The Villa Loredan Valier Perocco di Meduna, also known as Villa Loredan at Carbonera or Villa Loredan Valier Perocco, is a late 17th- and early 18th-century aristocratic villa located in Vascon, a district of Carbonera in the northern Italian region of Veneto. Set discreetly within a still-intact walled enclosure of Trevisan countryside, the villa is distinguished by its symmetrical three-body composition, with a cubic manor house flanked by two lower porticoed barchesse, and by the spectacular double-height frescoed hall on its piano nobile, recognized today as one of the most striking examples of Baroque illusionistic decoration in the Veneto.
Setting and territory The villa stands isolated in a small, intact quadrant of luxuriant Trevisan countryside, set several hundred metres east of the ancient road that runs from Treviso–Sant'Artemio through Lancenigo to Maserada, where it meets the Roman Via Postumia near the historic fords of the Piave river. The site also lies close to the north–south Via Claudia Augusta Altinate, which connected Altino to the prealpine passes of the Bellunese, and to the Ungaresca variant running from Treviso through Lancenigo and Vascon toward Lovadina.
The Carta Archeologica del Veneto records that a road bed of the Roman centuriation of Tarvisium crosses the great walled quadrangle of the villa's brolo just north of the manor house, perpendicular to its south-west/north-east axis, an orientation the villa itself preserves. A Roman "sawn-amphora tomb" and traces of the Via Claudia Augusta have been reported in the immediate vicinity.Carta Archeologica del Veneto, p. 165, F. 38; p. 192 n. 183. The site's terrain alternates gravelly Piave alluvial fans with clay strata; the contact between these layers feeds several risorgive springs, one of which, a source of the Mignagola stream, rises inside the walled brolo itself.
History
Before the villa: the Trevisan family (15th–17th centuries) Substantial landholdings at Vascon were held from at least the mid-15th century by the Venetian patrician Trevisan family of the "Santa Maria Formosa" branch, part of the wider pattern of Venetian terraferma investment that followed the consolidation of Venetian rule over the Marca Trevigiana in 1389 and the Padovano in 1405. By the 16th century a unitary Vascon estate was held by Francesco Trevisan q. Zuanne (b. c. 1510), who in 1535 married Elisabetta Zen and had three sons: Zuanne (1538–1606), Marco (1541–1616) and Ludovico (Alvise, 1548–1592). Two parallel inheritance lines descended from the elder two sons.
Through the senior line, Zuanne's grandson Daniele Trevisan (b. 1582), who married Elisabetta Giustinian in 1624, had a single daughter and heiress, Marietta. In 1644 Marietta married Zuanne Loredan (1610–1699) q. Domenico, of the branch later known as "di San Vio", bringing the Vascon estate as part of her dowry. This is the documented "Trevisan root" of the Vascon property that became the Loredan villa.
Through the cadet line, Marco Trevisan's granddaughter Bianca (d. 1677), heiress of Francesco Trevisan q. Marco (1578–1647) and Elisabetta Valier, married Scipione Boldù in 1647, transferring the second portion of the Vascon estate to the Boldù family. Both passages occurred almost simultaneously, in the mid-1640s, and are first recorded as new patrician names in the parish at Bishop Gian Antonio Lupi's pastoral visit of 6 June 1648.F. Morandin, [Vascon studies], 1992, p. 57.
Because the originally unitary Trevisan estate had accumulated layers of dotal, usufructuary and livello rights, a Venetian magistrature act (Procurator-Giudici, 20 June 1679) was required to ratify the effective rights of all interested parties.Archivio Museo Correr, Venice, Mss PD 868/60 (Molin), Procurator-Giudici, 20 June 1679 (original parchment copy). Only after this date, when he was 69, was Zuanne Loredan free to dispose of his Vascon property without encumbrance, and free to undertake substantial building work on the manor house.
The 17th-century villa: first nucleus under Zuanne Loredan The Loredan are first implicitly attested at Vascon in 1648, when Bishop Lupi listed them, along with the Boldù, among the delinquent contributors to the parish luminaria, indicating that the young couple Zuanne and Marietta Loredan had already begun seasonal residence in Vascon, then presumably using the older Trevisan manor. A worn Venetian-Gothic well-head of late 14th-century type, surviving behind the manor with an abraded coat of arms, hints at the antiquity and nobility of the prior settlement.
Several architectural and proportional clues suggest that the present manor was built, more accurately re-built, by Zuanne Loredan in the years immediately after the 1679 settlement, on the foundations and partly on the masonry of an earlier 16th-century Trevisan house. The decision to preserve the orientation of the older structure is significant: the manor's axis, with façade facing south-west, follows the same alignment as the great walled rectangle of the brolo, which itself conforms to the Roman centuriation grid.
The resulting building is a tall parallelepiped containing a raised ground floor, a piano nobile and a lowered attic storey, under a four-pitched hipped roof. Its plan follows the canonical Veneto tripartite scheme: a central portego running through from front to back façade, two pairs of rooms on each side, and a two-flight staircase placed transversely between the western rooms. A schematic map of 1713 records this late 17th-century configuration, showing the great walled rectangle of the brolo with the cubic manor inside, a small service body attached to the rear (likely the predecessor of today's left barchessa), and the still-extant "gardener's house" sketched to the south-east.
