Andrea Palladio at the Royal Academy
The rest, so to speak, is architectural history. Palladio never looked back. He studied, drew and painstakingly measured an extraordinary number of the buildings of ancient Rome. He analysed its proud triumphal arches and stern basilicas. He walked among the ruins of the Forum. He was fascinated by the Pantheon’s perfect measure and proportion, its combination of beauty and breathtaking monumentality. The better to grasp the values and principles that underpinned its daunting strenth and simplicity, he pored over the Roman author Vitruvius’s treatise on architecture.
He sometimes gives the impression of having left no stone unturned – literally – in his quest to understand the language of antiquity.Once he had mastered that language, Palladio put it to a bewildering variety of uses. He rethought civic architecture in Vicenza, Venice and the Veneto, replacing the old polychrome splendours of the Veneto-Byzantine style with the stark white simplicity of his own interpretations of the classical past.
Date: 01-02-2009
Owning Institution: The Royal Academy
Publication:
Sunday Telegraph Reviews 2004-2011
Subject:
16th Century
The Royal Academy’s new show, “Andrea Palladio: His Life and Legacy”, has arrived just too late to mark the five hundredth anniversary of the great architect’s birth, in 1508. But as every exhibition organiser secretly knows, centenaries (even quincentennaries), have never been much more than pretexts anyway. What matters is the quality of the end result, and the good news is that this is a meticulously organised, thoroughly engaging survey of Palladio’s career. The show follows the architect’s work from his earliest palazzi in Vicenza to his magnificent, enchanting villas in the Veneto – and then moves on to the final climax of his work on the great churches of Venice, crowned by the Redentore.
Palladio’s life story was remarkable, a rags-to-riches tale of the sort that was really only possible – such was the highly stratified nature of sixteenth-century Italian society – in fields such as arts and letters, architecture and engineering. He was born in Padua to a humble stonemason who did much of his trade on the local canals, to judge by his nickname of “Pietro la Gondola” (or “Peter the Boat”). Palladio was himself apprenticed to another stonemason when he was just 13 years old, but he broke his contract early on and went to work for a rival concern. He was nearly thirty years old when his breakthrough finally came. The workshop employing him was engaged by a humanist intellectual and aristocrat, Giangiorgio Trissino, to extend his villa just outside Vicenza. Trissino saw potential in Palladio. He took him under his wing, began to educate him in the rudiments of classical architecture, and encouraged him to visit Rome itself. He even gave him his professional name. Being a poet as well as a scholar, Trissino called his protege “Palladio” after an angel in one of his own lyric verses – an angel who rescues Italy from its own feudal past. It was a prophetic act.
The rest, so to speak, is architectural history. Palladio never looked back. He studied, drew and painstakingly measured an extraordinary number of the buildings of ancient Rome. He analysed its proud triumphal arches and stern basilicas. He walked among the ruins of the Forum. He was fascinated by the Pantheon’s perfect measure and proportion, its combination of beauty and breathtaking monumentality. The better to grasp the values and principles that underpinned its daunting strenth and simplicity, he pored over the Roman author Vitruvius’s treatise on architecture.
He sometimes gives the impression of having left no stone unturned – literally – in his quest to understand the language of antiquity.Once he had mastered that language, Palladio put it to a bewildering variety of uses. He rethought civic architecture in Vicenza, Venice and the Veneto, replacing the old polychrome splendours of the Veneto-Byzantine style with the stark white simplicity of his own interpretations of the classical past.
He also benefited immensely (if somewhat paradoxically) from the great crisis that had gripped the Venetian Republic and its empire following the fall of Constantinople in the mid-fifteenth century. The loss of their trade routes and the increasing threat to their maritime power posed by the rise of Turkish power and the increase of Spanish influence forced the Venetians to look inwards, to the terra firma. Money that was once invested in boats and cargoes was now spent on agriculture. To house a new breed of Venetian, a landowner rather than trader, Palladio designed a new form of building, the country villa-farm, modelled once more on what he thought were the best ancient stereotypes.These are his most beguiling, enduring creations. They are buildings that seem to embody not only an architectural but a moral and social ideal. In designing them, Palladio was designing nothing less than a model of civilisation itself, as he envisaged it – in which industry makes leisure possible, and leisure leads to enlightened contemplation. It is sometimes forgotten that the Palladian villa was designed during one of the bloodiest periods of human civilisation, a time when Europe was being torn apart by military conflict and religious schism. Like many of the great idealists, Palladio was a man holding a torch in a dark world.
