Palladio

Andrea Palladio (1508 – 1580), was an Italian architect, widely considered the most influential person in the history of Western architecture.

He was born Andrea di Pietro della Gondola in Padua, then part of the Republic of Venice. Apprenticed as a stonecutter in Padua when he was 13, he broke his contract after only 18 months and fled to the nearby town of Vicenza. Here he became an assistant in the leading workshop of stonecutters and masons. He frequented the workshop of Bartolomeo Cavazza, from whom he learned some of his skills.

His talents were recognized in his early thirties by Count Gian Giorgio Trissino, who later gave him the name Palladio, an allusion to the Greek goddess of wisdom Pallas Athene. In 1541 he moved to Rome to study classic architecture.

Palladian style is named after him; a style which adhered to classical Roman principles, similarly to styles of the Early and High Renaissance, when classical revivalism was at its peak. His architectural works have been valued for centuries as the quintessence of High Renaissance calm and harmony. Palladio designed many churches, villas, and palaces, especially in Venice, Vicenza and the surrounding area.

His style became fashionable all over Europe, for example in parts of the Loire Valley of France. In Britain, Inigo Jones and Christopher Wren embraced the Palladian style. Another admirer was the architect Richard Boyle, 4th Earl of Cork, also known as Lord Burlington, who, with William Kent, designed Chiswick House. Later exponents of his work who helped to popularize Palladio's concepts included the 18th century Venetian architect Giacomo Leoni who published an authoritative four volume work on Palladio and his architectural concepts. In a letter written by Colonel Isaac A. Coles to General Hartwell Cocke in 1816, Coles related Thomas Jefferson's admiration for Palladio: "With Mr. Jefferson I conversed at length on the subject of architecture — Palladio, he said 'was the Bible — you should get it and stick close to it…' "

Palladio's architecture also inspired a classical music piece by the Welsh composer Karl Jenkins, called Palladio. Many people know it by its first movement, which was used for a De Beers diamond television commercial.

He died in Maser, near Treviso.

Chronology

* 1508: Born 30 November.
* 1521: Begins work as a stone mason.
* 1540: Begins his first work, Villa Godi in Lonedo.
* 1544: Begins construction of Villa Pisani in Bagnolo.
* 1545: Involved in the refurbishment of the Basilica of Vicenza.
* 1550: Produces drawings for Palazzo Chiericati and Villa Foscari.
* 1552: Begins work on Villa Cornaro and the palace of Iseppo De' Porti
* 1556: In Udine he works on Casa Antonini and in Vicenza begins with Palazzo Thiene. While his assignments increase along with his fame, he collaborates with the patriarch of Aquileia on the edition of a book on Vitruvio, providing the drawings.
* 1557: Begins Villa Badoer in the Po river valley.
* 1558: Realises a project for the church of San Pietro di Castello in Venice and probably in the same year begins the construction of Villa Malcontenta.
* 1559: Begins Villa Emo in the village of Fanzolo di Vedelago.
* 1561: Begins the construction of Villa Pojana Maggiore and at the same time of the refettorio for the Benedictines of St. George in Venice, and subsequently the facade of the monastery Monastero per la Carità and Villa Serego.
* 1562: Begins the facade of San Francesco della Vigna and work on San Giorgio Maggiore.
* 1565: Begins the construction of Villa Cagollo in Vicenza and Villa Pisani in Montagnana.
* 1566: Palazzo Valmarana and Villa Zeno.
* 1567: Begins works for the Villa Capra "La Rotonda".
* 1570: He is nominated Proto della Serenissima (Illustrious citizen of Venice) and publishes in Venice I Quattro Libri dell'Architettura (The Four Books of Architecture)
* 1571: Realises: Villa Piovene, Palazzo Porto Barbaran, the Loggia del Capitanio and Palazzo Porto Breganze.
* 1574: Publishes the 'Commentari' (commentaries) of Caesar and works on studies for the front of the Basilica di San Petronio in Bologna.
* 1577: Begins the construction of the Il Redentore.
* 1580: Prepares drawings for the interior of the church of S. Lucia in Venice and in the same year on 23 March oversees the beginning of the construction of the Teatro Olimpico but dies on 19 August 1580.

Palladio's Italian Villas
villas

About 450 years ago Palladio's country houses — called "villas" — began to appear in the countryside of the Veneto, the mainland province around Venice. Eighteen Renaissance villas by Palladio survive today in the Veneto area around Venice. Many of them are open to the public. They are visited each year by thousands of architects, art historians, tourists and others who want to admire their beauty, feel closer to history and better understand the foundations of the modern world.

Palladio's villas revolutionized Western architecture in the 17th and 18th centuries, produced the school of Southern architecture in the 19th century, and changed the way homes look in our contemporary world. His influence was ensured by his revolutionary treatise The Four Books of Architecture (1570), which stunned the European world.

The villas represent Palladio's response to the unique needs of his contemporary world. In the villas Palladio re-worked what he perceived to be timeless and universal principles newly re-discovered from the past. Fortuitously, the needs of his time have remained needs of the modern world. As a result, Palladio's architectural insights and solutions remain vital and relevant.

The Secrets of Palladio's Villas
Adapted from an illustrated lecture by Carl I. Gable*

About 500 years ago, in the twilight of the period we call the Renaissance, there began to appear near the coast of the Northern Adriatic around the present city of Venice, Italy, a group of country houses unlike any homes ever seen before. They were all within a radius of about 50 miles, and they were all the work of a single architect.

Andrea Palladio's personal history would seem beyond the imagination of even Horatio Alger. Beginning as a 13-year-old apprentice to a stonemason, he grew up to become the sought-after companion of aristocrats and intelligentsia, as well as the political, military and business leaders, of his day — the dominant figure in his field, not just in his own lifetime, not just in the lifetime of those who knew him, but now — more than 400 years later.

Palladio's Contemporary Needs

In Palladio's time Venice was not just a city. It was the center of a vast empire with military and commercial enclaves all around the Adriatic and Eastern Mediterranean. In fact, at its height, Venice was one of the greatest military and commercial powers on earth. In population, four times the size of Rome and London combined.

Venice's power came from the fact that its forces stood astride both of the great East-West trade routes of the day: the Northern or land route to Asia and the Orient, and the Southern or sea route.

Venice rose to power in the 1100s by developing an advanced system for constructing war galleys. In fact, Venice originally was entirely a sea power. Based on a group of small islands in an Adriatic lagoon several miles from the mainland, the mighty Venice had no land at all on the Italian mainland until the mid 1300s. Military expansion on the Italian mainland then continued until the early 1500s. By then three dramatic events had set in motion a land rush for the vast undeveloped areas of the European mainland west of Venice.

