Practice 1 Section 1 Andrea Palladio: Italian architect A new exhibition celebrates Palladio’s architecture 500years on A. Vicenza is a pleasant, prosperous city in the Veneto, 60km west of Venice. Its grand families settled and farmed the area from the 16th century. But its principal claim to fame is Andrea Palladio, who is such an influential architect that a neoclassical style is known as Palladian. The city is a permanent exhibition of some of his finest buildings, and as he was born in Padua, to be precise—500 years ago, the International Centre for the Study of Palladio’s Architecture has an excellent excuse for mounting la grande mostra, the big show. B. The exhibition has the special advantage of being held in one of Palladio’s buildings, Palazzo Barbaran da Porto. Its bold facade is a mixture of rustication and decoration set between two rows of elegant columns. On the second floor the pediments are alternately curved or pointed, a Palladian trademark. The harmonious proportions of the atrium at the entrancelead through to a dramatic interior of fine fireplaces and painted ceilings.Palladio’s design is simple, clear and not over-crowded. The show has beenorganised on the same principles, according to Howard Burns, the architectural historian who co-curated it. C. Palladio’s father was a miller who settled in Vicenza, where the young Andrea was apprenticed to a skilled stonemason. How did a humble miller’s son become a world renowned architect? The answer in the exhibition is that, as a young man, Palladio excelled at carving decorativestonework on columns, doorways and fireplaces. He was plainly intelligent,and lucky enough to come across a rich patron, Gian Giorgio Trissino, alandowner and scholar, who organised his education, taking him to Rome in the 1540s, where he studied the masterpieces of classical Roman andGreek architecture and the work of other influential architects of the time, such as Donato Bramante and Raphael. D. Burns argues that social mobility was also important. Entrepreneurs, prosperous from agriculture in the Veneto, commissioned thepromising local architect to design their country villas and their urban mansions. In Venice the aristocracy was anxious to co-opt talented artists, and Palladio was given the chance to design the buildings that have made him famous— the churches of San Giorgio Maggiore and the Redentore, both easy to admire because they can be seen from the city’s historical centre across a stretch of water. E. He tried his hand at bridges—his unbuilt version of the Rialto Bridge wasdecorated with the large pediment and columns of a temple —and, after a fire at the Ducal Palace, he offered an alternative design which bears anuncanny resemblance to the Banqueting House in Whitehall in London. Since it was designed by Inigo Jones, Palladio’s first foreign disciple, this is not as surprising as it sounds. F. Jones, who visited Italy in 1614, bought a trunk full of the master’s architectural drawings; they passed through the hands of the Dukes ofBurlington and Devonshire before settling at the Royal Institute ofBritish Architects in 1894. Many are
