Villa Garzoni, Renaissance villa in Pontecasale, Candiana, Italy.
Villa Garzoni is a country house in Candiana with distinctive double loggias featuring five arches on each floor. The property includes stables, outbuildings, and protective walls that surround both the main residence and the agricultural lands belonging to the estate.
Natale Garzoni built a country house here between the late 15th and early 16th century; after his death on 26 June 1528, his sons Alvise and Girolamo commissioned Jacopo Sansovino to replace it. Alvise had contacted Sansovino, a fellow member of the Scuola della Misericordia, and the new design took shape around 1540. Work was finished by 1570, when Sansovino named the villa in a biography of his father.
The Garzoni banked in Venice and moved capital to the Paduan plain, and Alvise Cornaro in 1556 credited them with leading the land reclamation there. Their move persuaded other Venetian entrepreneurs to buy estates in the Veneto. Girolamo Priuli read the family's rise as a sign of the Republic's decline.
The villa stands on an irregular plot fully enclosed by a wall, with the main facade facing south; a large gate flanked by two statue-topped pillars opens onto the entrance avenue. Loggias run on three sides of the internal courtyard, whose north side is closed by a wall separating the house from the grounds. The barchessa, an arcaded service loggia, runs east of the villa.
The Salone di Caccia holds a plaster relief on a hunting theme; beneath it, a fireplace architrave rests on two male nudes probably carved by Sansovino. Of the four minor fireplaces he designed for the main floor, two were both designed and sculpted by him. The vaulting was altered in the late 18th century by the Venetian Francesco Galimberti.
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