Paolo Veronese, Allegory of Divine Love, after 1559, Villa Barbaro, Maser.

The theme of harmony has long been recognized as underlying both the consonant proportions of Palladio's architecture and the invenzione for Veronese's decorations in the Villa Barbaro at Maser. The images that constitute the principal composition on the vault of the Salone visualize cosmological harmony as defined by the Pythagorean philosophers and the writings of the villa's primary patron, Daniele Barbaro, and his Renaissance contemporaries. A more precise definition of the Empedoclean component of the philosophical foundation of this program can establish that the single most important figure of the decorative ensemble personifies Divine Love. She, and she alone, is capable of unifying the potentially discordant forces in nature and the heavens and can thus allude to the harmony that governs the world in which the Barbaro live in both a microcosmic and a macrocosmic sense
By the mid-sixteenth century, the country villa in the Veneto had become more than a retreat for study and con- templation; it had become a metaphor for the dwelling of virtue, the Liberal Arts, and peace.2 Ideally, the villa's art- ists and patrons would strive together to recreate the earthly paradises so eloquently described by Pliny the Younger, Varro, and Cicero.3 To reinforce their appreciation of the ideal, they consulted modern authors such as Marsilio Fi- cino, Pietro Bembo, Anton Francesco Doni, and Alberto Lollio.4 In keeping with this newly revitalized architectural topos, Andrea Palladio designed and Paolo Veronese dec- orated the Villa Barbaro at Maser as a locus amoenus for one of the most erudite of Venetian patrician families.5 Pal- ladio's plan expressed his and his patron's Vitruvian bias,

and Veronese's fresco cycle followed much of the counsel of Pliny the Elder and Vitruvius for the forms and motifs appropriate for painted ornament in private houses.6 At Maser, thematic unity responds to and complements formal unity: the scenographic treatment of space and the consistency of painted and architectural schema render- iconographic inconsistency unacceptable. Indeed, behind the spatial and decorative forms of this villa lies an inven- zione that bears directly on the antiquarian bias of Venetian mid-century letterati and expresses as well the reconcilia- tion that the patrons and their humanist colleagues sought between Greco-Roman and Christian precepts as they ap- plied to their Renaissance milieu. Daniele and Marcantonio Barbaro followed the exam- ples of earlier generations of their family in supporting the humanist interests of the Venetian intelligentsia.7 Daniele in particular adopted the dedication of his great-uncle Er- molao to the exegesis of classical texts, first as he completed the translations and commentaries of Aristotelian works that Ermolao had begun, and later as he embarked on his own monumental publication of 1556: the translation and commentaries of Vitruvius' De architectura. Thus, by the time Daniele Barbaro saw his country house taking final form, he was justifiably lauded by contemporaries - Pie- tro Aretino, as well as other, perhaps more honest chron- iclers of his time - as one of the most educated men of the Republic: "un gentilhuomo magnifico e dottore di fi- losofia clarissimo."8 No one has ever questioned that Daniele Barbaro was the author of the program at Maser. Conclusive documen- tation of his role or the specifics of his instructions to Ve- ronese have never come to light, but the secular subject mat- ter, the interdependence of themes that refer metaphorically to family, State, and Church, as well as the particular lit- erary bias expressed in the fresco complex of the villa, leave little room for challenge of the position traditionally given to Daniele.9 The Salone: The Macrocosm and Divine Love As the plan of the Villa Barbaro (Fig. 1) establishes a spatial hierarchy in the casa del padrone, imparting to it a bilateral symmetry dominated by the cruciform hall (B in Fig. 1) and crowned by the Salone (A in Fig. 1) at the north- ern end, so too does the Salone establish its own hierarchy of images. In this so-called Sala dell'Olimpo, Palladio's cen- tralized plan and Veronese's arrangement of the component images of his decorative scheme confirm the importance of the room and particularize the key to the invenzione. In the vault of the square space (Fig. 2), Veronese arranged the components of his composition in accordance with an- cient, centripetal formulae, such as could be seen in the Domus Aurea and in modern solutions all'antica exempli- fied by the Stanza della Segnatura.1o In the Villa Barbaro, a single figure (Fig. 3) appears at the apex of a progression of images that moves from idealized landscape views on the walls (Fig. 4) through images of the Barbaro family above into the realm of pagan allegory. That central figure, clad in white, sits with open arms atop a dragon encircled by the planetary gods within a larger allegorical structure of the four elements (Figs. 5-8) and the four seasons (Figs. 9, 10), all in their Olympian guises. In her, the themes of the images painted on