First, the Ottoman Turks, who had for decades been nibbling away at Venezia's eastern outposts, in 1453 stormed and captured Constantinople, the great Christian city of the eastern world, the massive capital of the long-faded Eastern Roman Empire. This and related developments effectively clipped Venice's already withered control of the land route to Asia, and put its sea route under great pressure as well.

Second, in 1492 the Spanish expedition of Christopher Columbus discovered the Western world, which in ensuing years rapidly replaced the Orient as the most lucrative destination of European traders.

Third and finally, in 1497 Vasco da Gama of Portugal demonstrated a new sea route to Asia by sailing around the southern tip of Africa and across the Indian Ocean. Now the merchants of Western Europe no longer had to pay Venice for safe passage to the East. In just 44 years the Mediterranean Sea — Medi-Terrano, the center of the earth for thousands of years — went from being the center of the earth to the center of very little.

Fortunately, after hundreds of years of fighting, peace had broken out on the mainland. The mainland areas near Venice finally had the security necessary for large-scale agriculture and for transporting those harvests to the population centers.

At the same time, to pull these elements together, there was a class of entrepreneurs with the capital to clear the fields, drain the swamps, organize the farm centers. These were the noble families of Venice. They had amassed their fortunes in foreign trade, in shipping, and — surprisingly for a sea-going class — in agriculture: Huge plantations in Crete, in Cyprus, and elsewhere through their overseas empire. Now they could put their capital and their overseas agricultural experience to work close to home.

These nobles also concluded that getting away from the hurly-burly and commerce of the city, getting closer to the calm and reflection of country life, was beneficial to the spirit, the virtuous, ennobling thing to do. Listen to Palladio himself:
"[B]y exercise, which one can take in the country on foot or on horseback, they will preserve their health and their strength, and there finally their spirits, tired of the agitation of the city, will take great refreshment and consolation, and they can attend quietly to the study of letters, and contemplation — as for that purpose the wise men of old times used often to follow the practice of retiring to similar places, where they were visited by good-hearted friends, and their kin … ."

The Villa Problem

But where were these noble families to stay in the countryside? They needed a magnificent home, something that reflected their own magnificence and virtue. But it wouldn't do just to build a Venetian palace out here in the countryside. That sort of building wouldn't be functional — suited to the business of supervising a large agricultural establishment, or storing the grain and wine produced. That kind of urban building wouldn't facilitate the communication with nature that the man of virtue requires for repose and contemplation. And perhaps most important, that kind of building would cost an arm and a leg.

Something entirely new was needed. Something magnificent, but inexpensive. Something comfortable, restful, yet at the same time functional as the center of activity for dozens of farm workers. Moreover, that the problem posed was not unique to Venice. It turned out to be the central problem at the intersection of modern architecture and modern economics. Therefore, Andrea Palladio's solution has been the cornerstone of architecture ever since.

Palladio's 3-Part Solution

Drawing upon his own insights and observations, Palladio devised a solution with three principal elements:

1. Dramatic exterior motifs.
2. Economical materials.
3. Internal harmony and balance.

Dramatic Exterior Motifs

Palladio ultimately developed three primary types of exterior elevation that we have come to characterize as Palladian. The simplest, most modest and most numerous among the constructed works, Type I (as I will call it), presents a loggia pierced by three openings.

The second, Type II, borrows the Greek temple front. Palladio never saw the Greek monuments, but he visited Rome five times. There he saw, mostly in ruins, the classic public buildings of Imperial Rome — which the Romans, of course, had borrowed from the Greeks. It was Palladio's inspiration to adapt the Greek pediment and columns to private residences.

Finally, the third and most innovative and modern of the three motifs: the double-columned loggia. That is, complete columns above and below.

The first motif, the three-opening loggia, appears in Palladio's very first villa: Villa Godi, which was constructed about 1540. There is a certain clumsiness to this first outing. Heavy volumes at the left and right are reminiscent of the fortress-like villas of the prior century and the early 1500s. Villa Trissino, the villa in Cricoli that Palladio's great benefactor Giangiorgio Trissino built two or three years earlier, comes to mind. There's really nothing obvious here to inspire the architects of future centuries. But there are a few elements that you will see evolve and mature.

First, there is symmetrical balance from left to right. It is a striking contrast to the unsymmetrical Gothic palaces of Venice. And it becomes a cornerstone of Palladian villas.

Secondly, the three-opening loggia — certainly not a new idea either — has been combined with other elements in a way that begins to open the villa to the world outside. Lasting peace — at least in a relative sense — had come to the Veneto. That fact is subtly underscored by Villa Godi.

Let's consider a few more examples of this triple-opening loggia. There's less variety among these than we find in the grander villas of the second and third motifs, although he sometimes elaborated the three openings with a Serliana motif. Villa Pisani at Bagnolo (probably incorporating an earlier tower on the left), Villa Caldogno, Villa Saraceno, Villa Gazzotti — are all substantially similar, and modest in their exterior motif. But a comparison of Villa Saraceno, for example, and Villa Gazzotti shows a fascinating element beginning to emerge at Villa Gazzotti: the pillars of the loggia begin to metamorphose toward classical columns supporting a pediment! At Villa Gazzotti the "columns" are only pilasters, but clearly a pediment of the Greek style is beginning to emerge atop a traditional Italian motif. Not yet the dramatic classical adaptation found in Palladio's great works, but a suggestion of the future.

The story turns dramatically when we move to the true temple-front examples. Now we are moving to the great homes in the history of architecture. At Villa Barbaro in Maser we see one of Palladio's most magnificent and influential designs. First, we see the true Greek temple-front. Not projecting forward in this example, but surmounted by a brilliant classical pediment.

This is the design for the front of a temple. Palladio and the proud patricians of Venice have had the self-confidence to put it on the residence of a mere mortal. Of course, to keep things in perspective, the temple/villa is flanked by adjoining farm buildings for storing grain and wine and for housing farm animals.

At the ends of the barchessas Palladio added dovecotes on top and faced them with sundials. The result is one of the lasting legacies of Western public architecture: the so-called 5-part profile.

Count the parts from left to right: 1-Left Dovecote; 2-Left Barchessa; 3-Residence; 4-Right Barchessa; 5-Right Dovecote. Start with the U. S. Capitol building. But in England there are dozens of country homes with this 5-part profile. Even American ranch-style homes frequently display this Palladian profile.