The exhibition tells its story through modern, large-scale models of some of Palladio’s most celebrated buildings, through computer animations, engravings and paintings, but above all through the architect’s own exquisite drawings – unparalleled collections of which have been held in this country since the seventeenth century. His influence, so great as to be effectively immeasurable, is also explored. The ghost of Palladio lurks on Capitol Hill in Washington as well as under the porches of the great plantation houses of the Deep South; his spirit can even be felt, albeit in debased form, in the more pretentious modern housing estates, with their pillared and pedimented approximations to Palladian magnificence. But nowhere has he shaped the built environment more than in Great Britain. His drawings, collected first by Inigo Jones and then, far more exhaustively, by the Earl of Burlington, can be described without exaggeration as the essential blueprint for nearly all of the greatest British architecture from the seventeenth century to the Georgian Age. The Banqueting Hall in London, Nash’s Regent’s Park, Edinburgh city centre and Bath ditto, pretty well all of the nation’s grandest country houses – all are “Palladian”, in one sense or another, and only part of a potentially much longer list.
The one experience no exhibition can deliver is that of Palladio’s buildings themselves. A tour to the Veneto is the best remedy, but failing that, a wonderfully eloquent and useful complement to the Royal Academy’s show was furnished by Tim Kirby’s recent documentary for BBC 4, “The Perfect House”. This was old-fashioned arts television at its very best. In fact it made a strong case for television as the best medium of all – better, certainly, than the book – both for the exposition of architecture and for the vicarious experience of the actual, living body of an architect’s work. Not only were Palladio’s buildings beautifully shot, their true significance was teased out with subtlety and passion by a brilliantly assembled cast of interviewees. The result was an exemplary layman’s introduction to the subject. The Royal Academy should borrow a copy and put it on a loop. At the very least, the BBC should make sure that it is available on iPlayer.
The exhibition tells its story through modern, large-scale models of some of Palladio’s most celebrated buildings, through computer animations, engravings and paintings, but above all through the architect’s own exquisite drawings – unparalleled collections of which have been held in this country since the seventeenth century. His influence, so great as to be effectively immeasurable, is also explored. The ghost of Palladio lurks on Capitol Hill in Washington as well as under the porches of the great plantation houses of the Deep South; his spirit can even be felt, albeit in debased form, in the more pretentious modern housing estates, with their pillared and pedimented approximations to Palladian magnificence. But nowhere has he shaped the built environment more than in Great Britain. His drawings, collected first by Inigo Jones and then, far more exhaustively, by the Earl of Burlington, can be described without exaggeration as the essential blueprint for nearly all of the greatest British architecture from the seventeenth century to the Georgian Age. The Banqueting Hall in London, Nash’s Regent’s Park, Edinburgh city centre and Bath ditto, pretty well all of the nation’s grandest country houses – all are “Palladian”, in one sense or another, and only part of a potentially much longer list.
The one experience no exhibition can deliver is that of Palladio’s buildings themselves. A tour to the Veneto is the best remedy, but failing that, a wonderfully eloquent and useful complement to the Royal Academy’s show was furnished by Tim Kirby’s recent documentary for BBC 4, “The Perfect House”. This was old-fashioned arts television at its very best. In fact it made a strong case for television as the best medium of all – better, certainly, than the book – both for the exposition of architecture and for the vicarious experience of the actual, living body of an architect’s work. Not only were Palladio’s buildings beautifully shot, their true significance was teased out with subtlety and passion by a brilliantly assembled cast of interviewees. The result was an exemplary layman’s introduction to the subject. The Royal Academy should borrow a copy and put it on a loop. At the very least, the BBC should make sure that it is available on iPlayer.
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