Andrea Palladio

Italian architect

• Born: November 30, 1508
• Birthplace: Padua, Republic of Venice (now in Italy)
• Died: August 1, 1580
• Place of death: Vicenza, Republic of Venice (now in Italy)

Palladio was the first great professional architect, one of the most influential the world has ever known, and possibly the most imitated architect in history. He fused Classical proportions and harmony with Renaissance exuberance, thus creating an architectural manner that has endured through the centuries.

Early Life

Andrea Palladio (ahn-DRAY-ah pah-LAHD-yoh) was born to Piero, a miller, and Donna Marta, called the cripple. Very little is known of his early years; the record of his activities begins with his apprenticeship in 1521 to a stone carver in the local trade corporation of bricklayers and stonemasons. His master at the corporation of Mount Berico has been identified as Bartolomeo Cavazza de Sossano, the artist responsible for the altar in the Church of Santa Maria dei Carmini in Padua. In 1523, Andrea ran away to Vicenza, where he was followed by Cavazza, who forced him to return to Padua to serve out the rest of his apprenticeship. A year later, the sixteen-year-old Andrea broke his bond and returned to Vicenza, where for the next fourteen years, he was first apprentice and then assistant to two sculptors, Giovanni da Porlezza and Girolamo Pittoni, both of the Pedemuro workshop, who had a near-monopoly on commissions, both private and public, to create many of Vicenza’s monuments and ornamental sculptures in the then-popular mannerist style.

Records show that in 1534 Andrea married Allegradonna, the daughter of a carpenter; the union produced five children. Working with the Pedemuro masters gave Andrea a thorough grounding in the techniques of stonework and sculpture, and he might have remained a craftsperson for the rest of his life had he not, at age thirty, met Count Gian Giorgio Trissino.

Trissino hired the young stonecarver to work on a new loggia and a few additions he had designed for his Villa Cricoli on the outskirts of Vicenza. Trissino took Andrea under his wing, housing and educating him with a group of young aristocrats who studied mathematics, philosophy, music, and classical literature. During this period, Andrea was given the appropriately classical name of Palladio by Trissino. Under Trissino’s tutelage, the newly christened Palladio embarked on a far-reaching study of architecture especially that of Vitruvius and engineering, as well as ancient topography.

Palladio may have joined Trissino on an extended stay in Padua in the late 1530’s; perhaps it was then that Palladio encountered the work of Alvise Cornaro, whose influence is evident in Palladio’s elegantly simple and clear writing style and in the economy of ornamentation in his designs. In 1541 and in 1545, Palladio visited Rome with Trissino. During these journeys, Palladio acquired a firsthand knowledge of classical architecture by sketching and measuring the ancient buildings baths, arches, bridges, temples whose remains could be seen above ground, and by studying and copying from the sketchbooks of other architects.

Shortly after Palladio returned to Vicenza, he won a commission to refurbish the Palazzo della Ragione, a vast Gothic structure that served as the meeting hall of Vicenza’s Council of the Four Hundred. Whatever the council’s reasons, their choice of Palladio in 1549 brought him instant recognition, and thereafter he was kept busy with commissions for palaces, villas, and churches.

Trissino died in 1550 a loss not only to Palladio but also to Vicenza’s intellectual and artistic community but by then Palladio was firmly established as an architect with several villas and public buildings under commission. Furthermore, in 1554, he published the results of his study tours in L’antichità di Roma (the antiquities of Rome), a small but reliable guidebook to the ancient ruins of Rome that became the standard guidebook to Roman antiquities for two centuries.

Life’s Work

Ever an active student of architecture, Palladio published his ideas and theories in several works issued throughout his career. In 1556, he collaborated with Daniele Barbaro in an edition of Vitruvius. Palladio’s greatest piece of writing, I quattro libri dell’architettura (1570; The Four Books of Architecture , 1738), was published late in his career, after he had devoted two decades to design and building. Using many drawings of his own buildings to exemplify the principles of design to which he tried to adhere, Palladio created an architectural pattern book that dictated building practice throughout Western civilization for four centuries. His last book, I commentari di C. Givlio Cesare (1575), is an edition of Julius Caesar’s Commentaries, with illustrations by Palladio’s sons Leonida and Orazio.