Here's another example of the 5-part form: Villa Emo at Fanzolo. The dovecotes on the ends are less prominent here, but look at the temple front. Now the columns are free-standing.

Next Palladio moved ahead to his third major motif. Not one loggia, but two loggias, one on top of the other. The garden side at Villa Cornaro shows this motif in its simpler form, with the loggia recessed within the central core of the villa. It's a place to sit and look from a protected area out into the world. But Villa Cornaro is one of Palladio's double-faced villas, and the street side brings the grand culmination of the evolution of Palladio's exterior motifs.

It's the leap to the modern world! Suddenly the "rooms" are not buried in the core and looking out at the world. Now the rooms are thrust out into the midst of the world! Compare this bold villa-as-part-of-the-world with the glum defensive Villa Godi with which Palladio began.

This must be one of Palladio's greatest achievements. Perhaps he was inspired in some way by Villa Giustinian about 40 miles away in Roncade. But essentially we have here a most unusual event: a completely new idea. Here is the first example of this motif ever built.

Economical Materials

Part II of the solution was the use of economical materials.

As you know, the palaces of Venice itself are built of stone brought from distant mainland quarries. The stone was then usually clad in marble from Istria or beyond. But because Palladio had achieved his visual impact through his design motifs, he could build his villas of brick instead of stone, and clad them in stucco instead of marble. Their nasty secret: brick. Brick and stucco.

Even the ornate capitals hold a secret: terra cotta. At least on the sunny south side; on the north facade the capitals might be stone because of the weather. The architraves supporting these mighty pediments? Wood covered with straw lathing and then stucco.

Inside any of the palaces of Venice itself, the walls are bare. In the 16th century the palace walls were covered in magnificent tapestries — both for their beauty and for their insulating qualities in the winter.

Now, since the villas out in the countryside were only for use in the summer farming season, the insulating qualities were not needed for warmth. So, if the walls could be decorated some other way, the huge cost of tapestries could be eliminated entirely. Frescos were the answer. f you didn't mind going down-market, you could hire Veronese or Zelotti to stop by for a month or two and give you some imitation tapestries and columns and statues. In fact, only the Cornaro family — the richest family of the Republic — seems to have resisted the temptation; their villa at Piombino held out for the real thing: real columns, real niches, real statues — not cheap imitations by Veronese.

Interior Harmony and Balance

The last, the least understood, and the most evanescent element of Palladio's solution: Palladio's interior harmony and balance.

It's the difference between Palladio himself and Palladianism. His exterior motifs — innovative as they are — can be copied. His economical materials can be duplicated, even improved. But Palladio's balance and harmony seem to live only in his 18 surviving villas of the Veneto. The harmony and balance of Palladio's interior spaces is their great epiphanal triumph.

First, and fundamentally, Palladio states that the parts of a house must correspond to the whole and to each other. This seems simple in theory but has proved nearly impossible for most of posterity's Palladio wannabes. Standing anywhere in one of Palladio's villas you have at all times a sense of where you are within the total structure. The concept of the floor plan is transparent. Compare that with a large modern house where you never know what twist or turn or size or shape of room may lie around the next corner.

Secondly, Palladio varies the volumetric size of his rooms with the creativity and discipline of a Bach fugue. His inspiration here is said to have been the Classical Roman baths with their rooms on three scales.

Finally, as to the shapes of individual rooms, he offers up a smorgasbord of possibilities, from the square and the circle to rectangles in a variety of ratios of width to length. The ratios of width to length — both as published in his Four Books of Architecture and as measured in the completed villas themselves — have been the subject of a great deal of recent scholarly research with little concrete result.

Rudolph Wittkower in 1949 published Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism with his breathtaking proposition that the ratios of width to length in Palladio's rooms are based on the harmonic proportions of music. In other words, that Palladio worked on an "If it sounds good, it'll look and feel good" principle. The enthusiastic acceptance of this theory was only modestly tempered by the fact that some of Palladio's rooms reflect harmonic musical proportions and some don't.

But Wittkower was right in emphasizing the importance of number theory or numerology as a foundation for Palladio's proportions. Harmonic proportion provides an insight to some of Palladio's villas, particularly the later ones, but equally or more important was the theory of "perfect numbers." The numbers "6" and "10" were deemed to be "perfect" numbers because they reflect the proportions of the human body in several dimensions, including the ratio of front-to-back and side-to-side. In other words, you would feel comfortable in a room that was in the ratio of 6-to-10 because the room would have the same proportions as your own body. Then, in a grammatical challenge, the number "16" was deemed to be the "most perfect" number, primarily because it was the sum of the other two.

The Perfect Scale of Villa Cornaro

Now let's put all this together in an analysis of the central core of the villa I know best, Villa Cornaro.

The first thing that strikes us is that the central core is one of Palladio's preferred shapes, a square. Next we notice the fugal variation of room sizes. You can't see it, of course, in Palladio's floor plan and elevation, but the heights of the rooms modulate as well.

Then let's look at the proportions of one of the long rectangular rooms on the north. Now we are moving toward the central inspiration of Villa Cornaro. The ratio of length to width in the room is 3-to-5. That's the same as 6-to-10. Yes, this room is in the ratio of the two "perfect" numbers. You'll feel very comfortable in this room. And the actual width of this room? Sixteen Vicentine feet: the most perfect number of all.

So here you are looking at Palladio's perfect room. A remarkable artefact to be sure, but remember Palladio's fundamental premise: the parts must relate to the whole and to each other. How does that work here? Well, obviously, there is another room the same size on the north. But then on both the east and west sides, there is a square room with a small room behind it. Those two rooms together repeat the dimensions of the perfect rooms on the north! Now that only leaves the large room. The relation here is not obvious, but it finally emerges: the grand salon is two of our "perfect" rooms side by side.

There you have the secret to the harmony and balance of Villa Cornaro: the central living area is six repetitions of the module of the perfect room, all set within a square.

But harmony and balance, like some of the finest wines, don't travel. You can transport the double projecting portico of Villa Cornaro to the Miles Brewton House in Charleston, to a pleasant home on Woodward Way in Atlanta, to thousands of other homes across America. And you can always transport wood or other even cheaper materials. You can transfer the 5-part profile of Villa Barbaro, the occuli of Villa Poiana, or the encircling arms of Villa Badoer. But the balance and harmony — the balance and the harmony that are the core of Palladio — don't travel. They can be found only in the Veneto.

