VITRUVIUS AND PALLADIO: ARCHITECTURE ALL’ ANTIC A

The discovery in the early fifteenth century by Poggio Bracciolini of a largely accurate manuscript copy of Vitruvius’ treatise De architectura, in the monastic library of St. Gal-len in Switzerland, was to send reverberations down the centuries. Its text provided those who wished to understand how ancient buildings were conceived and built with factual information—about the materials used, the construction techniques employed, the design intentions sought—that the Roman ruins alone could only partially divulge. While it was a find of considerable importance for the future course of architecture, it could be no more than a starting point for designers at that time as it was difficult to comprehend fully, being unillustrated and adopting some obscure technical terms in Latin and in a mixture of Greek and Latin. However, it provided a means by which some dedicated enthusiasts could interpret the remnants of ancient buildings, measuring them and then restoring their forms in drawings, so that they too could design buildings all’antica—in the ancient manner. Andrea Palladio (1508—1580) is notable amongst them, as one of the most prolific architects to design and build in this way and because he published his reconstructions of ancient Roman buildings, and his own designs all’antica, in I quattro libri dell’architettura (The Four Books on Architecture). For this treatise inspired a major architectural movement outside of Italy, named Palladianism after him, which developed from his rigorous interpretation of classical architecture filtered through the writings of Vitruvius. Palladianism grew in its appeal for several centuries after Palladio’s death and had a considerable impact on the architecture of the western world.
Vitruvius had written De architectura in the Augustan age of Roman antiquity, probably toward the end of the first century before Christ. It is set out in ten books which relate to the formulation and practice of architecture and the paraphernalia associated with it: Book I is concerned with defining what an architect and architecture are, as well as with city planning; Book II, with the origins of building and with materials and construction methods; Books III and IV, with proportion and with temple and column types; Book V, with proportions and public buildings; Books VI and VII, with domestic buildings and their details; Books VIII, IX, and X more broadly with surveying and engineering.
Vitruvius was himself looking back to the architectural and engineering achievements of the Greeks and early Romans, and he recorded for his emperor (to whom the treatise was dedicated) the harmony which they had sought between nature and architecture and which he hoped to revive. He described the beginnings of architecture, as it emerged from simple timber shelters in forest settlements and developed, with the increasing sophistication of civilization, into the magnificent stone structures of Greece. Vitruvius admired, in particular, the design of Hellenistic temples, which represented for him the perfect union of geometry, measure, and proportion—qualities and characteristics which mirrored, or so he reasoned, the beauty found in nature and in the human body. Similarly, the principal ornaments which adorned Roman buildings were Greek in origin and referred to human attributes: Vitruvius classifies the columns and their details as accordingly Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian, and their character as masculine, matronly, and maidenly. These were to be arranged in rows, with set intervals between them; they were to be stacked vertically, one upon the other, in a hierarchy with the plainest at the bottom (Tuscan and Doric), the most elegant at the top (Corinthian), and the Ionic in between. He describes too how these columns are to be arranged for different types of build-
ings from atria to xysti, the different configurations of these buildings in plan, and the most suitable room layouts, their appropriate proportions and appearance.
Vitruvius’ concern to provide architecture with a discernible structure and order proved vastly influential. Since the mid-fifteenth century, architectural writers inspired by his example have written commentaries to accompany their own translations of his ten books, in their attempts to make his writings more accessible; or they have written new treatises on architecture themselves, incorporating and extending his descriptions, often with examples of their own designs (as Vitruvius had also done). Palladio’s Quattro libri falls into the latter category, and although it was not the first of its kind, and is incomplete (it may even have been intended to comprise ten books like Vitruvius’, not just four), it is undoubtedly one of the most compelling to read or peruse. For, unlike the publications by many of his predecessors and successors, 'I it achieves an effective balance between words and images: his writing is direct and to the point, his bold large-format woodcuts equally so. Compiled in the last decades of his life, it combines firsthand observation with years of experience in every aspect of building. Moreover, it is informed by the determination and self-confidence that built him a successful career and enabled him to realize so many of his architectural ambitions.