Palladio’s architectural legacy can be classified loosely into three categories: villas, palaces and public buildings, and ecclesiastical buildings. Contrary to a popular misconception, there is no such thing as a typical Palladian villa. Palladio was far too innovative an architect to rely on one standard design, and his villas display the variety and inventiveness of his work. All the villas, however, share, as James Ackerman wrote, “a common conception of architectural harmony and composition” and a fusion of the practical and the ornamental, the commonplace and the luxurious, modernity and antiquity. Unlike the typical villas of the day, Palladio’s villas were nearly all built for gentlemen farmers men of wealth, culture, and sophistication. In the mid-sixteenth century, many of the great families moved inland to their vast estates to supervise their new ventures. These families needed homes for themselves and for their workers, shelter for their livestock, and storage for their crops. Palladio, already committed to the blending of the utilitarian and the majestic, was the perfect architect to create the new style that had no single architectural ancestry but a style that would integrate the traditional, the classical, and the innovative.

Palladio believed in a hierarchy of functions in design and architecture, and in one of his most famous metaphors, he compared a well-designed building to the human body: In both, the noble and beautiful parts are exposed and the unattractive but essential portions are hidden. Accordingly, his villas are completely functional structures or structural complexes, created both to accommodate the day-to-day business of a large agricultural venture and to disguise that practicality with a grand design drawn from classical architecture. In another departure from common practice, these villas were situated not in walled gardens but central to the activities of the great estates. Palladio’s signature element, which appeared on all the villas except Sarego (c. 1568-1569), is a pedimented temple front that appears in some buildings as a porch, in others as a relief. Although this feature appeared in classical architecture only on religious structures, Palladio incorporated it into nearly all his domestic buildings.

None of the palaces for which Palladio created designs was completed; in some cases, only the façades and entrances were built. Only one public building was ever completed. The Veneto region in the mid-sixteenth century was subject to much financial and political instability, which hampered the building of the grand structures envisioned by Palladio’s patrons in Vicenza. Modern knowledge of Palladio’s intentions comes from the finished façades and sections and from the detailed illustrations of specific designs in The Four Books of Architecture. Produced between about 1540 and the early 1570’s with a break of a few years in the late 1560’s the palace designs share with the villas Palladio’s distinctive combination of mannerist elements with classical proportion and repose; indeed, four of the palace designs in The Four Books of Architecture, of which only the Palazzo Antonini (c. 1556) was even partially built, resemble nothing so much as Palladian villas adapted to narrow city building sites and already crowded streets.

While Palladio’s villas and palaces are all in the Veneto region, his churches are all in Venice, in which he was increasingly spending much of his time. It is clear that he traveled often in the 1560’s: to Turin, to Provence, to Florence, where he became a member of the Academy of Design, and to Venice, where he met Giorgio Vasari, who became his friend. In 1568, Palladio was so busy that he was forced to decline an invitation to visit the Imperial Court of Vienna.

In his fifties by the time he began to design churches, Palladio believed strongly that church architecture should both glorify God and ornament the city. His commissions private or civic or monastic, rather than from the Church reflected his belief that religious architecture, like secular design, should surpass the achievement of earlier builders. Palladio, as well as two contemporaries, Galeazzo Alessi and Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola, developed a church design that took into account both the needs of the liturgical revival and the demands of architectural unity. This new ecclesiastical space combined a substantial nave with large side chapels, all joined but not restricted or blocked by a majestic central space that rose to a dome.

In 1558, Palladio’s first ecclesiastical commission (which does not survive) was a design for the façade of San Pietro di Castello in Venice. During the next decade, he worked on a cloister for Santa Maria della Carita; the refectory and cloister and then the Church of San Giorgio Maggiore; and the façade of San Francesco della Vigna, all in Venice. In the decade before his death, Palladio produced four more designs: the Zitelle church (c. 1570) in Venice, considerably altered by the architects who finished it after Palladio’s death; a chapel for the Villa Valmarana in Vicenza (c. 1576); Il Redentore in Venice (c. 1576-1577); and the Tempietto at the Villa Maser (c. 1579-1580). In the Tempietto, Palladio found his opportunity to design a central-plan church, modeled on his ideas for reconstructing the Pantheon in a modern idiom. The Tempietto retains the symbolic cross structure, which is integrated with a unified interior space enclosed by wall masses that support a dome. Palladio’s last project was the Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza. Commissioned by the members of the Accademia Olimpica for their regular and elaborate stage performances, the theater is an interpretive reconstruction of an ancient Roman theater in France. Palladio did not live to see the theater completed, although most of the construction was done by the time he died in August, 1580.

