A stonemason's son from Padua shaped country houses from England to Monticello
Andrea Palladio, born in 1508, designed villas in the Veneto whose rooms followed simple ratios like 3:4 and 4:5. Two centuries later his symmetrical, temple-fronted houses were being echoed in English parks, a Berlin opera house and Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, and his three-part window became one of architecture's most durable motifs.
Palladio's father worked stone in Padua. The son studied Roman ruins, the treatise of Vitruvius and the work of Bramante and Raphael, and sided with Leon Battista Alberti in preferring mathematical proportion to Renaissance ornament. What survives of his work stands in Venice, Vicenza and the surrounding Veneto, including the Basilica del Redentore. In 1570 he set out his methods in an illustrated four-volume treatise, The Four Books of Architecture, which later carried his ideas far beyond Italy.
His villas answered their sites. La Rotonda, on a hilltop, has four equal fronts, each with a portico so the owners could take in views on every side while staying out of the sun; at Villa Godi a recessed loggia takes that role. The standard plan stacked three levels: a rusticated base for kitchens and service rooms, a grand piano nobile reached by outdoor steps and a portico, and a low mezzanine for lesser bedrooms. Because the houses were also working farms, low symmetrical wings called barchessas swept out to shelter horses, animals and harvests. Palladio kept them apart from the house; his 18th-century followers pulled them in, and that fusion became a hallmark of Palladianism.
The Venetian window pairs a tall arched opening with two shorter flat-topped ones, a form borrowed from the Roman triumphal arch. Bramante used it outside Venice, Sebastiano Serlio described it, and Jacopo Sansovino added a giant order between the bays at the Biblioteca Marciana in 1537, a version Palladio used on both storeys of his basilica in Vicenza. James Lees-Milne traced its first British appearance to Burlington House in London, drawn from Inigo Jones rather than Palladio directly.
Jones brought the style to England early in the 17th century; his Banqueting House in Whitehall, completed in 1622, came first. Civil war and then the Baroque pushed it aside until an early 18th-century revival fed by books such as Colen Campbell's Vitruvius Britannicus. In Berlin, Knobelsdorff began an opera house in 1741 modelled on Campbell's Wanstead House, and in America Jefferson adapted it for a new republic. By the mid-19th century the Gothic Revival had taken over, with Augustus Pugin dismissing Palladianism as too pagan for Christian worship.
Source: Palladian architecture
