Andrea Palladio

Andrea Palladio (born Nov. 30, 1508, Padua, Republic of Venice [Italy]—died August 1580, Vicenza) was an Italian architect, regarded as the greatest architect of 16th-century northern Italy. His designs for palaces (palazzi) and villas, notably the Villa Rotonda (1550–51) near Vicenza, and his treatise I quattro libri dell’architettura (1570; The Four Books of Architecture) made him one of the most influential figures in Western architecture.

Early life and works

Palladio was born in the northern Italian region of the Veneto, where, as a youth, he was apprenticed to a sculptor in Padua until, at the age of 16, he moved to nearby Vicenza and enrolled in the guild of the bricklayers and stonemasons. He was employed as a mason in workshops specializing in monuments and decorative sculpture in the style of the Mannerist architect Michele Sanmicheli of Verona.

Between 1530 and 1538 Count Gian Giorgio Trissino, a Humanist poet and scholar, was rebuilding his villa at Cricoli outside Vicenza in the ancient Roman, or classical, style. Palladio, working there as a mason, was noticed by Trissino, who undertook to expand his practical experience with a Humanist education. The Villa Trissino was rebuilt to a plan reminiscent of designs of Baldassarre Peruzzi, an important High Renaissance architect. Planned to house a learned academy for Trissino’s pupils, who lived a semimonastic life studying mathematics, music, philosophy, and classical authors, the villa represented Trissino’s interpretation of the ancient Roman architect and theorist Vitruvius (active 46–30 bc), whom Palladio was later to describe as his master and guide. The name Palladio was given to Andrea, after a Humanist habit, as an allusion to the mythological figure Pallas Athena and to a character in Trissino’s poem “Italia liberata dai goti.” It indicates the hopes Trissino had for his protégé.

At the Villa Trissino, Palladio met the young aristocracy of Vicenza, some of whom were to become his patrons. By 1541 he had stylistically assimilated the Mannerist works of Michele Sanmicheli and the High Renaissance buildings of Jacopo Sansovino, whose library of St. Mark’s in Venice had been begun in 1536. He had probably been introduced in Padua to Alvise Cornaro, whose designs were the first to import the Roman Renaissance style to northern Italy. Palladio may also have met a prominent Mannerist architect and theoretician, Sebastiano Serlio, who was in Venice at that time and whose third and fourth books on architecture (L’architettura; 1540 and 1537, respectively) were to be an inspiration to him.

In about 1540 Palladio designed his first villa, at Lonedo for Girolamo de’ Godi, and his first palace, in Vicenza for Giovanni Civena. The Villa Godi has a plan clearly derived from the Villa Trissino but with similarities to traditional Venetian country houses. It contains all the elements of Palladio’s future villa designs, including symmetrical flanking wings for stables and barns and a walled courtyard in front of the house. In elevation the Palazzo Civena is close to the High Renaissance palace type developed in the early 16th century in Rome. In plan it resembles Sanmicheli’s Palazzo Canossa (c. 1535) in Verona. An innovative feature is the use of traditional arcaded pavement of northern Italy behind the main elevation, an idea that Palladio reinterpreted in imitation of an ancient Roman forum.

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Visits to Rome and work in Vicenza

In 1541 and again in 1547 Palladio visited Rome with Trissino. These visits greatly affected his palace designs. On them, he saw the work of the greatest architects of the Roman High Renaissance style, Donato Bramante, Peruzzi, and Raphael, generally more remembered for his painting than for his architecture. He also measured ancient Roman antiquities, notably the baths. Palladio’s principal ideas on palace design were formed between his first works of 1540 and his visit to Rome in 1554–56.

In 1546 Palladio prepared designs for the reconstruction of the 15th-century town hall in Vicenza, known since then as the Basilica, and in 1548 these plans were accepted, though much earlier designs, drawn in 1534 by the Mannerist architect and painter Giulio Romano and by several other distinguished architects, had been previously rejected. This was his first major public commission, and the work, which was not actually finished until 1617, involved recasing a vast hall with a two-story arcade of white stone to serve as a buttress to the old structure. Suited to both the Gothic style of the original structure and the dimensions of the classical orders, Palladio’s arcade was of great proportional subtlety. The architectural motifs used were taken from Serlio and from Sansovino’s library of St. Mark’s in Venice. Up to 1556 Palladio produced three basic palace types. The first, in 1550, was the Palazzo Chiericati, in which he extended his Palazzo Civena forum idea of a block with its axis parallel to the pavement, which it envelops in a loggia, or roofed open gallery. The tripartite division of the colonnaded elevation, which gives the building a definite central focus, was an innovation. The second, in 1552, was seen in the Palazzo Iseppo Porto, Vicenza, in which he stated in its clearest form his reconstruction of a Roman house. The facade was closely based on the Roman Renaissance palace type, such as Bramante’s House of Raphael (c. 1514), which Palladio had drawn in Rome. But it was planned in what Palladio believed to be the ancient Roman style. Two tetrastyle halls with four columns each were placed on opposite sides of a court surrounded by a giant colonnade of Corinthian columns. The third, in 1556, was in the Palazzo Antonini in Udine, which has a square plan with a central four-column tetrastyle hall and the service quarters asymmetrically to one side. The facade has six columns, which are attached to the wall rather than freestanding and which are centrally placed on each of the two floors, surmounted by a pediment or a low-pitched gable—a device normally used in his villas.

