Villa Barbaro at Maser Site Features

The composition is a central block with a temple front, flanked by long arcaded barchesse ending in dovecote pavilions -- domestic dignity and farm buildings unified into a single symmetrical facade, which is the Palladian villa's central idea.

Inside, Veronese's frescoes cover everything. Painted architecture opens the walls into illusionistic landscapes; figures lean through false doorways; a painted servant peers around a corner; Veronese may have put himself and his family among them. The ceiling of the Hall of Olympus dissolves into sky.

The effect is that architecture and painting are doing the same job. Veronese's painted columns continue Palladio's real ones, and it is deliberately hard to tell at a glance where one stops.

Behind the house a nymphaeum -- a semicircular pool and grotto with stucco figures -- is fed by the spring that supplied the villa and its fields, so the ornamental and the practical are the same system.

Veronese's frescoes

A complete decorative scheme, in place, in the building it was painted for.

The Hall of Olympus

The central room, with its ceiling opened into painted sky.

The trompe-l'oeil figures

Servants and children leaning through painted doors -- the details people remember.

The nymphaeum

The spring-fed pool and stucco grotto behind the villa.

The villa stands against a low hill at Maser, in the Asolani foothills, with its fields running south to the plain. Palladio set it so the hill shelters the house and the spring behind feeds both the nymphaeum and the farmland -- a single hydraulic and architectural idea. Asolo is 7 km west.