The Architect of Reason

By * Robert Hughes

Palladio: the very name is suggestive, evoking pedimented villas on the bank of the foggy Brenta, the symmetrical fac,ade of Venice's Church of the Redentore, and white porticos glimpsed through Deep South veils of Spanish moss. Palladio died almost 400 years ago, but he was the most imitated architect in history; even today his name remains synonymous with flawless precision and proportion. He was, and still is, the Mozart of his profession. Though 1973 marks no special anniversary in his life, one of Italy's most interesting tourist attractions this summer is a huge show of Andrea Palladio's drawings, models and projects, held in Vicenza, the city near Venice where he lived. Close by, he erected his villas: the Villa Rotonda with its four porches, the stately Barbaro at Maser, and a dozen more that are still standing.

Palladio built nothing outside northern Italy, and several of his greatest houses stand in tracts of the Venetian countryside that are out of the way today and must have been almost inaccessible to travelers in the 17th and 18th centuries. Yet his principles were studied as avidly in Stockholm and Leningrad as they were by Thomas Jefferson in Virginia, or by the elite of English Palladian architects like Inigo Jones, William Kent and Lord Burlington. By 1850, two continents were dotted with Palladian structures. Even Jefferson's design for the President's Mansion was a copy of the Villa Rotonda near Vicenza (1550); it was not built, but today's White House still remains recognizably Palladian in spirit.

This exemplar of high style began, unpromisingly enough, as an illiterate mason's apprentice from Padua, where he was born in 1508; he was named Andrea di Pietro della Gondola. At 34, he was still listed on the guild rolls as a "stonecutter." But by then the decisive moment in his career had come; in the late 1530s, while he was working on the construction of Villa Cricoli near Vicenza, its owner took him under his wing. Giangiorgio Trissino, a wealthy humanist with a special interest in architecture, renamed his protege Palladio, after an Angel of Architecture who appeared in one of Trissino's own cumbrous poems. He took the young man on several journeys to Rome. There, awed by the half-buried ruins, Palladio began the long work of measurement, analysis and drawing that would turn him into the leading architectural theorist of his age. The result was Palladio's Four Books of Architecture, which were published in 1570 and spread his influence throughout the West. By then he was already established as an original figure: his buildings, less strained and emotional than Michelangelo's or Vignola's, more atmospheric than Bramante's, met the mood of a culture that tended increasingly to think of antiquity as a golden age.

It was from Rome that Palladio got his most typical device: the temple-like portico in front of his buildings supporting a triangular pediment. He had seen it on temples like the Pantheon; in an odd but characteristic misapprehension, Palladio guessed that this stately entrance had come from the lost dwellings of antiquity. "I thought it most convenient," he explained, "to begin with the houses of private persons, as thinking it reasonable to believe that these in time gave rise to public edifices." So if the temple was a magnified house, a house could look like a temple. No solution could have been more pleasing to Palladio's Italian clients, who enjoyed their pomp; none could have responded better to Palladio's formal bent. The network of ratios between height and width, void and solid, expressed in the fac,ades of Villa Cornaro and Villa Malcontenta, subtly prepares the visitor for the less consciously felt proportions of the rooms within. For there was nothing improvised in Palladio. His plans--always axial, with lesser rooms grouped symmetrically around a high hall--obey stringent rules of harmony, not only in the three dimensions of each room, but in the relation of chambers one to another.

Light in Parenthesis. Formal and rational as a Mondrian, Palladio's planning is mathematics made concrete, a triumph of that certezza that was the goal of high Renaissance planning. When arguing that the ideal church plan should be circular--"the most proper figure to show the unity, infinite essence, uniformity and justice of God"--Palladio echoed a longstanding Renaissance fascination with absolute geometric shapes as metaphor. His purism was extreme. It is strange, for instance, to find an architect in 16th century Venice, a contemporary of Veronese (who frescoed the Barbaro villa), objecting to murals in churches--"Among all colors none is more suitable to temples than white; by reason that the purity of this color. . . is highly grateful to God." Of course, the preference was not God's but Palladio's. Why did he pre fer white? Because the protagonist in his Venetian churches, San Giorgio Maggiore and the Redentore, no less than in his villas, is light--the rich, fugitive, unstable light of the lagoon and the inland plain. Reflected from the creamy Istrian stone, absorbed by brick work and stucco, or washing solemnly across the pure vaults and domes, light gave substance a dreamlike sensuousness. No architect ever understood the ingredients of his craft better; Palladio's buildings, strict as they are, remain both exquisite and ideal, as though held in a parenthesis somewhere outside mundane history.

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