THE MANNERIST CONCEPTION OB SPACE

accent of the composition towards the River Arno. Here a loggia, open
in a spacious Venetian window on the ground floorand originally also
in a colonnade on the upper floor, replaces the solid wall. This is a
favourite Mannerist way of linking room withroom, away in which
both a clear Renaissance separation of units and a free Baroque flow
through the whole and beyond are avoided. Thus, Palladio's two
Venetian churches terminate in the east, not in closed apses, but in
arcades—straight in S. Giorgio Maggiore (1565), semicircular in the
Redentore (157?)—behind which back rooms of indistinguishable
dimensions appear. And thus Vasari, together with Vignola (1507-73)
designed the Villa Giulia, the country casino of Pope Julius III (1550-
55), as a sequence ofbuildings with loggias towards semicircular courts

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59. GIORGIO VASARI, GIACOMO VIGNOLA AND BARTOLOMMEO AMMANATI: THE VILLA OF
POPE JULIUS in, ROME, BEGUN IJJ2.

and with vistas across from the entrance through the first loggia
towards the second, through it towards the third and through that
into a walled back garden (fig. 59).

For the garden of the i6th century is still walled in. It may have
long and varied vistas, as you also find them at the Villa Este in
Tivoli or at Caprarola, but they do not stretch out into infinity as in
the Baroque at Versailles. Neither do the low colonnades on the
ground floors of Mannerist buildings, such as the Palazzo Massimi
and the Uffizi, indicate infinity—that is, a dark, unsurveyable back-
ground of space, as a Rembrandt background. Back walls are too
near. The continuity of the facade is broken by such colonnades—
that is what the Renaissance would have disliked—but the layer of
opened-up space is shallow and clearly confined in depth, Pafladio's

E.A.—9

in