They don't travel, but they never age. Unfazed, unaffected by any pale imitations — the villas live vibrantly today … As vibrant today as in the crisp, cool mornings when Palladio walked there.

Palladio's 18 Surviving Villas

1. Villa Godi-Malinverni Lonego di Lugo (Vicenza) 1537-42, 1549-52
2. Villa Valmarana-Bressan Vigadolo di Monticello Conte Otto (Vicenza) 1541-3
3. Villa Forni-Costa Montecchio Precalcino (Vicenza) 1560s [?] [cf 1541-2]
4. Villa Gazzotti-Marcello Bertisina (Vicenza) c. 1542-7, 1550-5
5. Villa Pisani-Ferri Bagnolo di Lonigo (Vicenza) 1542-4, c. 1561/2-6/9
6. Villa Caldogno Caldogno (Vicenza) c. 1548/9-52, 1569-70
7. Villa Saraceno-Lombardi Finale di Agugliaro (Vicenza) c. 1545-8
8. Villa Poiana Poiana Maggiore (Vicenza) c. 1549-56
9. Villa Zen Donegal di Cessalto (Treviso) c. 1558-66?
10. Villa Pisani-Placco Porta Padova, Montagnana (Padova) 1552/3-5
11. Villa Cornaro-Gable Piombino Dese (Padova) 1551-3
12. Villa Barbaro-Volpi Maser (Treviso) c. 1549/51-8
13. Villa Chiericati-Rigo Vancimuglio (Vicenza) 1547/8-54, 1574-80
14. Villa Badoer Fratta Polesine (Rovigo) 1556/7-63
15. Villa Foscari ("La Malcontenta") Malcontenta di Mira (Venezia) 1558-60
16. Villa Emo-Capodolista Fanzolo di Vedelago (Treviso) c. 1559-65
17. Villa Sarego Santa Sofia di Pedemonte (Verona) 1552/3?-69
18. Villa Almerico-Valmarana ("La Rotonda") Vicenza 1565/6-9

Five Important Examples

Map of Villas

Villa Barbaro

Villa Barbaro

Villa Barbaro, located in the village of Maser adjacent to the famous hilltown of Asolo, was built for Daniele Barbaro, Patriarch of Aquileia, and his brother Marc'antonio Barbaro, an ambassador of the Venetian Republic. Construction began in 1549 and was substantially completed by 1558. The Tempietto (chapel) was constructed 1579-80.

The central residential space is erected on the remains of a medieval castle or manor house. Its facade features four engaged Ionic columns adapted from the Temple of Fortuna Virilis in Rome. As at nearby Villa Emo, barchesse (farm buildings) extend symmetrically from the left and right of the central structure. The ends of the barchesse are surmounted by dovecotes, each with a large sundial on the facade. The result is the famous 5-part profile familiar in later Palladio-inspired architecture, including the U. S. Capitol building (with the Houses of Congress replacing the dovecotes!).

The interior of the central residence is highlighted by magnificent frescoes executed between 1560 and 1562 principally by Paolo Veronese.

Set in the hillside at the rear of the central residence is a spectacular spring-fed statuary grotto known as a nymphaeum. The nymphaeum may have been the conception of the villa's patrons. One of them, Marc'Antonio Barbaro, executed several of its statues and contributed other sculptural decoration to the villa as well.

The villa first descended through female lines in the same family until 1838. In 1934 the villa was acquired by Giuseppe Volpi di Misurata, who began the restoration that has returned to villa to its present condition. Today his granddaughter resides at the villa with her family.

Tourist Information.
Location: Maser (Treviso District). Accessible by car from Asolo (10km) or Venice (60km).
Hours: Tuesday, Saturday, Sunday only:
3:00-6:00 p. m. ( March-September)
The Tempietto (chapel) open Tuesdays, upon request (Tel. 0423/565-002)

Villa Cornaro

Villa Cornaro

Villa Cornaro, located in the village of Piombino Dese about 30km from Venice, is a masterwork of Palladio's middle period. One American writer recently included it on his list of 10 of the world's most important buildings ("Top Ten Buildings," Town & Country, January 2003).

Constructed in 1552-3 for Giorgio Cornaro, younger son of a wealthy Venetian family, Villa Cornaro introduced to Western architecture the two-story projecting portico-loggia motif. Palladio's device influenced Western architecture for hundreds of years, becoming a recurrent feature in Georgian, Adam and Colonial American architecture.

The impact of the motif can be ascribed to two primary factors. First, it anticipated the change in the concept of residences, away from the fortress and toward comfort, function, and interaction with surroundings. Second, the double portico-loggia motif was striking, flexible and subject to infinite elaboration and permutation by subsequent generations of architects. Among those utilizing the device was Thomas Jefferson, who selected Villa Cornaro as his initial model for Monticello.

Equally important, however, is the exquisite harmony of the Villa's interior spaces. The living area of the Villa's central core forms a square within which are arranged six repetitions of an elegant standard module.

The module, exemplified by the two rooms to the left and right of the entrance hall, is 16 Trevisan feet in width by 27 Trevisan feet in length, creating a ratio of 6 to 10, the "perfect" numbers of Renaissance architecture. The sum of those numbers was deemed "most perfect" and, as indicated, was used by Palladio as the width of the module. Palladio repeated the module on the east and west sides of the Villa, where the module is divided into a square room of 16 x 16 feet and a smaller room beyond. The central grand salon comprises two of the modules placed side by side. The 9-room floor plan of the piano nobile is exactly repeated in a second piano nobile above, with four mezzanine rooms between.

The Villa is unique among extant Palladian works for the extent of its original tile and terrazzo floors and original exterior intonaco (the stucco-like material covering the brick substructure of Palladio's country villas). The south facade bears graffiti recording Cornaro family births in the 1600s, numerous family deaths and honors, and a note from a cousin recording his 1690 flight to Piombino from Venice to avoid "contagion."

In 1588 the son of the Villa's original patron commissioned the six statues by Camillo Mariani that decorate the grand salon. The statues, which fill niches that were part of Palladio's original design, represent an innovation in Renaissance sculpture: a private family portrait gallery with full-figure statues of prominent members instead of mere busts. The family pantheon includes Doge Marco Cornaro and Caterina Cornaro, Queen of Cyprus.

The walls of Villa Cornaro remained in white for many years to accommodate the magnificent painting collection of the early owners. In 1716 Andrea Cornaro, the great great grandson of Giorgio Cornaro, launched a new decorative program. He commissioned Mattia Bortoloni, a young student of Antonio Balestra, to execute a large cycle of 104 fresco panels within a system of stucco putti and frames created by Bortolo Cabianca of Venice.