Antonio Loredan and the public cursus honorum The radical early 18th-century transformation of the villa was made possible by the social and institutional rise of Antonio Loredan (1666–1748), third son of Zuanne and Marietta. Antonio's exceptional public career in the service of the Serenissima included posts as Provveditore Straordinario in Armata (1698–1700), Provveditore Generale in Morea (1698–1708 and 1711–1714), Provveditore Straordinario at Peschiera (1703–1710), Podestà of Brescia (1716), Provveditore Generale and Inquisitore alle Isole del Levante (1716–1719), Provveditore Generale in Armata (1718), Inquisitore in Terraferma (1723–1725), Provveditore Straordinario in Terraferma "di là del Mincio" (1733–1736), Provveditore Generale da Mar (1739–1744), and finally Capitano Generale da Mar in 1746, at the age of 82.
He played a decisive role, alongside Marshal Schulenburg and Capitano Generale da Mar Andrea Pisani, in the successful Venetian defence of Corfu against the Ottoman siege of July–August 1716. For this service the Venetian Senate created him Knight of Saint Mark on 12 September 1716. Shortly afterward, in November of the same year, the sacred-military oratorio Juditha Triumphans, celebrating the Venetian victory over the Turks, was performed at the Ospedale della Pietà; the work was composed by Antonio Vivaldi very probably on the commission of Antonio Loredan himself, a noted music patron.
The 1717–1720 transformation From around 1717, on the strength of these successes and jointly with his elder brother Alvise (b. 1663), with whom he co-owned the family property and, in 1718, the Venetian palace at San Vio (the present Palazzo Cini), Antonio undertook the comprehensive prestige redesign of the Vascon villa. The agricultural function was decentralized to tenant farms across the wider estate, and the villa was reconceived as a residence of representational svago e villeggiatura in the manner of the most ambitious 18th-century country houses of the Brenta Riviera, Terraglio, the Lombard Navigli and the Genoese ville. The architect of the campaign is undocumented; some stylistic features suggest a possible attribution to Andrea Tirali (1657–1737).
Architectural reconfiguration The asymmetrical late 17th-century complex was reorganised into a strictly symmetrical front composition. To the central manor block two lower barchesse, each of five wide arches and entirely treated in differentiated bugnato, were aligned along a single façade plane: the left barchessa presumably reworked from the existing service wing, the right one built ex novo. Both are roofed in large hipped pavilions. The junction between each barchessa and the central block is mediated by a small body, slightly recessed from the main façade line, defining two small rectangular fore-courts into which the porticoes of the barchesse open laterally. These linking bodies contain vaulted ground-floor halls (the right-hand one preserves its original painted decoration, recently recovered) that serve as visual and physical passages between the front garden and the rear brolo.
The upper salone-auditorium and the open loggia
The most inventive intervention was reserved for the central portego of the piano nobile. The second floor immediately above it was sacrificed: by removing the intermediate ceiling, the volume of the salone was extended upward to a new high vaulted ceiling just below the roof timbers. At the level of the suppressed attic, two iron-balustraded balconies were inserted at the front and rear ends of the room, serving both as disobbligo for the lateral attic chambers (which received fine Venetian stucco decoration) and as musicians' tribunes. The redesign of the salone is thus inseparable from Antonio Loredan's role as a musical patron: it is, in effect, a private auditorium of carefully calculated acoustic shape.
The boldest move was made on the front-façade end of this salone. Where Veneto tradition would have placed a triple light with balustraded balcony, the architect instead opened the wall entirely into a four-columned loggia, with two great central Ionic columns and angular pilasters in masonry and marmorino, crowned externally by a classical triangular pediment of distinctly pre-neoclassical, "Palladian" character. This tetrastyle pronaos supplies the centre to the whole composition and creates an unprecedented interior–exterior continuity between garden and salone. The original full opening can still be read: the partial 19th-century infill (probably by the Valier family) with narrower arched windows leaves visible the full external/internal perimeter of the giant columns. The loggia was very likely kept fully open during the summer residential months.
Hypothetical external staircase An oral tradition recalls a vanished external staircase rising from the front garden to the salone. A double-flight "pincer"-shaped Baroque staircase, set against the central façade and rising to the loggia, would be architecturally congruent, provided it left clear the central arch and lateral architraved openings serving the lower portego. The six allegorical statues now in the villa (see below), as well as their stylistic and narrative coherence, plausibly belonged to such a staircase, ascending in two groups of three toward the loggia and culminating in the celebration of Roman virtues inside the salone.
Description
The villa consists of a monumental central block flanked horizontally by two porticoed barchesse, formerly intended to house servants, arranged in entirely symmetrical position. At its centre, the façade contains four Ionic semicolumns and a triangular tympanum; this neo-Palladian motif is an early 18th-century addition (c. 1717–1720), as are the linking sections between the main block and the two barchesse. The overall architectural effect, predominantly horizontal, fits well into the flat countryside of the March of Treviso.
Interior decoration