Palladio’s Four Books
Andrea Palladio publishes “The Four Books of Architecture”, with drawings of ancient buildings and of his own villas and palazzi.
The books spread all over the world. Palladianism shaped English country houses, American plantations and Swedish manor houses.
Palladio’s real name was Andrea di Pietro, and he was born in Padua in 1508. He trained as a stonemason and was working in Vicenza when the humanist Gian Giorgio Trissino discovered him. Trissino gave him the name Palladio, after Pallas Athena, the goddess of wisdom, taught him Latin and Vitruvius and took him to Rome, where he measured and drew the ruins. The times were favourable for an architect. Venice had lost ground in international trade and was turning to the mainland, where noble families invested in agriculture. The villa became a new kind of building: both a manor house for summer residence and the centre of the estate, with barns, stables and dovecotes as wings.
Palladio designed some twenty villas in the Veneto countryside, palazzi in Vicenza and churches in Venice, such as San Giorgio Maggiore and Il Redentore. He often built cheaply, in brick rendered to look like stone, but with careful proportions in which the dimensions of the rooms stand in simple ratios to one another. He believed that ancient houses had had temple fronts, and so he gave his villas columned porticoes with pediments, as at the Villa Rotonda outside Vicenza. “The Four Books of Architecture” was published in Venice in 1570, with woodcuts of the orders, his own buildings and the ancient temples. He had earlier illustrated Daniele Barbaro’s great edition of Vitruvius.
Palladio died in 1580, but the books took on a life of their own. The English architect Inigo Jones travelled to Italy in the early 17th century and studied the buildings with the book in hand. A century later Palladianism became almost a national style in England, championed by Lord Burlington and by translations of the Four Books. From there it reached North America, where Thomas Jefferson designed his home Monticello according to Palladio’s principles, as well as Ireland, Russia and the Nordic countries. In Sweden the legacy can be seen in 18th- and 19th-century manor houses and rectories with a symmetrical main building, columns and a pediment, and with wings grouped around a courtyard. The villa that Palladio once defined became a template for the whole Western world.