the walls and around her in the vault - both terrestrial and superterrestrial - coalesce. That she lies at the heart of any comprehensive reading of the pro- gram of the fresco complex in the Villa Barbaro has never been questioned, but her identity has remained elusive, de- spite our considerable knowledge of Daniele Barbaro's and Veronese's literary and iconographic points of view. De- scribed variously as Earth, Eternity, Divine Wisdom, Thalia, the Muse of transcendant grace, and Aristodama, Donna di bonta", she personifies none of them." As the tetrad formulations of the ceiling fresco suggest, this is a program founded on a Pythagorean-Platonic ra- tionalization of universal harmony by means of four-part allegories. The deceptively clear arrangement of large fig- ures inhabiting a spacious celestial setting depicts the nat- ural world of the four seasons: winter with spring (Venus and Vulcan, Proserpina and Ceres), summer with autumn (Ceres with Bacchus). They appear behind the fictive bal- ustrade in the same pictorial realm as that occupied by members of the Barbaro family. The personifications in the lunettes nevertheless stand apart from the Barbaro because of their heavenly setting. In keeping with the progression of tetrad relationships outlined by the ancient philoso- phers, Veronese portrayed the four elements: air as Juno, water as Neptune, earth as Cybele, and fire as Vulcan. Their position in the corners of the vault indicates their support of the cosmological system, while their placement in an intermediary register, between the earthly and celestial realms of the decorative system, conforms to the Pythag- orean notion that the elements are the fundamental stuff of all harmonic systems, whether terrestrial or planetary.12 Beyond this happy mediation between Heaven and earth, the four elements convey a sense of the cosmos in its most desirable, yet most rarefied state: one of cohesive and ab- solute equilibrium. The disposition of the elements in the vault of the Salone corresponds exactly to the prescriptions for cosmic and terrestrial harmony outlined by every Py- thagorean philosopher and sustained by later medieval and Renaissance authors, a scheme epitomized by woodcut il- lustrations for the editio princeps of Isidore of Seville's De rerum natura (1472) (Fig. 11) and Oronce Fine's Proto- mathesis (1532) (Fig. 12): earth lies opposite air, fire op- posite water.'3 The system incorporates as well other suc- cessful pairings that may be deduced from, and that in their turn contribute to, the harmonic structure of the universe: heat opposite cold, for example, dryness opposite mois- ture. The scheme expresses in visual terms just what Spe- rone Speroni, among countless others, observed in his Dia- logo della discordia: Water may be described as the companion of fire, and air of earth, which are opposites. . . . The elements are discordant not only because this one might be heavy, that one light, some opaque, others diaphanous and transparent; but likewise opposite are hot and dry fire, hot and moist air, cold and moist water, cold and dry earth. This diversity is the reason that they constantly combat and destroy one another.14 These elements, then, establish a tension that can control, and in Veronese's pictorial imagination, contain the plan- etary, cosmological allegory within the octagon of the Sa- lone vault. From this foundation, moreover, the notion of striking a balance between opposing forces could extend to evaluations and juxtapositions of the planets and other ce- lestial bodies. Pico della Mirandola explains, for instance, that Jupiter lies next to Saturn to abate the malignancy of the latter.'" Time and again Daniele Barbaro read about this system, saw diagrams of it, and incorporated it into his thought, finally to reevaluate it in accordance with his own under- standing of natural and cosmological phenomena. In a let- ter dated 1550, Barbaro wrote: Elemental nature is divided into four spheres, into fire, air, water and earth, and this is the constitution of the entire machine of the world with differentiated and per- fect order. . . . The nature of the four elements needed to be reconciled and moved by a superior virtue, and therefore celestial nature was introduced, worthy, noble, and far from contrarieties . . . and thus the Empyrean Heaven is all luminous; while the firmament, or starry Heaven, is mobile and multiformed, partly luminous and partly transparent, and the crystalline Heaven is mobile and uniform, and transparent throughout. I say, then, that the influences of Heaven can bring about the dif- ferentiated meaning of the years, the months, and the days, as they influence the production of things such as minerals, plants, animals . . . as the Scriptures say ... 