The frescoes in six rooms of the piano nobile feature scenes from the Old Testament; in two rooms of the second floor the frescoes depict New Testament scenes. The Biblical theme and the specific subjects of the individual frescoes were designated by Andrea Cornaro himself. Bortoloni, then 21 years old, utilized the newly evolving "light manner," one of the first extensive fresco demonstrations of that style in the Veneto.

The subjects of the frescoes appear to have been selected to portray themes of freemasonry, a conclusion strengthened by the apparent use of Masonic symbols in the frescoes on the eastern walls of the principal frescoed rooms - one of the earliest examples of Masonic art in Italy.

Villa Cornaro remained in the Cornaro family for 253 years, then passed through three other families as a private residence until 1951. After a difficult period in the 1950s and 60s when it was used as a parochial kindergarten and then stood vacant, Villa Cornaro returned to private ownership in 1969 and was restored over a period of 20 years by Mr. and Mrs. Richard H. Rush of Greenwich, Connecticut.

Since 1989 Villa Cornaro has been the spring and autumn residence of Sally and Carl I. Gable of Atlanta, Georgia, the sixth family to occupy the villa in its 450-year history.

Palladian Days
Sally and Carl Gable tell their experiences in a new book, Palladian Days (Knopf and Anchor Books).

Tourist Information
Location: Piombino Dese (Padua District). Accessible by car or train. Piombino Dese is 30km from Venice (about 45 minutes by car; 35 minutes by train). The villa is two blocks from the Piombino Dese train station.

Hours:
Open to groups (minimum 10): Throughout the year by appointment
(Telephone 049/936-5017)

Open to individuals: (May-September only) Saturday 3:30-6:00 p. m.

Villa Emo

Villa Emo

Villa Emo, located in the village of Fanzolo di Vedelago, was built in the period 1559-65.

The central residential space features four columns (two of them engaged) in the manner of a Greek temple front. As at nearby Villa Barbaro, barchesse (farm buildings) extend symmetrically from the left and right of the central structure, with the ends of the barchesse surmounted by dovecotes. The result is the famous 5-part profile familiar in later Palladio-inspired architecture, including the U. S. Capitol building (with the Houses of Congress replacing the dovecotes!).

Villa Emo was, until its sale in 2004, the only Palladian villa that had descended in male lines of the original family continuously since its construction. The Emo family, which came to Venice from Greece before the year 1000, produced civic and military leaders throughout the long history of the Venetian Republic.

Tourist Information
Location: Fanzolo di Vedelago (Treviso District). Accessible by car from Venice (45km).
Hours: May to September only:
Monday, Wednesday-Friday 2:30-6:00 p. m.
Tuesday: 3:00-6:00 p. m.
Saturday: 2:30-7:00 p. m.
Sunday: 10:00 a. m.-12:30 p. m., 2:30-7:00 p. m.

Telephone: 0423/476-414 or 476-334
Fax: 0423/487-043

La Malcontenta

La Malcontenta

The magnificent Greek temple-front design of La Malcontenta rises high above the banks of the Brenta river near the coastal lagoon of Venice.

The brothers Nicolo and Alvise Foscari commissioned La Malcontenta in the late 1550s, and it was nearly complete by the time of Nicolo's death in 1560. Interestingly, the villa's ownership was returned to the Foscari family in the present generation, and they have overseen a careful renovation.

The source of the villa's traditional name is unsettled. Perhaps it was originally the name of the village where the villa is situated, or perhaps it describes the melancholy woman pictured in one of the frescoes.

Tourist Information
Location: Malcontenta di Mira (Venice District)
Hours: Tuesday and Saturday, 9:00 a. m.-12:00 noon
Also by appointment, telephone 041/520-3966

La Rotunda

La Rotonda

La Rotonda is situated atop a hill in suburban Vicenza. Its four facades look out upon cultivated fields on three sides and a wooded slope on the fourth.

The central dome, one of Palladio's most famous and imitated motifs, was itself inspired by the Pantheon of ancient Rome.

Paolo Almerico, a papal prelate, commissioned Villa Rotonda in 1566 upon his return to Vicenza after a long residence in Rome. Palladio's protege Vincenzo Scamozzi oversaw completion of the structure following Palladio's death in 1580.

The villa was acquired and restored to its present condition in the 20th century by the Valmarana family of Venice.

Tourist Information.
Location: Vicenza
Hours: March-December only
Villa and grounds: Wednesdays 10:00-12:00 a. m., 3:00 p. m.-6:00 p. m.
Grounds only: Daily (except Monday) 10:00.-12:00 a. m., 3:00 p. m.-6:00 p. m.

Palladio's 12 Lost Villas
Villas that have been destroyed or no longer contain significant Palladian elements. Villas in brackets were not constructed.

A. Villa Thiene Quinto Vicentino (Vicenza) 1547/6-47/8
B. Villa Arnaldi Meledo Alto di Sarego (Vicenza) [cf 1547, 1565]
C. Villa Angarano-Bianchi Michiel Angarano di Bassano del Grappa (Vicenza) 1548
D. [Villa Ragona] Ghizzole di Montegaldela (Vicenza) —
E. [Villa Trissino-Facchini] Meledo di Sarego 1558?-62?
F. Villa Mocengo "sopra la Brenta" Dolo (Venezia) 1554-63
G. Villa Thiene Cicogna di Villafranca Padovana (Padova) 1554?-56
H. Villa Repeta Campiglia dei Berici (Vicenza) [cf 1557-8?]
I. Villa Mocenigo Marocco di Mogliano Veneto (Treviso) [cf 1561-2]
J. Villa Sarego Miega di Veronella (Verona) 1552/3?-69
K. Villa Valmarana-Scagnaroli Lisiera di Bolzano Vicentino (Vicenza) c. 1563-6, 1579-80
L. Villa Sarego Veronella (Verona) [cf 1564, 1569]

palladio

THE CREATION OF A SYSTEMATIC, COMMUNICABLE ARCHITECTURE

In the panorama of 16th-century architecture, Palladio is an exceptional figure. He came not from central Italy, as by birth or training did all the major architects who influenced him, but from the Veneto: he was born in Padua, but from the age of 16 lived and worked in Vicenza. He was also unusual in that he was not a painter by training (like Bramante, Raphael, Peruzzi and Giulio Romano) nor a sculptor (like Sansovino and Michelangelo) but a stonemason. In fact, were it not for his contact from the mid or later 1530s onwards with the Vicentine writer and nobleman, Giangiorgio Trissino (1478-1550), Palladio would probably have remained a skilled and intelligent craftsman, capable perhaps of designing portals and funerary monuments, but without the culture and intellectual skills by this time necessary in a true architect. He certainly would not have been transformed into the famous architect messer Andrea Palladio, the fine Roman name which Trissino invented for him.

