Giacomo Quarenghi Main elevation, rear elevation, cross section, and plan of Villa Whitworth

Alessandro Martoni

Pencil, pen, black ink, and polychrome watercolors on paper; 135 × 215 mm (inv. 30491); Donghi Collection 

The four drawings illustrate the project, datable to the ninth decade of the eighteenth century, for a villa to be built on the imperial estate of Tsarskoye Selo, near Saint Petersburg, for Lord Charles Whitworth, British ambassador and plenipotentiary to the court of the Romanovs from 1788 to 1800. The villa adheres closely to Palladian canons: in its use of the Ionic giant order that ties together the floors on the front façade, in the hierarchical articulation of its functional levels, in its use of the base as a podium at the rear, in the insertion of the owner’s insignia in the pediment, in the Diocletian window with its explicit classicist references, and in the triangular tympanums. The false tympanum pronaos of the front facade recalls a module of rigorous linear geometries that Palladio used more often in the façades of ecclesial buildings than in his villas. In the latter case, the pronaos almost always became an opportunity to extend the volume of the building outward to create a luminous and plastic play of solids and voids. It is in the garden façade – with its ashlar plinth around the grand staircase and its gabled avant-corps according to a scheme that recalls Villa Forni Cerato in Montecchio Precalcino – that Villa Whitworth expands with greater plastic dynamism, in line with similar projects by Quarenghi for suburban homes, such as the one for the ambassador of Baviera, built in the same countryside in Tsarskoye Selo.
The barrel vaults, the domed hall and the apse vaults adorned with hexagonal and rhomboid coffers, visible in the section drawing, are elements that reveal the building’s antiquarian classicism, while the plan declares full adherence to the Palladian language, also in terms of functional articulation and room distribution. Other sets of autographed drawings referable to the same project for Charles Whitworth, all watercolors, are conserved in the Municipal Library of Bergamo (6 sheets, Album G), the National Museum of Warsaw (7 sheets, including the plan of the second floor), the Irish Architectural Archive in Dublin (6 sheets), the Hermitage collections (6 sheets) and the Gabinetto dei Disegni of the Gallerie Accademia in Venice, testifying to the practice on the part of Quarenghi and studio of replicating drawings relating to his most important projects.

Bibliography: R. Mangili, in Le carte riscoperte. I disegni delle collezioni Donghi, Fissore, Pozzi alla Fondazione Giorgio Cini, edited by G. Pavanello, (Venice: 2008), pp. 107-109, catt. 194-197; P. Angelini, in Disegni di Giacomo Quarenghi. Progetti architettonici, exhibition catalog (Venice, Gallerie dell’Accademia) edited by A. Perissa Torrini and V. Poletto, (Venice: 2018), pp. 148-150, cat. II 21.