Palladio, Architecture’s Virgil

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The New York Sun

Given the nearly total absence of fanfare, you could be excused for not knowing that this was the quincentenary of Andrea Palladio’s birth. Generally it is a kind of condescension to treat the great cultural figures of the past as though, in some sense, they were, or needed to be, our contemporaries. And yet a respectable case could be made that, of all the architects who lived before the 20th century, few were as influential as Palladio (1508-80) or came closer, in the arc of their reputation, to being what we would now call a “starchitect.”

The major architects of the past usually influenced their contemporaries and their successors in tactical, rather than strategic ways. Great though he was, Michelangelo’s foremost legacy to posterity was a type of dome. But Palladio, like Wright, Le Corbusier, and Frank Gehry, created an entire style, an entire vocabulary of forms. Indeed, uniquely among the builders of his age, he won the supreme honor of having an entire movement, Palladianism, named for him. New York City itself would have turned out very differently without the influence of Andrea Palladio.

So it is fitting that one worthy exception to the discreditable silence about him this year is the Institute of Classical Architecture and Classical America, which has scheduled, throughout 2008, an abundance of lectures and exhibitions on Palladio, including talks tomorrow and July 16.

Before the emergence of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, in its 19th-century form, young men did not usually set out to become architects: They sidled into the profession, often unawares. Like the 17th-century architect Borromini, perhaps his only equal in influence among pre-modern architects, Palladio began as a stonemason and managed, through grit and force of character, to transform himself into a master builder.

In his early 30s, he sufficiently impressed the humanist poet and scholar Giangiorgio Trissino that the latter commissioned a villa from him, a humble, boxy affair that was nevertheless the start of Palladio’s career. (It was Trissino, by the way, who also gave Palladio, born Andrea di Pietro della Gondola, the name by which we know him today, a learned reference to Pallas Athena, the goddess of wisdom.)

Over the next four decades, Palladio turned out projects at a rate of nearly two a year, whether urban palaces such as the Palazzo Chiericati and the Loggia del Capitanio in Vicenza; ecclesiastical architecture such as San Giorgio Maggiore and Il Redentore in Venice; rustic villas in the Veneto, such as the Villa Maser and the Villa Foscari, and finally theaters such as the Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza.

If, as Sir Christopher Wren famously declared, the classical orders, Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian, were the Latin grammar of architecture, then Palladio was its Virgil. That is to say that he, more than any of his forebears, purged architecture of a certain improvised roughness and eccentricity that had characterized the buildings of the Quattrocento and that were still a palpable presence into the first half of the next century. In the process, he left the profession far better than he found it, possessed of a vocabulary of forms that felt universal and timeless, and that was remarkably free of regional eccentricities.

In part, it is true, his idiom was a composite of earlier practice, just as Virgil’s Latin retained echoes of his forebears. Palladio’s innovative conception of the urban palazzo, his repeated use of the giant order of columns, and his application of the triumphal arch to a temple façade, can all be traced to Bramante, Michelangelo, and Alberti, respectively.

But in Palladio, perhaps for the first time since Athens under Pericles, Europe found an architectural idiom whose universality prefigured, by four centuries, what the International style would achieve in the studios of Mies and Le Corbusier. Surely Palladio was not a severe classicist, in the manner of such Quattrocento Florentines as Brunelleschi in his Pazzi Chapel or his great church, the Santo Spirito: Palladio was born into the Mannerist age, and his contemporaries were men such as Jacopo Vignola and Michelangelo, in all his legendary “terribilita.”

But Palladio was also a Venetian, and the Mannerist movement that convulsed the rest of Italy was far more muted in its influence across the Veneto, where Palladio’s entire career played out. And so, even if, in true Mannerist fashion, he took from Michelangelo that odd use of the giant order of columns in his Palazzo del Capitaniato, even if he bizarrely superimposed one temple façade over another in the Redentore, even if the stage of his Teatro Olimpico was founded upon an impishly contrived optical illusion, still, the overriding result of his architecture was more a mitigation of Mannerism than a disturbance of the essential equilibria of classicism.

And so it is that one of the qualities of Palladio’s architecture that most impresses us even today is the imperturbable perfection of his details, from the keystoned arcade of the Barchessa di Villa Thiene, to the regimented balustrades of the Palazzo Chiericati and the bell tower of San Giorgio’s.

But what overrides the specific details and pervades Palladio’s best and most typical buildings is that exquisite instinct for balance and order that is seen most brilliantly in the Villa Rotunda. With the Taj Mahal, this must surely rank as one of the most serenely perfect structures ever built. It was this project, more than any other, that gave rise to the Palladian movement among the landed British gentry in the 18th century. And though the local architects of Britain achieved some charming results, at Lord Burlington’s Chiswick House and Henry Flitcroft’s Woburn Abbey, they never truly understood or attained to that exalted grand manner, that effortless universality and high seriousness, that were the essence of Palladio’s style.

There is one element of Palladio’s practice that was to have an incalculable effect on the future of his profession. At the Villa Maser, Palladio effected a revolution in bilateral symmetry by taking two pavilions, intended for winemaking and storage, and attaching them via wings to a raised central dwelling. What resulted was a new building type that would so thoroughly pervade the Western world and its colonies that it requires some effort to conceive how accidental its evolution really was.

Without that inspired innovation, we would not have the Capitol Building in Washington. In Manhattan, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York Public Library’s Humanities and Social Sciences Library on Fifth Avenue, and City Hall itself exhibit the same central structure flanked by wings and pavilions that would have been unthinkable without Palladio’s noble example from four centuries earlier.

Institute of Classical Architecture and Classical America lectures, “Palladio and Painting,” Wednesday, 6 p.m., and “Palladio’s Villas: The Development of an Ideal,” July 16, 6 p.m., New York School of Interior Design, 170 E. 70th St., $15, reservations 212-730-9646, ext. 106, or sd@classicist.org.


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