Significance

Appealing more to austere Protestant sensibilities than to Catholic preferences, which favored the exuberance of the Baroque, the restrained Palladian style enjoyed its greatest popularity in the northern European cultural centers. Palladio’s ideas and designs first traveled to England through the work of English architect Inigo Jones in the seventeenth century, although the true flowering of the Palladian style had to wait for the eighteenth century and Lord Burlington, who was responsible for the popularization of Palladianism in England. The style spread to Ireland and then to the American colonies, where the simple lines and harmonic proportions of Palladianism dominated in both domestic and public architecture. Not until the classical and Gothic revivals of the nineteenth century would the Palladian style be challenged, but its popularity has remained high even today.

Palladianism has been interpreted variously. To some, it means restraint and simplicity; to others, it signals correct proportions and cool detachment; to the great majority, it denotes a pediment plus a portico on a public building. Basically, the Palladian style is symmetrical, harmonically proportioned, majestic, and based on reason. At the same time, it is classical in its form and in its use of ornamentation. It conforms to Palladio’s goals of composition: hierarchy, or the movement of subordinate elements to a dominant focal point; integration of part to part, and part to the whole; coordination between the exterior design and interior structure; and consistency of proportion.

Bibliography

Ackerman, James S. Palladio. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1966. A good general study detailing both Palladio’s uniqueness and his borrowings from the past and from his contemporaries. Describes his education, his era, and the physical and cultural environment in which he worked. Provides brief critical introductions to Palladio’s major buildings. The text is copiously illustrated with photographs and line drawings.

Boucher, Bruce. Andrea Palladio: The Architect in His Time. Rev. and updated ed. New York: Abbeville Press, 1998. Study of Palladio’s career and development, tracing the differences between his early, mature, and late works. Incorporates the major research done in the thirty years following the publication of Ackerman’s text. Includes illustrations, bibliographic references, and index.

Constant, Caroline. The Palladio Guide. 2d ed. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1993. Although technically belonging to the genre of the architectural guidebook, this volume theorizes that Palladio’s buildings share an integral relationship with and a spatial attitude to the site. Begins with a brief biography and introduction, followed by a chronological listing of the buildings. The body of the book is a series of articles, each devoted to a single villa and arranged chronologically. Features a selected bibliography and maps. Probably too confusing to be used as a guidebook, but the interpretive commentary is most informative.

Guinness, Desmond, and Julius Torusdale Sadler, Jr. Palladio: A Western Progress. New York: Viking Press, 1976. A brief account of Palladio’s life and achievement, followed by several chapters describing the influence of Palladianism on architecture in England, Ireland, North America, and the West Indies. Very informative; profusely illustrated, primarily with photographs.

Kaufmann, Emil. Architecture in the Age of Reason: Baroque and Post-Baroque in England, Italy, and France. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1955. The first chapter, “English Baroque and English Palladianism,” offers a good introduction to Palladio’s principles of design and their application in the architecture of eighteenth century England. An extensive bibliography is provided for each chapter.

Puppi, Lionello. Andrea Palladio. Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1975. An extensive, exhaustive, and profusely illustrated critical study of Palladio’s life and work. The detailed and well-documented catalog of works makes up half of the volume and provides a thorough introduction to Palladio’s achievement. An excellent bibliography includes works by Palladio and commentators on his work and covers material from the sixteenth century to the 1970’s.

Rybczynski, Witold. The Perfect House: A Journey with the Renaissance Master Andrea Palladio. New York: Scribner, 2002. Part architectural treatise, part travel journal, this book recounts an architect’s visits to the seventeen surviving Palladio villas and his observations about each one. Includes illustrations, bibliographic references, and index.

Williams, Kim, and Giovanni Giaconi. The Villas of Palladio. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2003. A collection of pen-and-ink watercolor renderings of all thirty-two of the villas originally designed by Palladio. Also includes sketches, Palladio’s original woodcut plans, a color map, and bibliographic references.

Wittkower, Rudolf. Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism. 5th ed. Chichester, West Sussex, England: Academy Editions, 1998. An essential work that laid the foundations of modern Palladian criticism. Discusses Palladio’s cultural development, analyzes style in the villas and the ecclesiastical buildings, and provides analyses of Palladian principles.