Palladio and Palladianism: Villas, Temple Fronts and Symmetry

Andrea Palladio (1508–1580) was an Italian Renaissance architect in the Veneto who designed villas and churches on ancient models, with temple fronts, symmetry and strict proportions. Palladianism is the style that grew out of his buildings and his book The Four Books of Architecture, and it spread across Europe and America.

Facts

The stonecutter who became an architect

Palladio was born in Padua and began as a stonecutter. The poet and humanist Gian Giorgio Trissino in Vicenza discovered his talent, gave him a humanist education and the name Palladio, after Pallas Athena, goddess of wisdom. He travelled to Rome and studied ancient ruins with careful measurements. There he learned to read Vitruvius and the Romans’ building elements, and he looked for principles, not only forms.

The result was villas and palaces in Vicenza and in the Veneto countryside for rich merchants and landowners. The villas were often farms with a manor house in the middle, where the small temple front showed the owner’s education. Palladio thus made the ancient temple front into an everyday residential façade. Read about the time in the guide to Renaissance architecture and about Leon Battista Alberti, who had paved the way.

Villa Rotonda and the proportions

Villa Rotonda outside Vicenza, begun around 1566, is his most famous. The house is completely symmetrical: a square with a temple front with Ionic columns on all four sides, and a round hall under a dome in the middle. It is designed as a belvedere, not a country estate. It became the most copied building in Western architecture.

Palladio used simple mathematical ratios for the dimensions of the rooms, for example 3:4:5 or squares and double squares, and arranged the rooms symmetrically around a central axis. The churches San Giorgio Maggiore and Il Redentore in Venice have the same clarity. In 1570 he published his book with plans and sections of his own works and ancient models, which meant that his style could spread without anyone having to travel to Italy.

Palladianism in England and America

In England Inigo Jones was the first to bring home Italian classicism, with the Queen’s House at Greenwich and the Banqueting House in London in the seventeenth century. In the eighteenth century Palladianism became almost a national style as a reaction against the heavy, dramatic Baroque of Wren, Vanbrugh and Hawksmoor; compare Blenheim Palace. Lord Burlington and Colen Campbell, who published Vitruvius Britannicus in 1715, led the movement. Burlington’s Chiswick House (1726–1729) is a small, strict villa modelled on Palladio’s Rotonda.

Georgian terraced houses, English country houses and later the British Museum build on the same ideas, and the furniture of the period, such as the Chippendale chair, belongs in Georgian settings. Across the Atlantic Thomas Jefferson became a great admirer. He designed his home Monticello in Virginia, begun in 1769, on Palladio’s models, and many American state capitols and plantation houses follow the same pattern.

Recognising and understanding

Look for symmetry and a central temple front with columns and a triangular pediment. Look at proportions: the windows become smaller on higher floors, and there is a clear piano nobile, main floor, on top of a lower base. A hallmark is the Palladian window, a wide round-arched opening between two narrower ones with straight lintels, which in fact goes back to Sebastiano Serlio.

Palladianism differs from the Baroque by its restraint and from Neoclassicism by taking Roman and Renaissance classicism rather than Greek models as its starting point; read more in the guides to Neoclassical architecture, Baroque architecture and Greek architecture. The same period is described under the Renaissance and British history; see also Versailles as a counterpoint, and John Soane.

How to recognise it

Exercise

Which work gave Palladio’s architecture international spread?