Andrea Palladio
Andrea Palladio, original name Andrea di Pietro della
Gondola (born Nov. 30, 1508, Padua, Republic of Venice
[Italy]—died August 1580, Vicenza), 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.
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.
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 bc) 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.
Venetian period
After 1570 Palladio’s life was centred on the building
of churches in Venice. In the Veneto, because of a war with
the papacy, few churches had been built in the first half of
the century, and there are no church designs in his early
drawings. Palladio’s first design was for the facade of San
Pietro di Castello (1558) in Venice—a design that does not
survive. In about the 1560s he was working on monastic
commissions in Venice for Santa Maria della Carità and for
the refectory and cloisters of San Giorgio Maggiore. In the
early 1560s he designed the facade for San Francesco della
Vigna, at Venice, which had been built according to
Sansovino’s designs of 1534 but was never finished.
Palladio’s facade became a design prototype for classical
churches with a high nave, or central aisle, and lower
aisles. He resolved this by intersecting classical temple
fronts—one joining the side aisles and the other, grander
front superimposed upon it and covering the higher elevation
of the nave. This ingenious solution was refined and
perfected in the facades of San Giorgio Maggiore (1566,
completed in 1610) and Il Redentore (1576, completed in
1592). The liturgical revival of the Counter-Reformation
opposed the centrally planned church, requiring separate
functions for different parts of a Latin-cross church.
Palladio’s proposals for a circular church for Il Redentore,
therefore, were rejected. In both churches the nave is a
hall of gray stone columns, lit from windows at high level
and covered with a plain stucco barrel vault. The interiors
are a chaste white with no decoration. In Il Redentore the
apse is lit from the dome above and from the choir, which
stands behind a semicircular screen of columns.
At the end of his life, in 1579, Palladio
designed a central-plan church as a chapel at Maser. It is a
shallow Greek cross covered by a circular dome. Internally,
the complex decoration of all surfaces relates it in style
more closely to Palladio’s late palace designs than to his
churches. This was followed by a similar unexecuted project,
San Nicola di Tolentino (1579) in Venice. These demonstrate
Palladio’s ideal church plan and follow his reconstruction
of the Pantheon in the Quattro libri and paralleling designs
by Giacomo da Vignola (1507–73), the leading architect in
Rome after Michelangelo.
With the death of Sansovino in 1570,
Palladio became the leading architect of the Veneto region.
Until then he had failed to gain official state patronage,
and his designs for palaces in Venice, known from the
Quattro libri and from drawings, had never found patrons.
His later civic work in Venice consisted of advice on
fortifications, designs for decorations used on state
occasions, and interiors for the Doges’ Palace. In 1572 his
two sons died, and afterward he lived a secluded life,
publishing only an illustrated edition of Julius Caesar’s
Commentaries as a memorial.
Palladio’s last commission came in
1579–80—to build a theatre in Vicenza for the Accademia
Olimpica for the performance of classical dramas. The design
of the Teatro Olimpico was in the nature of an academic
exercise, being based on the reconstruction of the ancient
Roman theatre at Orange, in France.
When Palladio died he left a considerable
number of unfinished buildings, including the Basilica in
Vicenza, the two Venetian churches, the Villa Rotonda, and
the Teatro Olimpico. These were continued by his followers,
notably Vincenzo Scamozzi (1552–1616) and O.
Bertotti-Scamozzi (1719–90), but, because of the changing
taste of the period, they were not strictly in accordance
with Palladio’s designs.
Assessment
Palladio is one of the most influential figures in the
whole development of Western architecture. The qualities
that made him influential were numerous and varied. His
palaces and villas were imitated for 400 years all over the
Western world; he was the first architect to systematize the
plan of a house and consistently to use the ancient
Greco-Roman temple front as a portico, or roofed porch
supported by columns (this was probably his most imitated
architectural feature), and finally, in his I quattro libri
dell’architettura, he produced a treatise on architecture
that, in popularizing classical decorative details, was
possibly the most influential architectural pattern book
ever printed.
The influence of Palladio’s buildings and
publications reached its climax in the architecture of the
18th century, particularly in England, Ireland, the United
States, and Italy, creating a style known as Palladianism,
which in turn spread to all quarters of the world.
Margaret Ann Richardson
Encyclopædia Britannica
