Discover Villa Barbaro at Maser

The composition is a central block with a temple front, flanked by long arcaded barchesse ending in dovecote pavilions -- domestic dignity and farm buildings unified into a single symmetrical facade, which is the Palladian villa's central idea.

Inside, Veronese's frescoes cover everything. Painted architecture opens the walls into illusionistic landscapes; figures lean through false doorways; a painted servant peers around a corner; Veronese may have put himself and his family among them. The ceiling of the Hall of Olympus dissolves into sky.

The effect is that architecture and painting are doing the same job. Veronese's painted columns continue Palladio's real ones, and it is deliberately hard to tell at a glance where one stops.

Behind the house a nymphaeum -- a semicircular pool and grotto with stucco figures -- is fed by the spring that supplied the villa and its fields, so the ornamental and the practical are the same system.