15/10/07 - Architectural History - Andrea Palladio 1508-1580

In a biography of Palladio it says:

"All over the western world, hundreds of thousands of houses, churches and public buildings with symmetrical fronts and applied half-columns topped by a pediment descend from the designs of Andrea Palladio. He is the most imitated architect in history, and his influence on the development of English and American architecture probably has been greater than that of all other Renaissance architects combined."
[James S. Ackerman, Palladio]

A Survey of Palladio's Buildings
All of Palladio's buildings are situated in the region of Veneto, either in Venice or Vicenza or the surrounding countryside.

The Church of San Giorgio Maggiore and Il Redentore are two out of the four churches that he designed. On the San Giorgio Maggiore facade, a giant pediment tops two half-pediments. It is an anticipation of what we see when we enter the church. He attempts to make all parts of the building relate to each other in a meaningful way (as with all his buildings). But some say that the temple front looks odd because it appears to be 'levitating'. The whole of the temple front of Il Redentore starts at the same level, and this is considered to be a better design than the previous. Again, the facade is a diagram of what we see inside.

Palladio's secular buildings include the Basilica in Vicenza. He was commissioned to modify the public building, which was medieval. He built the existing facade in a Classical way, which of course meant that the bays had to be of equal length. Palladio instead sub-divided each bay into a central arch flanked by two lintelled portions. This is known as the 'Palladian motif' although he did not invent it. It is clever because it allowed Palladio to have bays of differing distance, without drawing attention to them.

Palladio's Theatre for the Accademia Olimpico, the Teatro Olimpico, 1579-80, is based on a Vitruvian original. It has a false perspective in the stage which was added after Palladio's time. Other secular buildings by Palladio include the Timber Bridge at Bassano del Grappa (1569), the Palazzo Chiericati (1550), Palazzo Barbarano (1570) and Palazzo Thiene (1545-50).

Palladio wrote several books, but the most famous one is I Quattro Libri dell' Architettura. It was first published in Venice in 1570 and subsequently republished in many editions and translated into more languages. He had meant to write ten books, based on Vitruvius' ten books of architecture, but he only wrote four. He illustrated them with drawings of his own buildings, including dimensions, which are significant for his designs.

The Villas of Palladio
There are around twenty-four villas by Palladio, all having three storeys, a principal floor above a basement and a temple front. The third floor was the attic. There are three types. The Villa Rotonda is a type on its own. It has two, rather than just one, axis of symmetry, and was not built for the working of the land but for pleasure. It is unique in these instances and is one of Palladio's most famous buildings. The other villas were either built in small towns (around three) and have two piano nobli or in the countryside in the centre of farmland (making up around twenty).

In sixteenth century Veneto, the wealth of Venice began to decline because the trade routes were also in decline. This was because new routes had been forged elsewhere through the Mediterranean and these became more populated, and also the discovery of new resources meant fewer people had to rely on imported trade goods. So the Venetian merchants had to diversify, and they did this by investing in land. They wanted houses that would be wealthy and powerful to separate them from the people of the land, but they did not want fortresses. Palladio stepped in to invent a new kind of building that would meet the demands. He came up with the villa. The villas were houses with farm buildings attached to them. They consisted of family accommodation, kitchen and household rooms in the basement, and storage of produce in the attic where it was most safe from theft and vermin. The staircases were discreetly hid away from the family accommodation so that servants could travel from attic to basement without disturbing the family.

The buildings, as well as serving practical purposes, had to be aesthetically pleasing. Italian Renaissance theory stated that the cosmos was ordered. The Italians looked to classical antiquity because they believed the ancients had discovered the order of the universe. This affected Palladio's architecture in three ways: in proportion and system; bi-axial symmetry in plan and elevation; and a hierarchical organisation of rooms.

The Villa Badoer in Fratta Polesine, 1554-63, has the family section in the centre. It is the most decorative and grand part of the house, for it had to imitate nature. It found in nature the human body, where the heart and brain, the most important parts, are in the centre, there is only one of them and they are bi-axially symmetrical.

"Since architecture, like all the other arts, imitates nature, nothing (in it) can satisfy that is foreign from what is found in nature."
[Quattro Libri, I, XX]

The hierarchical organisation of the house if rigid. The Ionic Order is used for the entrance loggia and the Roman Doric, which is a lower order, for the 'rustic' part of the building. Proportional systems were used to plan the shapes of rooms. Simple whole number ratios had to be used, that is, either 1:1, 1:2, 2:3, 3:4, 3:5 or 1:square root of 2. The heights of rooms conformed to the mean proportionals, which are derived from means of slightly different numerical values: the arithmetic mean, geometric mean or the harmonic mean. And the dimensions (size of rooms) followed the system of harmonic numbers. The Italians found that the ratio of 1:1 was the most harmonious musically, and that the more complex the ratio the more disconsonant the sound. Palladio used simple ratios to plan the shape of rooms. The height of each room is related to the distance of frets on a string instrument, the principal which guided the ancient Greeks to develop the mean ratios. The dimensions of each room in Palladio's villa must be related to the other rooms in a meaningful way. The largest room was placed on the axis of symmetry.

The Villa Foscari is one of Palladio's so-called 'microcosms'. All the rooms have ratios of harmonic numbers. The dimensions and symmetry are carefully planned, based on the order of the cosmos. This was useful for time keeping, especially for workers of the land. So the building was designed around its function. But it also had to be aesthetically pleasing, according to the theories of harmony and proportion. Like all of Palladio's microcosms, it serves a dual purpose.

Bibliography
Ackerman, J., Palladio, London, 1966
Tavernor, R., Palladio and Palladianism, London, 1991
Wittkower, R., Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism, London, 1962