Palladian architecture

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Palladian architecture began with a stonemason's son born in Padua in 1508. Andrea Palladio looked at the ruins of ancient Rome and saw not rubble but a set of governing laws. Symmetry, proportion, the precise ratio of 3:4 or 4:5 between a room's height and width: these were not decorative preferences but mathematical obligations. Palladio wrote them down in a four-volume illustrated treatise published in 1570, I quattro libri dell'architettura, The Four Books of Architecture. That book would shape buildings on four continents across four centuries.

  Thomas Jefferson called it his bible. An Irish-born architect drew on its traditions when raising the White House between 1792 and 1800. A Prussian king was persuaded to adopt the style for his opera house. And in the English countryside, a nobleman known as the architect earl turned Palladianism into something approaching a national religion. The questions worth asking are how a single Venetian architect's ideas traveled so far, what happened to them when they arrived, and why the style keeps returning long after its champions declared it finished.

• 2. Palladio's System

  ›

  Palladio drew his deepest inspiration from the writings of Vitruvius, the Roman theorist whose work dates to around 80 BC, and from the 15th-century architect Leon Battista Alberti, who applied Roman principles using mathematical proportions rather than Renaissance ornament. The surviving buildings Palladio left behind are concentrated in Venice, the Veneto region, and Vicenza, and they include churches such as the Basilica del Redentore.

  His villas are where the system is most legible. Each one was designed to fit its particular landscape. Villa Almerico Capra Valmarana, known also as La Rotonda, sits on a hill; Palladio gave it four identical facades so that residents could look outward in every direction. Porticos were placed on all sides to protect occupants from the sun while keeping the countryside in view. When a loggia replaced the portico, it served a similar function: an inward room whose walls were open to the elements. At Villa Godi, the loggia is the focal point, with a second loggia terminating each end of the building.

  The floor plan followed the same logic as the façade. Three floors were standard: a rusticated ground level holding service rooms, above it the piano nobile reached by an external staircase through a portico, and above that a low mezzanine for secondary bedrooms. The proportions of every individual room were set by simple mathematical ratios. Palladio wrote in I quattro libri dell'architettura that beauty comes from the correspondence of the whole to its parts, and of the parts to one another, so that the structure appears as a single complete body in which every member agrees with every other.

  The villas also carried a practical purpose that shaped their visual character. They served as both farming estate centres and weekend retreats. Low flanking wings called barchessas swept outward from the main block to shelter horses, farm animals, and agricultural stores. Palladio designed them to complement the house visually without being part of it. That distinction between house and wings would become a fault line that his followers exploited, and it drove one of the central transformations in the later style.

• 3. The Venetian Window

  ›

  One motif from Palladio's early career traveled further than almost any other single element: the window type that goes by two names, the Venetian window and the Palladian window, though the distinction between them is precise. The simpler form, the Venetian window, has three parts: a central opening with a round arch, and two smaller rectangular openings to either side, topped by lintels and supported by columns. Its origins lie in ancient Roman triumphal arch design, and it first appeared outside Venice in the work of Donato Bramante before being described by Sebastiano Serlio in his seven-volume architectural survey published across the 16th century.

  Palladio's elaboration of this motif is the version that carries his name more strictly. It places a larger order between each window group and doubles the small columns supporting the side lintels, with the second column set behind rather than beside the first. Jacopo Sansovino introduced this version in the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice in 1537. Palladio then adopted it heavily in the Basilica Palladiana in Vicenza, where it appears on both storeys of the building.

  According to James Lees-Milne, the window's first appearance in Britain came not from Palladio directly but through the English court architect Inigo Jones, whose designs for Whitehall Palace served as the immediate source for the remodelled wings of Burlington House in London. Lees-Milne describes that Burlington window as the earliest example of the revived Venetian window in England. Richard Boyle, the 3rd Earl of Burlington, went on to use the motif in 1721 for an elevation of Tottenham Park in Savernake Forest designed for his brother-in-law Lord Bruce. William Kent deployed it in his designs for the Houses of Parliament and in the north front of Holkham Hall. The window became one of the most persistent features of the tradition, legible in buildings centuries and continents removed from the Veneto where it first took shape.

