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Andrea Palladio (1508 - 80)
Palladio was the first great professional architect of the modern era and - as the eponymous creator of Palladianism - certainly the most influential.
He was the son of Pietro dalla Gondola and a citizen of Padua. He began his working life as a stone-mason and bricklayer.
In about 1536, Giangiorgio Trissino, a poet, philosopher, mathematician and amateur architect -in other words, a common-or-garden Renaissance man - took him under his wing and encouraged him to study the ancient Romans. In particular, Trissino encouraged Palladio to study Vitruvius. It was Trissino who nicknamed him "Palladio", an allusion to Pallas Athene, the ancient goddress of wisdom, who featured in a poem Palladio was writing at the time.
Palladio began the full time study of architecture. Trissino took his protégé to Rome several times between 1541 and 1547, where he studied the remains of Ancient Roman architecture. Palladio's reputation was established by his work modernising the earlier Palazzo della Ragione in Vicenza, which began in 1546 and was completed by 1549. He surrounded the old building with a two-storey screen of arches in an ancient-Roman-brought-up-to-date style. From then on his flow of work rarely dried up.
From 1540 onwards he had commissions for a number of aristocratic palaces. Casa Civena, in Vicenza, was followed by Palazzo Thiene, where he introduced Ionic columns, Corinthian pilasters, a rusticated surface to the walls, and heavy quoins and voussoirs to give a monumental effect. The room layout was based on those of ancient Roman baths. The basic plan of Palazzo da Porto was also derived from ancient Rome, but its façade was based on models by Raphael and Bramante. For Palazzo Chiericati he invented a façade consisting of a two-storey colonnade, which still derived from ancient ideas but was his own invention.
Palladio designed the convent of the Carità in Venice with the plan to make it a perfect reconstruction of an Ancient Roman house. But he liberally invented features never seen in a Roman house, such as the first flying spiral staircase. In fact, his style began to move in two directions at the same time. On the one hand, his designs - particularly the building layouts - became more pedantically reproductions of ancient layouts. For example, his last building in Vicenza. the Teatro Olimpico, was an elaborate reconstruction of a Roman theatre. On the other hand, his façades became less and less authentically ancient and developed all sorts of decorative effects in the then-cutting edge Modernist tradition. Palazzo Valmarana was built with a mass of overlapping pilasters, which would have surprised the Caesars.
Many of his commissions were villas. Palladio developed a blueprint based on his idea of an ideal Roman villa. The main building was symmetrical, with a central door and portico. At the side were long wings of farm buildings. In many cases his porticos for houses look like temple-fronts, because Palladio (wrongly) assumed the ancient Romans had built them that way.
Palladio also designed several churches, all in Venice.
What Palladio insisted on in all his designs, whether directly copied from the ancient Roman models or invented by him, was that the sizes of rooms and the proportions of all the elements in a building had to be determined according to mathematical rules to ensure harmonic proportions. This he believed was the essence of the lessons to be learned from the ancient Romans.
In 1554 Palladio published two detailed studies of historical buildings: Le antichità di Roma (Ancient Roman Buildings) and Descrizione delle chiese di Roma (Roman Churches Described).
In 1570 he published his Quattro libri dell’architettura (Four Books on Architecture). This was partly an advertisement for his business as the admired buildings were his own. But it also set out his whole theory of proportions and harmony in architecture. This book was the source of Palladianism, which gradually became the predominant architectural style in Western Europe.
So far as England was concerned, Palladio's theories were first embraced by Inigo Jones. But with his death, Baroque became the predominant English style until over half a century later when Lord Burlington introduced the English to Palladianism and his protege, Colen Campbell published his edition of the Quattro libri in 1728. The standard edition, however, was Ware's 1738 editon.
Palladio was unusual among the artists of the time in that he stuck to architecture and nothing else. He set out to recreate the splendour of ancient buildings. The rules he claimed to have discovered came to be treated with blind obedience by his successors, although Palladio himself broke them whenever it suited him. Neo-Classicism repudiated him for inventing an ancient world of "impure" buildings which had never in fact existed and went back to basics to discover their own purer rules (which they too then liberally ignored).
