Palladio, Andrea, and Palladianism

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PALLADIO, ANDREA, AND PALLADIANISM

PALLADIO, ANDREA, AND PALLADIANISM. Andrea Palladio (1508–1580) was born Andrea di Pietro della Gondola, but he was given the name Palladio by an early patron and mentor. Despite his modest origins and unpromising apprenticeship as a stonemason, he went on to become one of the leading architects of the Renaissance and arguably the most influential builder of all time. By Renaissance standards, Palladio was something of an anomaly. He built nothing in Rome or Florence and comparatively little in Venice, most of his work being located in Vicenza and its surrounding countryside. Seemingly indifferent to the religious and political strife of the mid-sixteenth century as well, Palladio until the end of his life largely shunned the mannerist artifice of his contemporaries, creating designs more in tune with the idealizing principles of the High Renaissance than with the fashions of his own age. It is ironic therefore that his work so perfectly exemplifies the character of the Renaissance as a whole. His antiquarianism, his rationalism, and his secularism together constituted the essence of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century humanism, and these were the very ideals that would later endear him to builders of the Enlightenment.

Palladio's architectural career began around 1537 at the villa of Gian Giorgio Trissino at Cricoli. The design of the villa originated with Trissino himself, a distinguished humanist and the aspiring architect's first mentor. Trissino bestowed the classical name "Palladio" on him and, more important, accompanied him on his first trip to Rome in 1541. Palladio's attraction to Rome's classical remains led him to return on four other occasions, the last time being in 1554, when he visited Rome in the company of another influential intellectual, Daniele Barbaro. Barbaro at the time was working on a translation and commentary on Vitruvius's Ten Books of Architecture, for which Palladio furnished the woodcut illustrations. It was through his associations with both Trissino and Barbaro that Palladio learned the grammar and syntax of classical architecture, lessons he never forgot in either his work or the renowned Four Books of Architecture, published in 1570.

During the 1540s and 1550s Palladio devoted himself exclusively to the design and construction of secular buildings. With the exception of the Basilica or Town Hall in Vicenza and one or two other civic commissions, these were all private residences, for the most part villas in the Vicentine countryside. It is in these private commissions, and especially the villas, that Palladio's genius expressed itself with the greatest originality. Unlike earlier Renaissance villas like those of the Medici in Tuscany, Palladio's houses were not simply weekend retreats for the aristocracy, but rather working farms whose very existence was predicated on social and economic changes that favored the region's agricultural development.

Palladio's challenge in virtually all the villas—and there are nearly two dozen of them—was to reconcile his instinct for classical design with the practical needs of agrarian life. Only at the Villa Rotonda, his best-known but least typical country house, were the ideal demands of the structure uncompromised by utilitarian concerns. There a square, symmetrically divided ground plan is reflected in the equally regular exterior elevations. Each of the villa's four facades has the same projecting classical portico, while the roof is crowned with a cupola of the same diameter as that of the circular hall below. The formal consistency of this solution belies its audacious iconography, however, for both the portico and the cupola were forms that historically connoted sacred usage. Indeed, the Villa Rotonda appears to emulate the design of centralized churches from an earlier stage of the Renaissance. Although classical orders had occasionally embellished private dwellings since the fifteenth century, the cupola had not, and no Renaissance facade—sacred or secular—had ever employed a classical portico so boldly. Palladio was clearly conscious of these conventions of decor; despite its visual appeal, the Villa Rotonda was to remain his only residential building crowned with a dome.

Palladio's villas all tend to be blocklike with columnar porticos, but the functional demands of farming usually necessitated the addition of flanking wings at the sides. At the Villa Foscari at Malcontenta, the attached walls were so low as to hardly affect the overall prospect, but more typically, as at the Villa Barbaro at Maser, the wings are a prominent part of the exterior elevation. In nearly every instance, however, the wings and attached outbuildings confer frontality on the complex as a whole while emphasizing in their deference the grandeur of the residence itself.