Trissino was important for Palladio in many ways: he was himself a talented amateur architect, in line with up-to-date architecture in Rome. Trissino, who had been a member of the inner cultural circle around the Medici Pope Leo X and had known Raphael, would have been familiar with the villa of Poggio a Caiano, designed by the patron, Lorenzo de' Medici and his architect, Giuliano da Sangallo. At Poggio one finds anticipations of Palladio's hierarchical grouping of rooms of different sizes around a vaulted central hall, as well as the application for the first time, of a temple front to the façade of a Renaissance residential building. At Cricoli Trissino already employed a system of rooms of different sizes, and a scheme of interrelated proportions and thereby established what became a key element in Palladio's system of design.

Trissino was of great importance for Palladio in other ways. he almost certainly had a determining role in recommending Palladio to his fellow Vicentine patricians in the early years of his activity. It was with Trissino too that Palladio made his visits to Rome in the 1540s, which opened his eyes as to the character of ancient and modern architecture in the city, which till then he would have known only through drawings. Thirty years later Palladio recalled that he found the ancient buildings "worthy of much greater attention, than I had at first thought". The impact on him of these works was extremely powerful, and furnished him with a wide range of models which he immediately adapted to his commissions.

Trissino probably also guided Palladio in his initial reading and Vitruvius. It is not known whether Palladio could read Latin; even if he could not by the 1540s it was already possible to have access to many important Latin and Greek works in Italian translations. This must have greatly aided Palladio in his efforts to acquire a wide ranging culture, and to assimilate texts that presented difficulties even for scholars.

TRISSINO AND THE LINGUISTIC ASPECTS OF PALLADIO'S ARCHITECTURE

If we return to the question of the ways in which Palladio resembles and differs from his contemporaries, and the authors of the "modern classics" which he studied in Rome and elsewhere, there emerges what is probably the greatest debt that he owed to Trissino. Bramante, Raphael, Peruzzi, Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, Giulio Romano, Falconetto, Sanmicheli and Sansovino all had a considerable influence on Palladio when he was in his thirties. All of them employed the classical orders in their works, in a way which was relatively consistent and represented a compromise between Vitruvius' specifications, and the observable practice of ancient Roman architects. All of them incorporated into their works both planimetric and elevation schemes derived from the Antique. And in all this they were similar to Palladio.

The great difference however between these architects and Palladio was that from the late 1540s onwards the Vicentine architect makes use of a standard series of overall types, of room shapes, of forms for the orders. He saw the distance between the columns as an integral part of each order, with for instance two and a quarter column diameters serving as the intercolumniation for the Ionic order, and two for the Corinthian. The order thus becomes - for the first time in Renaissance architecture - a potential generator both of two dimensional and three dimensional schemes. His work displays an adherence to a system of design, which makes use of a grammar of forms and proportions, and a "controlled vocabulary" of motifs. His immediate predecessors and elder contemporaries are less systematic: They were in a sense inventing and changing the rules as they went along, developing as architects from work to work. They were also often faced with such novel and unusual commissions.

Palladio too was faced sometimes with unique, "one off", problems: the Logge of the Basilica in Vicenza, palazzo Chiericati, the Teatro Olimpico, his two great Venetian churches, the Rialto bridge. But the bulk of his commissions were for town and above all country houses, where the needs and requirements were roughly similar. No architect up to that time had had as many commissions for villas and palaces. This made the establishment of standard optimal forms and dimensions desirable, not least as a way of reducing the amount of work which was needed to design an individual building. Early on in his architectural career Palladio realised that it was not necessary to decide for each house how wide and high the interior doors should be, what forms stairs should have, or what profile and proportions to give to the Doric capital. It was enough to decide on a set of standard forms to be modified, certainly, when necessary, but in general applicable in most projects. Palladio's architecture therefore, more than that of any other Renaissance architect, is founded upon a set of carefully worked out, conceptually pre-fabricated elements.

Common sense entered into the elaboration of this system; so too did the working habits of craftsmen and stone masons in Venice and the Veneto. Venetian masons had long been accustomed to order blocks in standard sizes from the quarries, and to use standard forms and sizes for doors, windows, columns. But overlaying Palladio's concern with creating an architecture of fixed forms, fixed proportions, regularly implemented principles, is a conscious attitude, which probably derives from the many hours and days he must have spent in discussion with Trissino. Trissino was one of the leading writers on orthography, grammar and literary theory of his time. Like others of his literary contemporaries he was concerned with the most appropriate form for written Italian, in a period in which no standard literary version of the language existed, apart from the Tuscan forms employed by Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio. Trissino however went beyond a concern with the most "correct" form of Italian, to a realisation that literary effect depends on grammar and choice of vocabulary. It may be that Trissino himself saw the parallel between linguistic structure and a structured approach to architectural design; alternatively Palladio by a process of intellectual osmosis, helped by his reading of Vitruvius and Alberti, may have transferred Trissino's view of the relation between literary style and linguistic rules to architecture.

His architecture in any case assumed a linguistic and grammatical character, which was recognised and approved by humanist intellectuals, like his friend and patron Daniele Barbaro. For Barbaro and his well educated friends, Palladio offered something which even the great and the richly inventive Sansovino could not: a truly rational architecture, based not only on the application of reason and principles derived from nature, but structured along the lines of humanist linguistics. Barbaro's preference for Palladio's systematic approach to architecture led him to obtain for the Vicentine architect from the late 1550s onwards a series of major ecclesiastical commissions in Venice itself (the façade of San Francesco della Vigna, the refectory and church of San Giorgio Maggiore, the rebuilding of the Convento della Carità) which might otherwise have fallen to the elderly but still much respected Sansovino.

PALLADIO'S EMERGENCE AS AN ARCHITECT

It is not clear exactly how Palladio passed from manually executing demanding details like capitals, and probably also designing small scale works, to becoming a full-time architect, working not with mason's tools, but with his mind, his books, his pen and ruler, and his drawings after the antique. He is documented as making a design for the villa Godi in 1540, but his intervention there was at this time probably restricted in scope, as the foot-print of the great villa had probably already been established, and does not correspond to Palladio's preferred division of a villa plan into suites of rooms (usually three) of different shapes and sizes. More important was his work on the palazzo Civena (for four moneyed but socially unimportant brothers) for which several drawings survive. The palace had originally belonged to Trissino's friend Aurelio Dall'Acqua, and one can suspect that Palladio and Trissino may have made designs for rebuilding the palace even before it was acquired, in 1540, by the Civena family.

