, creates new religions, engages in calligraphy and makes handwritten books.
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