16 Furthermore, in the final draft of his commentaries on Vi- truvius, Barbaro incorporated an illustration (Fig. 13), ap- parently copied from Fine's Protomathesis, to accompany his and Vitruvius' remarks on the elements as the foun- dation of pre-Socratic cosmologies, the elements from whose "correspondence all things are born."''7 With only one exception, the Pythagorean philosophers of antiquity never mention a single "superior virtue" or deity that might be responsible for unifying the cosmos, for bringing these pairs of opposing forces into a state of perfect and harmonic equilibrium. Nor do early humanist philosophers such as Isidore provide central foci that can transcend the "world of man" to unify the planetary spheres and forces governed by the Zodiac. These philosophers thus offer no assistance in a search for the identity of the lady on the dragon in the vault of the Sala dell'Olimpo at Maser. To identify the central figure of the fresco as a symbol of Eternity not only contradicts the fluctuations of the Py- thagorean structure over which she presides, a structure in which Eternity has no place, but also contradicts traditional personifications of Eternity as a man with a snake.'8 That she might be Thalia was postulated by Richard Cocke: it was his assumption that the eight suonatrici (Figs. 14-21) in the cruciform hall of the villa are Muses, as Carlo Ridolfi had proposed, and that to complete their number, the ninth must be she who reigns in the celestial realm of the ad-joining room.19 This argument, like the casual observation by the seventeenth-century author on which it is based, ignores the lack of correspondence between the instruments held by the suonatrici and the traditional attributes of the Muses. Its chief flaw is, however, that Thalia has no role to play in that arena conceived and conjoined by paired opposites. Neither do iconographic components of the scheme of the decoration of one room logically "spill over" into entirely different iconographic contexts elsewhere in this villa. Moreover, Apollo's role in the vault composi- tion, no different from that played by the other planetary gods, rules out the possibility that Veronese is here de- picting Parnassus or Mt. Helicon. Later scholars have tried to identify a ninth Muse elsewhere in the villa, in the vault of the Stanza del Bacco, but there again the acceptability of the reading is jeopardized by the situation of Apollo in a separate composition, a different decorative level, and an ancillary role superficially unrelated to that of the "Muse."20 For the past twenty years, the figure of the Salone vault has most often been identified as a personification of Divine Wisdom. The association derives principally from the re- semblance between the figure in the Villa Barbaro and those painted by Anselmo Canera in the Palazzo Thiene in Vi- cenza (Fig. 22) and by Titian in the vestibule of the Libreria Marciana (Fig. 23).21 Canera's figure, however, appears in the sky with her traditional attribute, a snake, not a dragon, and she functions there not as part of a Pythagorean sys- tem, but rather as the central component of a purely astro- logical scheme. In fact, in the context of a Pythagorean program, based on balancing opposing qualities, Divina Sapienza plays no role: she has no clearly defined opposite, such as "universal ignorance," which might disrupt cosmic unity as Sapienza unites it.
Among the Pythagorean philosophers, only Empedocles suggests that a single force might be capable of unifying the potentially discordant relationships of the cosmos - as opposed to Isidore's "world of man."22 Empedocles' thought survived in the sixteenth century in fragmentary form and through citations by Aristotle and Simplicius. It was Empedocles who developed a cosmic system in which "into one do all through Love unite."23 As Simplicius para- phrases Empedocles' system, "the material Elements are four in number, Fire, Air, Water, and Earth, all eternal but changing in bulk and scarcity through mixture and sepa- ration: but [Empedocles'] real first principles, which impart motion to these, are Love and Strife. The Elements are con- tinually subject to an alternate change, at one time mixed together by Love, at another separated by Strife. ... ."24 Empedocles' own fragmentary description of this process of unification of the elements through Love locates "Love within their midst in all her being in length and breadth the same. . . . Perfect the works of concord calling her by name Delight or Aphrodite clear, she speeds revolving in the elements .... ."25 At the Villa Barbaro, the harmonic disposition of the elements, in accordance with the Pythagorean four-part formulae for an ordered universe, and the visual calm of the vault fresco assure the viewer that the cosmological allegory alludes to the world governed by Love. Her per- sonification is dominant in the Heavens, her conquest of Strife accomplished. This beautiful figure, clad in pure.
white, is roughly as Empedocles said she should be, "in length and breadth the same," and she shares much with traditional images of the youthful yet mature goddess Aphrodite. She wears white possibly because, as the fusion of all the elements, she may be perceived as the fusion of all colors, themselves derived from the elements, as Alberti explains and as Leonardo implies, brought into unison in white.26 The figure in Veronese's vault composition is not por- trayed alone, however. She rides a dragon, and any inter- pretation of this ensemble must acknowledge the visual unit.