With Palladio's unexecuted designs for the villa Pisani at Bagnolo, and other drawings for villas from around 1542 one can see for the first time the impact of Palladio's first visit to Rome. Motifs from the baths, from the Cortile del Belvedere and the villa Madama appear, in enthusiastic abundance. In the final design these features were simplified and reduced, to leave more space for living rooms, and to spare the patrons' pockets. The architecture which emerges however in Palladio's work around 1542, with high barrel-vaulted or cross-vaulted halls, ample loggie and column screens, stays with Palladio throughout his career, waiting the moment when it can be put to the best use, as in the churches of San Giorgio Maggiore and the Redentore in Venice. Even the villa Pisani as built is astonishing in the grandeur of its absidally terminated loggia and its great vaulted hall: a similar height and magnificence at his date would have been familiar to contemporaries only in major churches, and its architecture must have surprised, even shocked, many of those who saw it for the first time.

VILLA ARCHITECTURE

By 1550 Palladio had produced a whole group of villas, whose scale and decoration can be seen as closely matching the wealth and social standing of the owners: the powerful and very rich Pisani, bankers and Venetian patricians, had huge vaults and a loggia façade realised with stone piers and rusticated Doric pilasters; the (briefly) wealthy minor noble and salt-tax farmer Taddeo Gazzotto in his villa at Bertesina, had pilasters executed in brick, though the capitals and bases were carved in stone; Biagio Saraceno at Finale had a loggia with three arched bays, but without any architectural order. In the villa Saraceno as in the villa Poiana Palladio was able to give presence and dignity to an exterior simply by the placing and orchestration of windows, pediments, loggia arcades: his less wealthy patrons must have appreciated the possibility of being able to enjoy impressive buildings without having to spend much on stone and stone carving.

Palladio's reputation initially, and after his death, has been founded on his skill as a designer of villas. Considerable damage had been done to houses, barns, and rural infrastructures during the War of the League of Cambrai (1509-1517). Recovery of former levels of prosperity in the countryside was probably slow, and it was only in the 1540s, with the growth of the urban market for foodstuffs and determination at government level to free Venice and the Veneto from dependence on imported grain, above all grain coming from the always threatening Ottoman state, that a massive investment in agriculture and the structures necessary for agricultural production gathers pace. Landowners for decades had been steadily, under stable Venetian rule, been buying up small holdings, and consolidating their estates not only by purchase, but by swaps of substantial properties with the other landowners. Investment in irrigation and land reclamation through drainage further increased the income of wealthy landowners.

Palladio's villas - that is the houses of estate owners - met a need for a new type of country residence. His designs implicitly recognise that it was not necessary to have a great palace in the countryside, modelled directly on city palaces, as many late 15th-century villas (like the huge villa da Porto at Thiene) in fact are. Something smaller, often with only one main living floor was adequate as a centre for controlling the productive activity from which much of the owner's income probably derived and for impressing tenants and neighbours as well as entertaining important guests. These residences, though sometimes smaller than earlier villas, were just as effective for establishing a social and political presence in the countryside, and for relaxing, hunting, and getting away from the city, which was always potentially unhealthy.

Façades, dominated by pediments usually decorated with the owner's coat of arms, advertised a powerful presence across a largely flat territory, and to be seen did not need to be as high as the owner's city palace. Their loggie offered a pleasant place to eat, or talk, or perform music in the shade, activities which one can see celebrated in villa decoration, for instance in the villa Caldogno. In their interior Palladio distributed functions both vertically and horizontally. Kitchens, store-rooms, laundries and cellars were in the low ground floor; the ample space under the roof was used to store the most valuable product of the estate, grain, which incidentally also served to insulate the living rooms below. On the main living floor, used by family and their guests, the more public rooms (loggia, sala) were on the central axis, while left and right were symmetrical suites of rooms, going from large rectangular chambers, via square middling sized rooms, to small rectangular ones, sometimes used as by the owner as studies or offices for administering the estate.

The owner's house was often not the only structure for which Palladio was responsible. Villas, despite their unfortified appearance and their open loggie were still direct descendants of castles, and were surrounded by a walled enclosure, which gave them some necessary protection from bandits and marauders. The enclosure (cortivo) contained barns, dovecote towers, bread ovens, chicken sheds, stables, accommodation for factors and domestic servants, places to make cheese, press grapes, etc. Already in the 15th century it was usual to create a court in front of the house, with a well, separated from the farmyard with its barns, animals, and threshing-floor. Gardens, vegetable and herbal gardens, fishponds, and almost invariably a large orchard (the brolo) all were clustered around, or located inside the main enclosure.

Palladio in his designs sought to co-ordinate all these varied elements, which in earlier complexes had usually found their place not on the basis of considerations of symmetry vista and architectural hierarchy but of the shape of the available area, usually defined by roads and water courses. Orientation was also important: Palladio states in the Quattro Libri that barns should face south so as to keep the hay dry, thus preventing it from fermenting and burning. Palladio found inspiration in large antique complexes which either resembled country houses surrounded by their outbuildings or which he actually considered residential layouts - an example is the temple of Hercules Victor at Tivoli, which he had surveyed. It is clear, for instance, that the curving barns which flank the majestic façade of the villa Badoer were suggested by what was visible of the Forum of Augustus. In his book Palladio usually shows villa layouts as symmetrical: he would have known however that often, unless the barns to the left and right of the house faced south, as at the villa Barbaro at Maser, the complex would not have been built symmetrically. An example is the villa Poiana, where the large barn, with fine Doric capitals, was certainly designed by Palladio. It faces south, and is not balanced by a similar element on the other side of the house.

PALACES

Between 1542 and 1550 Palladio was involved with the design of three major city palaces, all in Vicenza: the palazzo Thiene, the palazzo Porto, and the palazzo Chiericati. If the economic base of the leading families of the Veneto cities was largely in the countryside, their political life was centered in the cities, where most palace builders and owners controlled the affairs of the city as city councillors. The nobility in cities like Vicenza and Verona was usually grouped into two opposing "factions", one pro-French and pro-Venetian, the other pro-Spanish, thus reflecting the divisions in the international scene. These were in a sense predecessors of political parties, though they were above all expressions of a network of client-patron relationships, and often violently animated by family vendettas and hatreds. The faction leaders, like the Thiene and Porto on the one hand, and the pro-Spanish Valmarana on the other, had a particular need to express their pre-eminence in a large and opposing palaces. Palladio's reputation was such that leading figures from the opposing factions sought designs from him.

