VENETIAN GARDENS AND VILLAS. 
345 
Venice and called on Titian he remarked to Vasari what a pity it was that the Venetians, who 
were such good colourists, did not learn to draw. This criticism holds good not only in their 
painting, but in their architecture and decorative arts as well. 
Coming direct from the great villas of Tuscany, stamped with the sober truth-seeking art 
of the School of Florence, to the Villa Palace of Stra is to be translated into another world, 
where art speaks in the terms of the theatre. Venice itself is, in the main, a city of fafades, 
where well-nigh all the changes have been rung in window grouping and surface decoration. 
No student of architecture to-day is likely to accept Ruskin’s estimate of the Stones of Venice ; 
rather is he likely to think of their resemblance to those gems for which Marguerite made so 
fatal a traffic. 
In the days of her glory Venice stretched out a fascinated hand to the mainland, and by- 
degrees her patricians began to line the banks of the Brenta all the way to Padua with villas and 
gardens of vast extent. By this policy of encroachment upon the mainland Vincenza, destined 
to be the birth city of Palladio a century later, came in 1400 within the sphere of Venice. 
Absorbed in her life, the great architect’s work is coloured by her traditions of facile art and 
careless splendour. It is well to remind ourselves that Ammanati, Vignola and Pirro Ligorio 
were the almost exact contemporaries of Palladio (1518-80). 
When we come to describe Maser we shall find Venetian architect, painter and sculptor 
working in unison with two patricians of noble family, producing a work which may stand as 
the very mould of Venetian form. In such good company Palladio seems to relax, unless it be 
that the master has been otherwise viewed by his disciples, or that what he wrote has over- 
weighted what he did. Venice itself was too crowded for garden space, but in these mainland 
villas we find her contribution to the art of garden architecture. A. T. B. 