• 4. England's Architect Earl

  ›

  Inigo Jones first encountered Palladio's work directly when he traveled through Italy with the art collector Earl of Arundel in 1613-1614, annotating his personal copy of the treatise as he went. His Queen's House at Greenwich became the first English Palladian building, and the Banqueting House at Whitehall followed as part of an uncompleted royal palace for Charles I. But the political associations of Jones's work with the court of Charles I proved fatal to its short-term survival. After the English Civil War and the Stuart Restoration, the architectural scene was seized by the more flamboyant English Baroque, led by architects including Sir John Vanbrugh, Nicholas Hawksmoor, and Jones's own pupil John Webb.

  The Baroque was viewed with suspicion in England in a way it was not on the Continent, where critics described it as theatrical, exuberant, and Catholic. The reaction against it in the early 18th century was powered by four books published in quick succession. Colen Campbell's Vitruvius Britannicus appeared in 1715, followed by a translation of Palladio's I quattro libri dell'architettura also from 1715. Leon Battista Alberti's De re aedificatoria appeared in Giacomo Leoni's translation in 1726, and William Kent published The Designs of Inigo Jones in two volumes in 1727, with a further volume issued by the architect John Vardy in 1744.

  Campbell's Vitruvius Britannicus placed his own designs for the enormous Wanstead House near the front of the first volume, immediately following the engravings of Jones and Webb, presenting it explicitly as an example of what new architecture should look like. On the strength of that positioning, Campbell was chosen to design Stourhead for Henry Hoare I. Richard Boyle, the 3rd Earl of Burlington, became the movement's most prominent champion. Dan Cruikshank describes him as the man responsible for elevating Palladianism to the rank of a quasi-religion. In 1729, Burlington and Kent designed Chiswick House as a purified reinterpretation of Palladio's Villa Capra, stripped of its 16th-century ornament. That severity of decoration became a defining characteristic of the English version of the style.

  Holkham Hall in Norfolk followed in 1734. James Stevens Curl considers it the most splendid Palladian house in England. Kent's treatment of the flanking wings at Holkham drove a significant departure from Palladio's original intentions: he attached the wings firmly to the main block, removed the farm animals, and elevated their status until they were nearly as important as the house itself. Wings at later houses were given porticos and pediments of their own, sometimes resembling small country houses, as at the much later Kedleston Hall. The style had traveled a long distance from the farming estate villas of the Veneto. Sir John Summerson described Kent's Horse Guards on Whitehall as the epitome of Palladianism as the official style of Great Britain, a building at the centre of the nation's capital that embodied the triumph of the Whig Oligarchy that ruled Britain unchallenged for roughly fifty years after the death of Queen Anne.

• 5. Ireland and the White House

  ›

  Irish Palladian architecture developed its own character during the same period. Even modest mansions were built in the neo-Palladian manner, and the style acquired a political dimension that set Ireland apart: both the original and the present Irish parliament buildings in Dublin occupy Palladian structures.

  Sir Edward Lovett Pearce, who lived from 1699 to 1733, became the leading Irish advocate. He had studied as a pupil of his cousin Sir John Vanbrugh before rejecting the Baroque and spending three years in France and Italy. His most significant Palladian work is the former Irish Houses of Parliament in Dublin, which Christine Casey, writing in the 2005 Pevsner volume Dublin, describes as arguably the most accomplished public set-piece of the Palladian style in Britain. Pearce also oversaw the construction of Castletown House near Dublin, designed by the Italian architect Alessandro Galilei, born in 1691 and died in 1737. Castletown is notable as perhaps the only Palladian house in Ireland built with Palladio's mathematical ratios applied in full, and it is among the Irish mansions that influenced the design of the White House in Washington.

  James Hoban, born in 1762 in Callan, County Kilkenny, built the White House between 1792 and 1800. His father was a tenant farmer on the estate of Desart Court, a Palladian house designed by Pearce himself. Hoban studied architecture in Dublin, where Leinster House, built around 1747, was among the finest Palladian buildings of the era. The architectural historian Gervase Jackson-Stops describes Castle Coole as a culmination of Palladian traditions while remaining strictly neoclassical in its ornament and austerity, and that building's influence on the White House, particularly on the South façade, which closely resembles James Wyatt's 1790 design for Castle Coole, is considered the more direct connection.