The first of the major palaces with which Palladio was involved, the palazzo Thiene, was begun in 1542 for Marcantonio Thiene and his brother, the richest individuals in the city at that time. On stylistic grounds, on the basis of the testimony of Inigo Jones, and because of the close links of the aristocratic Thiene with the Gonzaga, rulers of Mantua, it seems likely that the initial design was made by the Gonzaga court architect, Giulio Romano, who visited Vicenza in 1542. Palladio, who had not yet achieved any real fame or standing as an architect, would have been employed initially only as the executing architect, to realise the designs of the admired Giulio Romano. After Giulio's death in 1546, he had the opportunity to impose his own ideas and motifs on the building, which he published in the Quattro Libri as entirely his own work. This collaboration with Giulio was probably of great importance for Palladio: it gave him the opportunity to have contact with a very sophisticated and experienced architect, whose memories went back to the last years of Raphael's life.

THE EMERGENCE OF PALLADIO'S PERSONAL STYLE

In the palazzo Porto, the villa Poiana, the Basilica and palazzo Chiericati Palladio completes his assimilation of lessons learned from his leading contemporaries; he passes from the eclecticism of the early 1540s to the formulation of his own distinctive language. He also displays an architectural intelligence of a high order. In the Basilica, for instance, he produced a monumental screen of particular magnificence around the pre-existing core (shopping mall below, the huge hall for the city's courts above). The structure, realised in solid stone, despite its Roman appearance, is almost Gothic in its combination of lightness and strength.

Following a suggestion offered by the amphitheatres at Arles and Nîmes, the half columns of the piers and the entablature broken out over them constitute an effective way of buttressing and reinforcing the main bearing element, which has to resist the thrust of the vaults behind - the earlier loggie, which Palladio's structure replaced, had in fact suffered structural collapse. Combined with the strong but narrow piers, Palladio's adoption of the serliana motif, which had been used by Sansovino in the Libreria, and by Giulio Romano (for instance in the interior of the abbey church of San Benedetto Po) was a brilliant choice. It enabled the maximum of light to penetrate into the interior of the building (the amount of light is also increased by the oculi in the spandrels) and made it possible to absorb unavoidable irregularities in the elevation discreetly, almost imperceptibly, in the space between the small columns and the piers, leaving the large elements, the piers and the arches, regular and equal.

The refinement of Palladio's design, in which functional, structural and aesthetic elements all play a part is to be seen even in details, like the choice of cylindrical (i.e. Vitruvian Tuscan) bases for the small Doric columns, in the place of normal attic bases. This is a functional move, for the cylindrical bases, without any plinth, do not project to trip up those who enter or leave the building; at the same time the simplification of the form of the base (maintained at the upper level as well) is a way of avoiding too much fussy small-scale detail, and of enhancing the impact of the large attic bases.

It should be added that Palladio did not merely design an exterior. Originally the cross-vaults over the broad transverse passages were covered with clean white plaster, in which pulverised stone was a component. The inside therefore read as a continuation of the exterior, even in its colour and surface texture, a grand Roman space comparable to the market hall of Trajan's Forum, and with a large serliana at the end of the vista. The present grimy state of the unplastered brick vaults, deprives us of the impressive spatial experience created by Palladio.

A chronological account of his work after 1550 has to take account of the further enrichment of his architectural culture in the 1550s, as a result of his close collaboration with another great intellectual figure, the Venetian patrician Daniele Barbaro. It was Palladio who provided almost all the illustrations for Barbaro's monumental translation (with full commentary) of Vitruvius. This effort further defined Palladio's architectural language; it also crystallised for him certain motifs which he was to use constantly in his designs, like the pedimented temple front for villas, and the giant order with free-standing columns, spanning two floors, derived from his own reconstruction of Vitruvius' Basilica at Fano. Palladio realised this impressive solution in stone at the villa Serego.

Other works, like the undecorated but beautiful and structurally elegant wooden bridge a Bassano will have to be passed over here. Nor is there space to analyse one of Palladio's very last works, the Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza, a learned, but also miraculously vital resuscitation of the layout of the ancient Roman theatre.

THE QUATTRO LIBRI AND PALLADIO'S INFLUENCE

One of Palladio's most impressive creations cannot pass without mention, for it has so much to do with this exhibition. Palladio's Quattro libri (Venice, 1570), is his influential architectural testament, in which he set out his formulae for the orders, for room sizes, for stairs and for the design of detail. In the Fourth book he published restorations of the Roman temples which he had studied most closely, and in the Second and Third books (as no architect had done until then) offered a sort of retrospective exhibition of his own designs for palaces, villas, public buildings and bridges.

Concise and clear in its language, effective in its communication of complex information through the co-ordination of plates and texts, the Quattro libri represents the most effective illustrated architectural publication up to that time. The intelligence and clarity of the "interface" which Palladio offers to his readers can be seen if one compares it to Serlio's architectural books, which started to appear in 1537. Whereas Serlio does not inscribe dimensions on the plates, but laboriously rehearses them in the small print of text, Palladio frees the text of this encumbrance, and places the measurements directly on the plans and elevations. Unlike Serlio, Palladio presents buildings and details in a uniform fashion, redraws drawings that he derived from other architects, and presents all dimensions in a standard unit of measurement, the Vicentine foot of 0.357 mm.

It was therefore not only Palladio's architecture, with its rational basis, its clear grammar, its bias towards domestic projects, but the effectiveveness of his book as a means of communication that led to the immense influence of Palladio on the development of architecture in northern Europe, and later in North America.
Of course Palladio - as Inigo Jones for instance knew - did not spell out all his secrets in the Quattro libri. He did not say exactly how to design according to a system, without being boring or repeating oneself; he did not say exactly when or how to break his own rules; he did not tell how to use drawing as a way of generating many ideas and designs from a single initial scheme, or why it was important always to make alternative designs. And he did not explain how to design details that would be just right, not on all buildings, but only on a specific building, as the windows of the villa Poiana are just right for that villa, or those of the villa Rotonda for the Rotonda. In writing the Quattro libri he certainly wanted to educate, to improve general standards of architectural design. But like all good teachers (and all masters with apprentices) perhaps he knew that it is better to leave the pupils something to find out for themselves.

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