Andrea Palladio
Palladio was a stonemason before he became an architect. His villas, palaces and churches in Vicenza and Venice and his “Four Books on Architecture” (1570) spread all over the world. The temple front on an ordinary dwelling became his signature.
Andrea di Pietro della Gondola was born in Padua in 1508, the son of a miller. He was apprenticed as a stonemason and moved to Vicenza, where he worked in a stone-carving workshop. Around 1538 he was discovered by the learned humanist Gian Giorgio Trissino, who took him under his wing, gave him a classical education and the name Palladio, after Pallas Athena, the goddess of wisdom. Trissino took him to Rome several times, where he measured and drew the ancient ruins with great precision. Through Trissino’s circle he received his first commissions from noble families in Vicenza, both town palaces and country villas in the Veneto.
Palladio’s breakthrough was the remodelling of Vicenza’s town hall, the Basilica Palladiana, from 1549, with arcades of the kind known as the Palladian motif. He designed palaces in Vicenza such as the Palazzo Chiericati and a large number of country villas, where the temple front was applied to a dwelling for the first time. The Villa Rotonda, begun around 1567, is symmetrical on all four sides with a dome at its centre. In Venice he designed the churches of San Giorgio Maggiore and Il Redentore, and in Vicenza the Teatro Olimpico. His “Four Books on Architecture” of 1570 combined the rules of antiquity with his own works in clear woodcuts. His architecture is based on harmonic proportions, symmetry and a simple, lucid order.
Palladio died in 1580. His books made him the most influential architect in the history of the West. In England Inigo Jones and later Lord Burlington built on his ideas, and Palladianism became the 18th-century style for English country houses. From there it spread to the American colonies, where Thomas Jefferson designed Monticello and the University of Virginia in his spirit. In Sweden too the traces are clear: manor houses with temple fronts and central projections, Gustavian pavilions and later 19th-century public buildings follow Palladian principles. His villas in the Veneto and buildings in Vicenza are inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List, and the word Palladian is still used today for classical houses.