  Irish country houses also developed their own decorative signature: robust Rococo plasterwork far more elaborate than anything typical in England, frequently executed by the Lafranchini brothers. That exuberance contrasted with the Whig austerity of their English counterparts. During and after the Irish War of Independence, many of these houses were abandoned or destroyed, including Palladian examples such as Woodstock House.

• 6. Palladianism in America

  ›

  The Irish philosopher George Berkeley may be the first recorded American Palladian. In the late 1720s he bought a large farmhouse in Middletown, Rhode Island, and added a Palladian doorcase taken from Kent's Designs of Inigo Jones, which he may have carried with him from London. Palladio's work was also part of the library of a thousand volumes assembled for Yale College, and Peter Harrison borrowed directly from I quattro libri dell'architettura for his 1749 designs for the Redwood Library in Newport, Rhode Island.

  Two colonial-period houses can be traced definitively to specific pages in that book. The Hammond-Harwood House in Annapolis, Maryland, designed by William Buckland in 1773-1774 for the wealthy farmer Matthias Hammond of Anne Arundel County, takes its design from the Villa Pisani. Thomas Jefferson's first Monticello, begun in 1770, derives from the Villa Cornaro at Piombino Dese. Both buildings draw on Book II, Chapter XIV of I quattro libri dell'architettura. Jefferson later made substantial alterations to Monticello, producing what is known as the second Monticello, completed between 1802 and 1809, which means the Hammond-Harwood House stands as the only remaining house in North America modelled directly on a Palladian design.

  Jefferson's attachment to Palladio ran deeper than any single building. He used illustrations from I quattro libri dell'architettura as the basis for the James Barbour Barboursville estate, the Virginia State Capitol, and the University of Virginia campus. He saw ancient Roman architecture as politically meaningful for the new American Republic, and he designed civic buildings such as The Rotunda in a Palladian mode, drawing a conscious parallel between the republic he was helping to build and the one whose buildings Palladio had studied.

  In Virginia and the Carolinas, plantation houses including Stratford Hall, Westover Plantation, and Drayton Hall adopted the style. Westover's north and south entrances were cut from imported English Portland stone and patterned after a plate in William Salmon's Palladio Londinensis, published in 1734. The portico, which had become a mere symbol in northern Europe, often closed or suggested only by pilasters, regained its full functional purpose in America: deep shade from a hot sun, just as Palladio had originally designed it for the Veneto. Mount Airy in Richmond County, Virginia, built between 1758 and 1762, is among the further examples of this American recovery of the portico's original purpose.

• 7. Legacy and Continuation

  ›

  By the 1770s, British architects such as Robert Adam and William Chambers were drawing on such a wide variety of classical sources, including ancient Greek material, that their work was classified as neoclassical rather than Palladian. The Palladian revival in Europe had effectively closed by the end of the 18th century. In the 19th century, champions of the Gothic Revival such as Augustus Pugin argued that Palladianism was too pagan for Christian worship, tracing the style's roots back to ancient temples.

  The term Palladian itself became loosely applied to almost any building with classical pretensions, a misuse that diluted its meaning in modern discourse. A more rigorous reconsideration arrived in 1947, when the architectural theorist Colin Rowe published his essay The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa. Rowe drew direct links between the compositional rules governing Palladio's villas and Le Corbusier's villas at Poissy and Garches, connecting a 16th-century Venetian system to the central buildings of 20th-century modernism. Suzanne Walters's article The Two Faces of Modernism extended that argument, suggesting a continuing influence of Palladio's ideas on 20th-century architects more broadly.

  In England, Raymond Erith, who lived from 1904 to 1973, worked directly from Palladian inspirations and was followed in this by his pupil and later partner Quinlan Terry. The architectural historian John Martin Robinson drew on their example to suggest that I quattro libri dell'architettura continues as the fountainhead of at least one strand in the English country house tradition. Sir Aston Webb demonstrated the style's practical durability when he refaced Buckingham Palace in 1913, reviving in one of England's most public buildings an approach that had fallen out of favour during the Victorian era. The pediments, symmetry, and proportions Palladio derived from ancient Rome are still present in the design of modern buildings, and the stonemason's son from Padua is still regularly cited among the world's most influential architects.