All He Surveyed
How Palladian was Palladio?
by Paul Goldberger | March 30, 2009


Palladio’s Villa Rotonda. At one time, a visit to the Palladian villas was considered an essential part of an architectural education.

It is probably fair to say that Andrea Palladio, who died in 1580, is the patron saint of every McMansion that has ever cluttered the American landscape, because it was he who brought architectural aspiration to the houses of the moderately wealthy. Before Palladio, serious architecture was for churches, public buildings, and the palaces of the richest nobles. Palladio studied the architecture of ancient Rome, codified its elements in a famous treatise, and started putting porticoes and pediments and domes on the houses of the landed gentry, conferring on them a feeling of classical pedigree.

Palladio was the most influential architect in Western history. Our idea of grandeur comes predominantly from him. Without Palladio, who was Thomas Jefferson’s favorite architect, Monticello would not have looked the way it did; nor, for that matter, would Scarlett O’Hara’s Tara. If modern developers have used his treatise “The Four Books of Architecture” as a mere catalogue of columns and cupolas for the upwardly mobile, Palladio isn’t to blame. His book shows that making good new buildings is a matter not of just copying old ones but of learning their lessons. Still, the man who wrote that “often the architect has to follow the wishes of those who are spending rather than what one really ought to do” clearly had a certain sympathy for architects who have to accommodate the questionable tastes of rich clients. He knew that you had to earn a living.

Palladio was born in 1508, and his five-hundredth birthday is currently being marked, belatedly but enthusiastically, with an elaborate exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, in London. Most architecture exhibitions are frustratingly vicarious: they try to make us feel as if we were in actual buildings, with films and computer simulations, but they can’t. This exhibition, to its credit, doesn’t try to substitute for a direct experience—although, as it happens, the Royal Academy is in Burlington House, a key building in the spread of the Palladian style in the eighteenth century. There are no photographs other than some small ones attached to the labels, like footnotes, and although there are a few beautiful large wooden models of Palladio’s buildings, the bulk of the exhibition is made up of drawings, plans, paintings, letters, ledgers, and other artifacts; the idea isn’t to hit you with special effects but to present materials that tell the story of Palladio’s buildings.

Many of these materials date back to the sixteenth century, and one thing that becomes evident as you look at them is that making buildings in Palladio’s time was as politically and financially challenging as it is now. Many of Palladio’s drawings show versions of buildings different from what was built, sometimes because the client insisted on changing things, and sometimes because the architect kept revising the design, trying scheme after scheme until he was satisfied. Perfection came slowly, with all kinds of false starts. A lot of the documents displayed relate to money—a consideration never far from the minds of architects and patrons. A logbook kept by Girolamo Chiericati, who commissioned one of Palladio’s greatest houses, records every expense, beginning with the outlay, on November 15, 1550, of seven troni for the notebook itself. Palladio got four gold scudi for preparation of plans for the house, and ten gold scudi for spending two years supervising construction. Chiericati also gave him a load of pears.

Palladio was born in Padua and grew up in Vicenza. He was trained as a stonemason, but his potential must have been clear, because he had a knack for finding mentors. Under the sponsorship of Giangiorgio Trissino, a Vicenzan nobleman and intellectual, he went to Rome in his early thirties. There he explored ruins, sketched, and started thinking about how to make something new from the ancient buildings he saw. Some years later, Trissino helped get Palladio his first job, reconstructing Vicenza’s old assembly and market hall into a grand public building, called the Basilica. Palladio wrapped the old buildings in a new façade, a two-story loggia of open arches, with Tuscan columns on the first floor and Ionic on the second—a simple gesture that raises an ordinary building to monumental grandeur. Palladio had a gift for composition, for combining solids and voids, curves and straight lines, depth and flatness, in nearly perfect equilibrium, and he was among the first to think of classicism as a vocabulary that could transform mundane structures into something special.

After this important commission, local nobles lined up to have him design their country villas and city palazzi. The most famous of these is the Villa Almerico-Capra, also known as the Villa Rotonda, a miracle of symmetry and proportion with a large central dome and identical porticoes on all four sides. But, for all its beauty, the Villa Rotonda has a rigid order that is atypical of Palladio’s lively inventiveness. Taken as a whole, the villas he built around Vicenza are more severe, unconventional, and risky than the Palladian label leads you to expect. The façade of the Villa Foscari has a grand Ionic portico, with a classical pediment tucked above it like a huge dormer; in the back, Palladio placed an arched window so high that it pushed through into a pediment. At the Villa Emo, the portico is pushed right up against the façade, and the open space behind it is carved out of the mass of the house. And the Villa Poiana has a semicircular arch over the door, with five round windows arrayed around it, like huge polka dots. There’s no precise model for any of this in the ancient buildings Palladio studied, but Palladio was a modern architect, not a copyist. It was the new ideas that mattered.

The documentary record that Palladio left behind tells us only so much about his personality, but his ambition is not in doubt: he essentially invented the modern architectural career. The “Four Books,” which Palladio published in 1570, when he was in his sixties, is not just a book of rules and standards but also the first architectural monograph. Palladio included a portfolio of his own work, which disseminated his ideas and made his buildings more famous than anyone else’s. “Only as a result of the book did the very idea of an architectural opus take shape,” the architectural historian Kurt Forster said at a conference on Palladio at Yale this year. “Were one to ask how an architect can extend the shelf life of his work, it is to Palladio that one must turn.”

Palladio’s writings gave his architecture mythic status, and made his villas, and the churches he later designed in Venice, into places of pilgrimage. Jefferson tried unsuccessfully to get to Italy to see them; Goethe came away from the Villa Rotonda, in 1786, saying that the architect was a truly great man. At one time, a visit to the Palladian villas was considered an essential part of an architectural education, as important a stop on the grand tour as the Gothic cathedrals. Palladio was the first architect whose reputation preceded his buildings. People arrived in Vicenza expecting to be awed, the way they do now when they go to see the work of Frank Gehry in Bilbao, or of Rem Koolhaas in Beijing.

Yet the tradition of reverence that has sprung up around Palladio’s work is in danger of obscuring its humbler but more interesting features. Since many villas were not only aristocratic retreats but also working farms, he made specific recommendations about where to place granaries, haylofts, quarters for animals, and wine cellars, prescribing that they be connected to the villa by covered arcades so that the owner could keep the agricultural functions at a distance but still inspect them without going outdoors. Palladio wrote that his porticoes were there at least as much to keep the owner dry as he went in and out as they were to add majesty to the façade. In the “Four Books” he tries to distill prescriptions from a lifetime’s accumulation of know-how. He recommends building country houses near rivers, but not standing waters, “because they generate very bad air, which we can easily avoid, if we build in elevated and cheerful places . . . where the inhabitants are healthy and cheerful, and preserve a good color, and are unmolested by gnats and other small animals.”

It’s odd to think of history’s most famous architect being as obsessed with animal smells as he was with scale and proportion. But not being afraid of the ordinary side of his job was a key component of Palladio’s genius. To him, architecture existed to solve problems, and he seems to have given equal weight to elevating the image of his clients, making their lives function more smoothly, and creating beautiful objects for the world. Figuring out where to put the farm animals and shaping designs of transcendent beauty were all in a day’s work. ♦