Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Wonderful Palladio
When it comes to coffee-table architecture, no one beats Andrea Palladio. As you flip
past photos of his villas, your own problematic living space begins to dissolve, and
you find yourself strolling through more harmonious country. Nature is governed by
pleasing symmetries. Roman rigour is soothed by rustic charms. He managed to syn-
thesise the classical past without doggedly copying it, creating buildings that were at
once inviting, useful and incomparably elegant. From London to St Petersburg, his
work - cleverly disseminated by his own 'Quattro Libri', a how-to guide for other ar-
chitects - shaped the way Europe thought about architecture.
And yet when Palladio turned 30 in 1538, he was little more than a glorified stonecut-
ter in Vicenza. His big break came when nobleman and amateur architect Giangiorgio
Trissino recognised his potential and noticed his inclination towards mathematics. He
introduced Palladio to the work of Roman architectural theorist Vitruvius, and sent
him to Rome (1545-47) to sketch both crumbling antiquities and new works like
Michelangelo's dome for St Peter's.
Something mysterious happened on those trips, because when Palladio returned to
Vicenza he was forging a new way of thinking about architecture - one that focused
on the relationship between ratios to create spatial harmony. So a room in which the
shorter wall was one-half (1:2), two-thirds (2:3) or three-quarters (3:4) the length of
the longer would inevitably
feel
more satisfying because it was rationally harmonious.
Like Pallas Athena, the goddess of wisdom, from whom he took his name, Palladio's
ideas seemed to spring fully formed from his head.
This search for perfection was never at odds with practicality. In his villas, he
squeezed stables beneath elegant drawing rooms. Lacking funds to line San Giorgio
Maggiore with marble, he came up with a superior solution: humble stucco walls that
fill the church with an ethereal softness. Constraint provided the path to innovation.
A Palladian villa never masters its landscape like, say, Versailles. Palladio makes
his mark tactfully, as if he has merely gathered the natural forces of the land and trans-
lated them into an ideal, and distinctly human, response. His Rotonda, for example,
crowns a rise in the terrain, and looks out on it from four identical facades. Nothing
like it had been built before. Yet when you see it
in situ
, it seems to be the inevitable
outcome of the site itself.
