Antonio Foscari Livres

In the 1920s and 1930s, the Villa Foscari in Venice, better known as La Malcontenta, became a meeting place for intellectuals, artists, and members of the nobility such as Sergei Diaghilev, Boris Kochno, Serge Lifar, Winston Churchill, Robert Byron, Diana Cooper, Bruce Chatwin, and Le Corbusier. It was an era of inspiring encounters between aristocrats, the avant-garde, snobs, and intellectuals that ended when Italy entered World War II. Antonio Foscari recounts this lively period in the building’s history and talks about its then owner, Albert Clinton Landsberger, and his friends Catherine di Rochegude, Baronesse von Erlanger, and Paul Rodocanachi, who not only lovingly renovated the villa, but made it such a lively place for the first time. The text is complemented by numerous photographs dating from this exciting time that convey an impression of what was happening in the villa in those days. Antonio Foscari is an architect and has been a professor of architecture at the University of Venice since 1971. In 1973, he restored the Villa Malcontenta, built for his ancestors by Andrea Palladio, and has concentrated his research on buildings by the great Renaissance architect since that date.

Visiting the villas built by Andrea Palladio (1508-1580), one inevitably asks oneself how people lived there in the sixteenth century. Palladio articulated the villas as "small towns" (piccole città) that formed a unit with adjacent service buildings and farm fields. Within their walls lived a multitude of people of all ages, social backgrounds and various skills. They were the venue for significant moments of public life. In these houses, the principles of hygiene, privacy and comfort, which we consider essential today, did not apply; furniture as such, did not exist. Living with Palladio in the Sixteenth Century investigates how Palladio's houses, their floors, rooms and measurements are designed to structure the life of such a heterogeneous family of people. It analyzes their hierarchical structure with the owner (padrone) at the top and everyone involved in the everyday running of the household (famiglia minuta) at the bottom. This book fills a decisive gap in research literature on the famous Italian architect by looking at how Palladio prioritized the domestic functions of his private buildings.

"Any attempt to sum up Andrea Palladio's creative achievements is invariably distorted by the fact that some of the greatest projects of his mature years were never built. For the most part, these unfinished works were in Venice. They include the patriarchal Church of San Pietro di Castello, the reorganisation of the Rialto district at the commercial and financial heart of the city, a church that would have overlooked the Grand Canal and, lastly, the monumental complex of the monastery for the Lateran Canons, the Convento della Carità. Antonio Foscari has now restored the balance by charting the course of Andrea Palladio's remarkable life and prodigious oeuvre in a way that sheds new light on all his works while also recognising a number of previously unclassified drawings. The books culminates with an attempt, unprecedented in over four hundred years of Palladian studies, to reconstruct the project that Palladio, in the autumn of his life, held to be the supreme testimonial of his creativity: the rebuilding of the Doge's Palace in Venice."--P. [4] of cover.

- After Andrea Palladio - Unbuilt Venice and Tumult and Order, the third volume by Antonio Foscari focuses on the frescos in the Villa Malcontenta in Venice - The publication deals with the relationship between the three arts of architecture, painting and sculpture in the Renaissance era