SCENE AT THE OLYMPIAN THEATER AT VICENZA.
In the lower order the middle interval has a high open arch, and the two others, on the side, have square openings through which are seen streets and squares of stately architecture, each ending in a triumphal arch. The position of the diverging avenues will be understood by reference to the [plan]. The magnificent palaces and private dwellings which are here portrayed furnish a very effective setting for the plays which were performed in the theater. Though the distance to the back of the theater is only forty feet, yet by skillful and ingenious perspective and foreshortening it appears to be four hundred feet distant. For this skillful and ingenious conceit, which is unclassical in spirit, we are indebted to Scamozzi. The exterior of the theater is by no means comparable to its internal beauty. It was built not at the expense of the government, but by some private Vicentine gentleman of the Olympic Academy. The theater was completed in 1586, and was inaugurated by the performance of the “Œdipus Tyrannus” of Sophocles.
The general lines of the interior of the theater are noble and calm. The theater looks as well on paper as in reality, for, like so many of Palladio’s buildings built of brick and stucco, which are now in a dilapidated condition, it has an enduring shabbiness. It must be said that in this remarkable building Palladio conciliated the precepts of Vitruvius and the needs of a contemporaneous society. M. Eugène Müntz has expressed the conception of the theater when he said that it was a “mirage of a Paolo Veronese in architecture,” and indeed, with its profusion of statues and niches and columns, it does resemble the works of the great painter of Verona, who, in his great light-filled frescoes and canvases, crowds the space with monumental architecture, and fills the buildings with the well-dressed courtiers of Venice, until the whole becomes a gorgeous pageant.
PLAN OF PALLADIO’S OLYMPIAN THEATER.