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Palladio further developed the basic plan of his Palazzo Iseppo Porto in the Palazzo Thiene (c. 1545–50), Vicenza, the largest and most problematical of his palace designs, of which only the side and rear blocks were completed. Four wings, containing a combination of rectangular rooms and small octagons, similar to those of the Roman public baths, are symmetrically placed around a huge court. The elevations are of a grandeur unequalled in Palladio’s other work. The design is the first in which Palladio was influenced deeply by the prevailing contemporary style of Mannerism and especially by Giulio Romano, who was in Vicenza when the project was begun.

During his stay in Rome, from 1554 to 1556, Palladio in 1554 published Le antichità di Roma (“The Antiquities of Rome”), which for 200 years remained the standard guidebook to Rome. In 1556 he collaborated with the classical scholar Daniele Barbaro in reconstructing Roman buildings for the plates of Vitruvius’ influential architectural treatise (written after 26 bce) De architectura (On Architecture). The new edition was published in Venice in 1556.

Palladio’s elevations have always a central emphasis that reflects the axial symmetry of the plan. This is developed in the Palazzo Valmarana, Vicenza, of 1565, along with an increasing use of stucco surface reliefs and giant orders, or columns, extending more than one story. The latter are both Mannerist elements, used particularly by Michelangelo. Giant orders were also used in the massive and unfinished Palazzo Porto-Breganze of c. 1570 and finally in the Loggia del Capitanio of 1571. The latter was built in emulation of many similar loggias, such as those of Florence and Venice. The lower floor was to be a raised platform open to the square and the upper a meeting hall. The original decoration was adapted to symbolize the contribution of Vicenza to the Venetian victory over the Turks at Lepanto in 1571, and a triumphal-arch motif was added to the side elevation. But the cost of the victory so impoverished the government that only three bays, or sections, were built of a possible five or seven intended.

Though Palladio absorbed contemporary Mannerist motifs, his plans and elevations always retained a repose and order not associated with Mannerist architecture, particularly that of Michelangelo and Giulio Romano. When the simplicity of his early designs was abandoned, it was largely to incorporate details warranted by the examination of buildings of the late Roman Empire, reflecting archaeological study common to his period.

Palladio’s villas were less affected by his visits to Rome. For practical reasons these buildings were always of stuccoed brickwork with a minimum of carved-stone detail. His aim was to recreate the Roman villa as he had come to understand it from Latin descriptions in the writings of Pliny and Vitruvius. His villas were built for a capitalist gentry who, during the period of Palladio’s maturity, gained in prosperity and found new economic outlets in agricultural improvement and land reclamation. He developed the prototype plan of Villa Trissino with many variations at Cricoli. The plan could change in scale and function to serve as a summer residence of an urban aristocrat or the estate headquarters of a gentleman farmer. Included in the former category are the least typical and most widely copied of Palladio’s villa designs, the villa for Giulio Capra, called the Villa Rotonda, near Vicenza. This was a hilltop belvedere, or summer house, with a view, of completely symmetrical plan with hexastyle, or porticoes on each of four sides and central circular halls surmounted by domes. The Villa Trissino at Meledo, of the same type, was to have curved wings attached to the main portico. This was a device Palladio usually used when less consideration had to be given to farming and agricultural use of the land. Although the Villa Trissino was not built, it was a most influential design because it was illustrated in the Quattro libri.

Palladio adapted the classical temple front to the facades of his villas because it had the dignity suitable for an entrance. He reasoned that, since ancient temples such as the Pantheon in Rome had pedimented porticoes, houses, which preceded temples, would also have had them. Sometimes, as at the Villa Cornaro (c. 1560–65) at Piombino Dese and the Villa Pisani (c. 1553–55) at Montagnana, the portico is two-storied, with principal rooms on two floors. Normally (as at the Villa Foscari at Mira, called Malcontenta [1560]; the Villa Emo at Fanzolo [late 1550s]; and the Villa Badoer), the porch covers one major story and the attic, the entire structure being raised on a base that contains service areas and storage. In a third type the temple front covers the whole front of the house, as at the Villa Barbaro (c. 1555–59) at Maser, which Palladio designed for his friend the scholar Daniele Barbaro. This villa retains the contemporary fresco interiors painted by the Venetian master Paolo Veronese (c. 1528–88) and is one of the few interiors to survive from Palladio’s day.

At the Villa Thiene (c. 1550) at Quinto, he started to build a grandiose house planned on the lines of his reconstruction of a Roman villa shown in the Quattro libri, but it was never finished. At the Villa Sarego (c. 1568–69) at Santa Sofia a similar inward-facing complex was also planned but not completed. This design differs from the normal villa in its two-story rusticated colonnade forming loggias to rooms arranged around three sides of a court. It is reminiscent of the court to the Pitti Palace in Florence, built in 1550 by the Mannerist architect and sculptor Bartolommeo Ammannati (1511–92).

Palladio’s villas were planned as total complexes but could be built in part to satisfy the owner’s immediate requirements. He attached great importance to the courts that flanked or stood in front of the house, since they extended its axial symmetry and proportion.

At the end of 20 years of intensive building, Palladio in 1570 published I quattro libri dell’architettura. This work was a summary of his studies of classical architecture. He used a number of his own designs to exemplify the principles of Roman design. The first book contains studies of materials, the classical orders, and decorative ornaments; the second, many of Palladio’s designs for town and country houses, together with his classical reconstructions. His executed designs are frequently corrected, particularly in the case of early works like the Villa Godi. They are marked with dimensions according to a system of mathematical ratio. The ratios employed are based upon the musical intervals that were in use in Palladio’s day, and it was believed that numerical equivalents would result in a beautiful building, since it would be designed within a universal mathematical order. The third book contains designs for bridges, ancient town planning, and basilicas, or ancient Roman oblong halls for public assembly, later adopted as a prototype for the Christian church. The fourth book has to do with the reconstruction of ancient Roman temples.