Villa Cornaro Historical Timeline

Giorgio Cornaro commissioned the villa around 1552, and the family held the estate for generations afterwards. Palladio published it in the Quattro Libri of 1570, which is how the design reached architects who would never see the building.

Two later campaigns produced most of what is inside. Around the end of the sixteenth century Camillo Mariani carved the statues of Cornaro ancestors that stand in the main hall. Then in 1716–17 the young Mattia Bortoloni covered the walls with more than a hundred biblical scenes — an enormous commission for a painter barely twenty years old, and the reason the interior reads as eighteenth-century inside a sixteenth-century shell.

The villa passed into foreign ownership in the twentieth century and was restored by owners who published an account of the work, which is part of why this particular villa is so unusually well documented.