of this group, which manifests what the Empedoclean sys- tem prescribes: that she, Love, has conquered Hate or Strife which, if not disarmed by its opposite, would produce dis- order and commit the cosmos to chaos. In early cosmol- ogies - Hesiod's Theogony, for example - the dragon symbolized primordial chaos.27 By the Middle Ages, the image developed a tradition both in a philosophical and Christian context: the one associating it with the embodi- ment of evil, the other with Satan. The fact that this image of the all-conquering, all-unify- ing figure of Love offered a balance between classical and Christian metaphysics deepened its appeal to Renaissance humanists. Indeed, Empedocles' system was unusually compatible with Christianity by virtue of its commitment to the singular unifying power of Love, and Empedoclean ideas formed the cornerstone of the personal philosophies of numerous Renaissance thinkers and even music theo- rists. Therefore, men whose interests extended far beyond classical philology wove the Empedoclean cosmology into both their original and exegetical writings.28 Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, in his commentary of 1486 on Girolamo Benivieni's Canzona d'amore ... , pro- vides an early example of this tendency to adapt an Em- pedoclean view to Renaissance thought: Contrariety begins, without which nothing could be cre- ated, nor is contrariety and the discord of diverse natures sufficient to constitute the creature if (according to its established temperament) the contrariety does not be- come united and the discord concordant, which [process] one can with a true definition assign to Beauty itself, which is nothing other than an amicable inamicability.
and a concordant discord. But Empedocles spoke more perfectly, positing as the beginning [the foundation] of all things not discord by itself, but discord together with concord, and intending by discord the variety of natures, of which [variety] they [the natures] are composed, and intending by concord the union of those natures. From what has been said above it is clear why Love is placed by Orpheus in the breast of Chaos before all the other gods: because Chaos is nothing but matter full of all the forms, but in a confused, imperfect, and undifferentiated state ... in which Chaos Love was born, that is the de- sire for perfection.29 Pico constituted an especially valuable source for the for- mation of Daniele Barbaro's personal philosophy for sev- eral reasons. Not only was this Tuscan philosopher a great friend and faithful correspondent of Barbaro's revered great-uncle Ermolao, but he had also demonstrated a life- long interest in the Venetian strain of Christianized Aris- totelianism.30 Pico's independence from his sources, his ability purposefully to select elements of the thoughts of others to construct a personal philosophical manifesto, is just where he may have struck his most harmonious chord with Daniele Barbaro. Both sought a synthetic approach to their sources and both tended to use classical, pagan allegory to express universal, even Christian truths.31 In Barbaro's case, one can cite Aretino's praising remarks, penned to Daniele himself: "If the wisdom of your learned judgment concludes that beautiful and ancient spirits are renewed in Daniele's compositions, I hold it as dear as if such a praise were in honor of my own works. Thus you have contracted a great debt to nature, since your schol-
arship shines with your own works and not with those of others."32 Renaissance writers who also accorded special impor- tance to Empedocles and who developed this view of Di- vine Love as the essential unifier of the cosmos include, in addition to Pico, contemporaries of the Barbaro: Benedetto Varchi, Gioseffo Zarlino, and Natale Conti. In poetry, Var- chi - Daniele's colleague in the Academia degli Infiammati - demonstrated how the cosmology of Empedocles could be adapted to modern thought. One of his Rime that ac- companies his translation (1551) of Boethius' De consola- tione philosophiae is typical: Only Love binds and holds united Heaven and earth, so that - if but for a second he loosens one rein - where now there is love and peace, there would be war, and the loss of that faith, which now the heavens and the elements direct onto the people, would be the cause of sudden ruin and destruction. Love still binds with firm friendships the villas and cities; it governs the marital knot and dictates its laws to faithful friends, where all good resides. O happy mortal race, if it turn its heart in friendship to that sainted and divine love that turns the heavens .33 In the context of mid-sixteenth-century music theory, Gioseffo Zarlino singled out the importance of Empedo- clean thought when he wrote, "Music taken in its analogy, or proportion, is not other than Harmony; and we can say that it is that Strife and Love posited by Empedocles, from which according to him all things were generated, that is a discordant concord, or one might say a concord of var- ious things all of which may be joined together."34 Finally, in the Mythologiae by Natale Conti, a handbook useful to artists and authors of programs of the period, Empedocles again receives special mention and Divine Love claims her place at the top of the cosmic hierarchy:
promoter, and dissension [strife] after the four elements, which he saw simply as the generation of matter, un- productive and useless in themselves. He thought strife the cause of corruption. However, Empedocles perceived amity and strife to be the two most powerful of the nat- ural [first] principles. There can be no doubt, but sud- denly indeed was Heaven made by God the Creator, set apart from other inferior bodies, so that the wise could contemplate; [all] at once were born amity and strife, which were believed to hide in that formless matter.35 Empedoclean rationalizations of terrestrial and cosmic har- mony thus may be understood as received philosophical knowledge in the mid-sixteenth century as they became as- similated into the conventions of Renaissance Christianized thought of Barbareni generation.