but Palladia was a modern architect,

n ot a copyist. It was the new ideas

that mattered.

he documentary record that Palladia left behind tells us only so

me1ch about his personalitv, but his ambition is not in doubt: he essentially invented the modern architectural career.

ferson tried unsuccessti.illy to get to Italy

to see them; Goethe came away trom the
Villa Rotonda, in 1786, saying that the
architect was a tmly great man. At one
time, a visit to the Palladian villas was
considered an essential part of an architechiml education, as important a stop
on the grand tour as the Gothic cathedrals. Palladio was the first architect

least as much to keep the owner dry as he

went in and out as they were to add majesty to the fa<;:ade. In the "Four Books" he
tries to distill prescriptions from a lifetime's accumulation of know-how. He
recommends building country houses
near rivers, but not standing waters, "because they generate very bad air, which
we can easily avoid, ifwe build in elevated

Palladia's Villa Rotonda. At one time, a visit to the Palladian villas was considered an essential part ofan architectural education.

The "Four Books," which Palladia published in 1570, when he was in his sixties, is not just a book of rules and standards but also the first architectural
monograph. Palladio included a portfolio of his own work, which disseminated
his ideas and made his buildings more
:; famous than anyone else's. "Only as a
~ result of the book did the verv idea of an
~ architectur~ll opus take shape," the ar~ chitech!ral historian Kurt Forster said
~ at a conference on Palladio at Yale this
~ year. 'Were one to ask how an architect
g can extend the shelf life of his work, it is
g to Palladia that one must turn."
~ Palladia's writings gave his architec6 ture mythic stahls, and made his villas,
~ and the churches he later designed in
ffi Venice, into places of pilgrimage. Jef-

whose reputation preceded his buildings.

People arrived in Vicenza expecting to
be awed, the way they do now when they
go to see the work of Frank Gehry in
Bilbao, or of Rem Koolhaas in Beijing.
Yet the tradition of reverence that has
sprung up around PaUadio's work is in
danger of obscuring its humbler but more
interesting features. Since many villas
were not only aristocratic retreats but also
working farms, he made specific recommendations about where to place granaries, haylofts, guarters for animals, and
wine cellars, prescribing that they be connected to the vill<l by covered arcades so
that the owner could keep the agricultural
functions at a distance but still inspect
them without going outdoors. Palladio
wrote that his porticoes were there at

and cheerflu places ... where the inhabitants are healthy and cheerful, and preserve a good color, and are unmolested by
gnats and other small animals."
It's odd to think of history's most
famous architect being as obsessed with
animal smells as he was with scale and
proportion. But not being afraid of
the ordinary side of his job was a key
component of Palladia's genius. To
him, architecture existed to solve problems, and he seems to have given egual
weight to elevating the image ofhis clients, making their lives function more
smoothly, and creating beautiful objects for the world. Figuring out where
to put the farm animals and shaping
designs of transcendent beauty were all
in a day's work. +
THE NEW YOI\KEI\. MAI\CH 30. 2009

75

THE SKY LINE

ALL HE 5UR.VEYED
How Palladian was Palladia?

BY PAUL GOLDBEf\GEf\

r i probably fair to say that A ndrea

Palladia , who died in 1580, is the
patron saint of every l'vlcM ansion that
has ever cluttered the American landscape, because it was he who brought
architectural aspiration to the h ouses
of the moderately wealthy. Before Pallad ia, serious arch ite cture wa s for
ch urches, public b uildings, and the
palaces of the richest nobles. P alladia
stu died the architecture of ancient
Ro me, codified its elements in a famous treatise, and started putting porticoes and pedi me nts and dom es on
the houses of the landed gentry, conferring on them a feeling of classical
pedigree.
Palladia was the most influential
architect in W estern history. Our idea
of g rand eur co mes predominantly
from him. W itho ut Palladio, who was
T homas Jefierso n's favorite architect,
M onticello would not have looked the
way it did; nor, for that matter, would
Scarlett O'Hara's Tara. If modern developers have used his treati se "The
Four Books of Architecture" as a mere
catalo?;u e of columns and cupolas for
the upwardly mobile, Palladio isn't to
blam e. His boo k shows that making
good new buildings is a matter no t
of just copying old ones but of learning their lessons. Still, the man who
wro te that "often the architect has to
fo llow the wishes of those wh o are
spending rather than what one really
ought to do" clearly had a certain sympathy for architects who have to acco mmodate the questionable tastes of
rich clients. He kn ew that you had to
earn a living.

