At Home - Bill Bryson [155]
• CHAPTER XIII •
THE PLUM ROOM
I
We call it the plum room for no other reason than that the walls were painted that color when we moved in, and by accident the name stuck. There is no telling what the Reverend Mr. Marsham called this room. It appeared on the original plans as “the Drawing Room,” but then that key room was moved next door during the reshuffle that deprived the servants of the proposed “Footman’s Pantry” and gave Mr. Marsham a spacious dining room instead. Whatever it was called, this room was clearly intended as a kind of parlor, probably for the receiving of favored guests. Mr. Marsham might have called it the library, for one section of wall is filled with a built-in bookcase reaching from floor to ceiling and large enough to hold about six hundred books, a respectable number for a man of his profession in that day. By 1851, books for reading were widely affordable, but books for show remained expensive, so if Mr. Marsham’s shelves held a collection of tooled calfskin it is entirely possible that that was display enough to give the room its name.
Mr. Marsham seems to have lavished a good deal of care on this room. The cornice moldings, wooden fireplace surround, and bookshelves are all in a semiexuberant classical style that bespeaks expense and thoughtful selection. Nineteenth-century pattern books offered homeowners an almost infinite array of shapely, esoterically named motifs—ovolos, ogees, quirks, crockets, scotias, cavettos, dentils, evolute spirals, even a “Lesbian cymatium,” and at least two hundred more—with which to individualize projecting surfaces of wood or plaster, and Mr. Marsham chose liberally, opting for bubble-like beading around the doorcase, fluted columns at the windows, ribbony swags fluttering across the fireplace breast, and a stately show of repeating demi-hemispheres in a style known as egg-and-dart around the ceiling trim.
Such decorative gusto was actually out of fashion by this time and marks Mr. Marsham out as something of a rustic, but we may be grateful to him now, for the classical styles he selected take us in a straight line to the most influential architect in history—himself a rustic, as it happens—and onward to two of the most interesting houses ever built, both in America, both the work of rustics there. So this is really a chapter about architectural style in a domestic setting and some rustics who changed the world. It touches in passing on books, too—not inappropriately, I hope, for a chapter coming from a room that may or may not once have been a library.
For the story of how the plum room’s stylistic features, and a great deal else in the built world beyond, got to look the way they do, we need to leave Norfolk and England, and take ourselves to the sunny plains of northern Italy and the pleasant and ancient city of Vicenza, halfway between Verona and Venice in the region known as the Veneto. At first glance, Vicenza seems much like any other northern Italian city of its size, but almost all visitors are soon overtaken by an odd sense of familiarity. Again and again, you turn corners to find yourself standing before buildings that you feel, in an almost uncanny way, you have seen before.
In a sense you have. For these buildings were the templates from which other important buildings all over the Western world were derived: the Louvre, the White House, Buckingham Palace, the New York Public Library, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and uncountable numbers of banks, police stations, courthouses, churches, museums, hospitals, schools, stately homes, and unassuming houses. The Palazzo Barbarano and Villa Piovene clearly share architectural DNA with the New York Stock Exchange, the Bank of England, and the Berlin Reichstag, among many others. The Villa Capra, on a hillside on the edge of town, brings to mind a hundred domed structures, from Vanbrugh’s Temple of the Four Winds at Castle Howard to the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C. The Villa Chiericati, with its striking portico of