Palladio's city dwellings play less dramatic roles in the urban landscape. Smaller for the most part than conventional palazzi in Venice or Florence, they are actually townhouses or palazzetti of the type popularized by Donato Bramante's Palazzo Caprini in Rome (c. 1510). Most are tucked into Vicenza's narrow side streets with facades designed to appear both monumental and at the same time sensitive to their site and surroundings. Facing on an open piazza, the Palazzo Chiericati was conceived with a bold, open columnar elevation more like that of the villas, while the exteriors of his street-facing palaces are, in turn, flatter and more densely articulated. The Palazzo Iseppo-Porto initiates the typological development beyond the Bramantesque prototype. Designed around 1550, contemporary with the Chiericati, the two-story elevation differentiates between a rusticated, arcuated lower floor and a trabeated piano nobile embellished with half columns. Like most of his more ambitious palazzi, the plan of Iseppo-Porto was designed in accordance with what Palladio believed to be the style of the ancient Roman house with an atrium entrance and peristyle courtyard. None of his courtyards were ever completed according to plan, however, and only the buildings' inventive facades, with their novel variation in the use of the classical orders, preserve his original intentions. Significantly, not one of his executed palaces has a pediment or dome, a further indication of his respect for conventional decorum.

The Basilica and the Loggia del Capitaniato, both in Piazza dei Signori, Vicenza's main square, were Palladio's most important civic commissions. Conceived in 1549 and 1571, respectively, they together represent the consistent principles and the evolutionary nature of his personal style. For the Basilica he did no more than encase an existing medieval town hall within a two-story loggia, but the irregularities of the earlier structure made the creation of a uniform exterior challenging. Palladio's solution was to envelop the building in a series of superimposed serliane, the lintel-arch-lintel device now so closely associated with his work that it is customarily called the Palladian motif. By varying the interval between the columns and piers of the nine serliane that constitute the principal facade, Palladio disguised the dimensional defect and made the elevation appear consistent. The rationality of this solution and the purity of its classical references were clearly shaped by his travels to Rome and by the knowledge of classical Vitruvian principles he gained while working on the Barbaro edition of the Ten Books of Architecture.

The three-bay ceremonial Loggia is even more monumental with its use of the giant order. But here, later in his career, Palladio's commitment to Vitruvian correctness began to wane. The architectonic purity of the structure is compromised by an extensive overlay of sculptural relief and disjunctive relationships that exist among its various parts, particularly its front and sides. Affected perhaps only now by the uncertainties of his age, Palladio began to experiment with mannerist methods of design.

It was not until the second half of his career that Palladio designed for the church. His two most ambitious commissions—SS. Giorgio Maggiore, begun in 1565, and Il Redentore, begun in 1576—are both in Venice. Although Palladio devoted the last of his Four Books of Architecture to the design of ancient temples, the dictates of the Counter-Reformation so constrained church building in his day that classicizing ideals became all but impossible. Yet SS. Giorgio and Il Redentore together offer imaginative solutions to two of the principal challenges of late Renaissance church design, their plans and facades. Palladio's introduction of a composite ground plan afforded a compromise between the aesthetically desirable, if by then outdated, centralized plan and the more functionally and symbolically appropriate cruciform plan. His cloaking of these churches' facades with superimposed engaged temple fronts was just as brilliant, if slightly more idiosyncratic.

Palladio's influence was initially limited to the Veneto region, and it was only decades after his death in 1580 that the true Palladian revival began, not in Italy but England. Inigo Jones (1573–1652) was the first to "rediscover" Palladio, visiting Vicenza and Venice during his second trip to Italy in 1613 with a copy of The Four Books in hand. Jones's subsequent designs for the Banqueting House at Whitehall, the Queen's House in Greenwich, and the facade of St. Paul's, London (destroyed by fire in 1666), pay worthy tribute to their sources. Not surprisingly, it was Palladio's secular buildings that attracted English and eventually American patrons. Colen Campbell's treatise The Vitruvius Britannicus (1715–1725) along with Campbell's own house at Mereworth (1722–1725) and Lord Burlington's at Chiswick (begun 1725) turned Palladio into an eighteenth-century icon, a circumstance substantially aided by the publication of the Four Books of Architecture in no fewer than four English editions between the years 1663–1738. American Palladianism quickly followed, the Four Books being particularly instrumental in disseminating a style of architecture throughout the southern colonies after the 1740s. Thomas Jefferson was the last important Palladian architect, his house at Monticello (1771–1809) perhaps being the true culmination of the Renaissance master's idealistic idiom. Significantly, Jefferson never visited the Veneto during his travels in Europe, but as his preparatory studies for Monticello indicate, Palladio's treatise provided all the initial inspiration he needed.