Stepping into the motherlode: visiting the Italian mannerist mansions that set the taste for former Prince Charles .
Or what can we say about the new King's state of mind based on his admiration of the Villas Lante in Bagnaia and Farnese in Caprarola
Prince Charles, after a lifetime on the sidelines, has now assumed the title of King Charles the III, following the death of his Queen Mother, Elizabeth II. While I have never paid much attention to British royal affairs in general, nor to any other surviving royal family for that matter, I have found Charles’ dabbling in architecture, urbanism and the environment an anomaly among royals of his generation. Not so of course if you travel back in time, when the European nobility had little better to do than oppress its subjects, survive various palace intrigues and commission grandiose architectural monuments. Now that Charles is King, many have begun to suspect he will drag his passion for architecture into the throne, something Queen Elizabeth would never have seen fit to do. For me, the question is of another nature: was Charles venturing into classical architecture not only a quest for a lost tradition, but also a quest for more forceful invocations of power and domination?
To get a better handle on this question I began by looking at two of the former Prince's favourite villas in Italy: Villa Farnese in Caprarola and Villa Lante in Bagnaia. The “School for Civil Architecture” founded by Charles in the early nineties featured these two estates prominently. Both were completed by the mannerist architect Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola, they're from the same era, and are celebrated for their magnificent gardens. I took students to visit these sites when I ran a summer study abroad program with the University of Siena about the same time Charles launched his school. More recently I returned to visit Farnese and Lante, to pull together material for another newsletter. In the meantime, on September 8, following a disastrous year for British politics, Queen Elisabeth took leave of her realm, and Charles ascended to the Crown. This turn in events rekindled my interest in the King's earlier forays into Italy and specifically his attraction to late Renaissance architecture.
Architects, critics, and fellow travellers will recall that the Prince of Wales was considered the bane of modern architecture, having personally intervened in a number of prominent projects around the UK, succeeding on more than one occasion in scuttling the construction of one or another modernist plan in favour of more traditional solutions. Charles was also a strong proponent for what would become known as New-Urbanism, led by the likes of Léon Krier in Europe, and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Andrés Duany in the United States. For Charles the free plan (raumplan) and the functional glass box were violations of good taste, just like the modern gridded city defied basic traditional social customs.
This reputation of his didn’t escape the attention of the press: the ascension of Charles to the throne generated reams of articles among architectural cognoscenti: “King Charles’ endless meddling in architectural politics has accomplished nothing” writes Phineas Harper from the Guardian; “King Charles III’s impact on British architecture” —that lists six ways he negatively but also positively impacted the profession, is by Tom Ravenscroft from Dezeen; “King Charles wants to Make Britain Beautiful Again” a sort of spoof of Trumpian politics by Billy Anania from Hyperallergic; there are those that see the King in a favourable light, like “King Charles ‘dotty’ environmental views are now mainstream” traveling back to the 1970’s for Charles’ pronouncements on the environment penned by Jermey Plester again from the Guardian.
Yet for me I could remember nothing so strangely awkward as when I took my students to the visit the gardens at Villa Lante and discovered that the then Prince Charles had recently conducted an architectural design studio on these premises. Coming from New York, I was very familiar with the burgeoning stylistic wars rocking the architectural profession: Philip Johnson, the richest and most controversial of American architects, and de facto don of MoMA (Museum of Modern Art), had succeeded in erecting his picturesque chippendale AT&T tower in midtown Manhattan, and was going full throttle gothic across the United States. It came to me as a shock that Villa Lante, like Villa Farnese down the road, was considered by this aristocratic crowd to be the motherlode of post-modernism.
In fact Charles fell so completely head over heels for Villa Lante that he petitioned the Italian government to be able to sleep in one of twin Casinos on the grounds. Was he longing for the perfect classical fix? Or was he after something else? Villa Lante’s history begins as a hunting lodge and park, and is enlarged, developed and refined under the direction of Cardinal Gianfrancesco Gambara (1533-1587), whose family was from Lombardy. Gambara—that roughly translates into shrimp in English and hence the iconic stone carved shrimps on the garden’s fountains— oversaw the works while he served as Bishop of nearby Viterbo. After Gambara’s death, the Villa transferred to the then young upstart Cardinal Alessandro Peretti di Montalto, who would over time exhibit much more lavish tastes and would become an extravagant patron of the arts. Though the designs of the Casinos and gardens are attributed to Vignola, a Sienese architect, Tommaso Ghinucci, a specialist in hydraulics, was responsible for overseeing the completion of the gardens. The most sublime area of the park is at the top of the park’s slope, once the main entrance, where you find the a vertical garden called the ”Deluge,” designed as a wild natural overgrowth with a water folly.
The Villa Farnese in Caprarola has a radically different origin story. The Villa itself begins as a pentagonal shaped fortification initiated in 1550, and gradually morphed into a much more palatial and much less militarized country retreat. The two original architects, the Sienese Baldassari Peruzzi and the Florentine Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, were known for their expertise in developing perfectly geometrical bastionated ideal cities. When Vignola arrived on the scene in 1556, the pentagonal fortified base was already in place, giving the architect a sort of promontory to set out his mannerist opus. Vignola, commissioned by Cardinal Alessandro Farnese (a grandson of Pope Paul III), also contributed to the development of the garden’s fountains and decorative monuments. The Villa’s patron Cardinal Farnese was deeply complicit within the Roman Papal state, while over his lifetime he would amass an incredibly vast collection of Roman statuary and a trove of Renaissance paintings.
So what do these two villas tell us about King Charles today? Villa Farnese lords over the small town of Caprarola, with its enormous fortified mass bearing down on the city’s singular main street. Villa Lante, on the other hand, is cut in two by a central axis that runs from the top of the “Deluge” down to the French gardens and monumental fountain at the bottom. The axis divides the residential complex into twin symmetrical buildings, an architectural gesture that succeeds in reducing the buildings’ bulk. The effect is to dial down the impact of the Villa on the town of Bagnaia, so the park seems to flow gradually into the town. In comparing the two, its obvious that one project started off as a military outpost and the other a wooded hunting park.
But there is also an evident patronage system at work. The former Prince of Wales might have been impressed by these two magnificent works of architecture and landscape architecture, but would he have also considered the political forces behind their inception? In each case, the driving vision emanated from an aristocratic class of privileged clergy, whose family positions enabled a considerable amount of wealth and political power. Italy hardly resembled the absolute monarchy of the French state that would build Versailles a century later or the British Empire following the industrial revolution. Lante and Farnese were built by regionally based family dynasties linked to the Papal order. True the era was marked by great financial corruption and arbitrary religious purges, while the peninsula had been long parcelled into numerous rival political alliances. On the other hand, the guilds, universities, workshops, artisanal cooperatives all seem to have flourished under these competing systems of patronage.
I can only imagine that King Charles III, now that he is the supreme monarch of the United Kingdom and Commonwealth along with his religious titles, will find himself in a much less forgiving environment. The wealth of the British monarchy built on imperial aggrandisement will be all up for repatriation soon enough. Charles, if he sees himself as a monarch in search of a lasting legacy, shouldn’t be thinking of building more monumental palaces and bucolic villas. He should instead start giving away his worldly possessions and take up gardening.