alladio was born in 1508, and his

five - hundredth birthday is currently being marked, belatedly but enthusiastically, with an elaborate exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts,
in Lo ndon. Most architecture exhibitions are frustratingly vicarious: they
7 4

THE NEW YORK11.. MAI\CH 30. 2009

try to make us feel as if we were in actu al buildings, with films and computer simulations, but they can't. This
exhibition, to its credit, doesn't try to
sub stitute for a direct experience-although, as it happens, the Royal Academy is in Burlingto n H ouse, a key
building in the spre ad of the P alladian style in the eightee nth century.
There are no photographs other than
some small ones attached to the labels,
like footnotes, and although there are
a few beautiful large wooden models
ofPalbdio's buildings , the bulk of the
exhibiti o n is m ade up of drawings,
plan s, paintings, letters, ledgers, and
other artifacts; the idea isn't to hit you
with special efiects but to present materials that tell the story of Palladia's
buildings.
l\hny of these lll<ltcrials date back
to the sixteenth century, and one thing
that bec omes evid e nt as you look
at them is that making buildings .i n
Palladia's time was as politically and
finan cially challeng ing as it is now.
J\llan y of Palladio's drawings sh ow
versions of buildings different from
what was built, sometimes becau se
the client insisted on changing things ,
and sometimes because the architect
kept revising the design, ttying scheme
after sch eme until he was satisfied.
Pertection came slowly, with all kinds
of false starts. A lot of th e docum ents
displayed relate to money-a considerati on never far fro m the minds of architects and patrons. A logbook kept
by Girolamo Chieric.tti, who commissioned one ofPalladio's greatest houses,
records every expense, beginning with
the outlay, on Nove mber 15, 1550,
of seven troni for the notebook itself.
Palladia got four gold scudi for preparation of plans for the house, and ten
gold scudi for spending two years supervising construction. Chiericati also
gave him a load of pears.
Palladia was born in Padua and

grew up in Vicenza. He was trained

as a stonemason, but hi s potential
must have been clear, because he had
a knack for finding mentors. Under
the sponsorship of Giangiorgio T rissino, a Vicenzan nobleman and intellectual, he went to Rome in his early
thirties . There he explored ruins,
sketched, and started thinking about
how to make something new from the
ancient buildings he saw. Some years
later, Trissino helped get Palladia his
first job, reconstructing Vicenza's old
assembly and market hall into a grand
public building, called the Basilica.
Palladia wrapped the old buildings in
a new fa s;ad e, a rvvo- story loggia of
open arches, with Tu scan columns on
the first floor and Ionic on the second-a simple gesture that raises an
ordinary building t o monumental
grandeur. Palladia had a gift for composition, for combining solids and
voids, curves and straight lines, depth
and flatness, in nearly perfect equilibrium, and h e was among the first to
think of classicism as a vocabulary that
could transform mundane structures
into something special.
After thi s important commission,
local nobles lined up to have him design their country villas and city palazzi.
The most famous of these is the Villa
Almerico- C apra, also known as the
Villa Roto nda, a miracle of symmetry
and proportion with a large central
dome and identical porticoes on all four
sides. But, for all its beauty, the Villa
Rotonda has a rigid order that is atypical of P alladio's lively inventiveness. T aken as a whole, the villas he
built around Vicenza are more severe,
unconventi onal, and risky than the
Palladian label leads you to expect.
The fat;:ade of the Villa F oscari has a
grand Ionic portico, with a classical
pediment tucked above it like a huge
dormer; in the back, Palladia placed an
arched window so high that it pushed
through into a pediment. At the Villa
Emo, the portico is pushed right up
against the fat;:ade, and the open space
behind it is carved out of the mass
of the house. And the Villa Poiana
has a semicircular arch over the door,
with five round windows arrayed
around it, like huge polka dots. There's
no precise model for any of this in the
ancient buildings Palladia studied,