Villa La Rotonda
A square villa with a temple front on each of its four sides and a dome in the centre. Palladio set it on a hill so that each front has its own view. The villa was copied in England, Russia and America and has given its name to an entire movement: Palladianism.
The villa was commissioned by Paolo Almerico, a priest who had served at the papal court in Rome and returned to his home town of Vicenza. He wanted a residence for leisure and social life, not a working farm like most of Palladio’s villas. Building began around 1566. Palladio died in 1580 before the villa was finished, and it was completed by Vincenzo Scamozzi, who among other things gave the dome a lower form than Palladio had envisaged. In 1591 the villa was bought by the Capra brothers, and it is therefore also known as Villa Capra. Like most of Palladio’s buildings it is built of brick that was rendered and whitewashed to give the impression of stone, with details in dressed stone.
The plan is entirely symmetrical about two axes: a square with a round hall at its centre beneath the dome, and on each of the four sides a temple front with six Ionic columns, a flight of steps and a pediment. The rooms around the central hall are identical and arranged in pairs, and from the round hall one looks out towards all four points of the compass. Palladio described the villa as set on a hill surrounded by other hills, like a theatre. Statues stand on the pediments, and inside the rooms there are 16th- and 17th-century frescoes and stucco work. The combination of temple front and dome had previously been reserved for churches and temples, and using it for a private house was new.
Palladio published the villa in his Four Books of Architecture in 1570, and through this it became known throughout Europe. In England it became the model for several 18th-century villas, among them Chiswick House and Mereworth Castle, and from there Palladianism spread to America, where Thomas Jefferson was influenced by it. The villa has been owned by the same family since the 20th century and is part of the World Heritage Site of the City of Vicenza and the Palladian Villas of the Veneto. Palladio’s book was in the libraries of Swedish architects, and Palladian motifs with a columned portico and strict symmetry became common in Swedish manor houses and public buildings in the 18th and 19th centuries. Villa La Rotonda is thus one of the most imitated houses in the history of architecture.