VIRTUE, AND THE BIRTH OF PALLADIO
His beginnings lacked any personal advantage. He was born in 1508 in the distinguished university town of Padua in northern Italy. His father, Pietro della Gondola, was a mason who prepared and installed millstones; his mother was known as “lame” Marta. Tradition has it that he was born on 30 November, the feast day of St. Andrew, and that his name Andrea was taken from that day. His full name was therefore Andrea della Gondola, or di Pietro, after his father. The name under which he achieved fame, Andrea Palladio, was conferred on him some thirty years later under the influence of his mentor, the noted statesman Count Gian Giorgio Trissino.
Andrea probably came upon Trissino in Vicenza, which, like Padua, was a city ruled by the Venetians. He had arrived there in his mid-teens to continue his training as a stonemason, having already served eighteen months of the specified six-year apprenticeship in Padua. There he joined the Pedemuro workshop, which was involved in the construction of fine buildings locally. Trissino was having a new villa built for himself at Cricoli, on the outskirts of Vicenza, and it is thought possible that it was during the years of its construction, between 1537 and 1538, that he encountered Andrea.
Trissino had traveled widely; he had spent some years in Rome, where he was an intimate of Pope Clement VII, and was familiar with the work of Raphael and other leading painters •i and architects of the day. The entrance front of his Villa Trissino at Cricoli is clearly based on an elevation designed by Raphael for a villa on the slopes of Monte Mario, to the north of Rome, for Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici—known as the Villa Madama after a later inhabitant. It displays similar ornaments all’antica—pilasters, niches, and pedimented windows—though sandwiched between two square towers. It was at Cricoli that Trissino founded his Academy, as a place to educate young Vicentine nobles along the lines of the famous humanist academies in Florence and Rome that promoted classical literature and wisdom. According to Palladio’s biographer, Paolo Gualdo, Andrea also benefited from Trissino’s Academy, since, “finding Palladio to be a young man of very spirited character and with a great aptitude for science and mathematics, Trissino encouraged his natural abilities by training him in the precepts of Vitruvius.”
The Academy imparted three things: Study, the Arts, and Virtue, as inscriptions over three of the villa’s doorways proclaim. It was the third of these pursuits—in Latin virtus, rendered as virtu in sixteenth-century Italian—that was of particular importance to the aspiring architect, as Palladio was later to assert so strongly: the frontispiece to each of his four books on architecture depicts Regina Virtus—the Queen of Virtue—as mother of the arts, seated aloft, presiding over the descriptions of the architecture within. In antiquity, Virtue meant “excellence” and “good action,” which was to be directed for the benefit and enhancement of civic life by the well-rounded individual. Education provided the key, hence Virtue was preceded by Study and knowledge of the Arts. Presumably, Andrea was renamed Palladio by Trissino once he had absorbed these lessons and was considered ready to serve society as a man of virtue.
The name Palladio suggests what was in store for Andrea. It may have been derived from Pallas Athena, or the talisman in her image, known as the Palladium: the Romans believed Aeneas had brought it to Italy, and, as a symbol of wisdom and vision, it later safeguarded Rome. Alternatively, he may have been named after Palladius, the fourth-century writer on agrarian economy; certainly it was the rich farmland of the Veneto, especially that around Vicenza, which provided Andrea’s numerous patrons with their wealth and him with the opportunities to design farm estates and the villas at their heart. More directly, Trissino wrote an epic poem in which he described an archangel called Palladio, who was an expert on architecture and instrumental in expelling the Goths from Italy. Entitled L’ltalia liberata dai Gotthi (Italy Freed from the Goths), the poem was published in 1547, though Trissino is known to have started writing it before he met Andrea. Thus, it has been inferred that Andrea chose to adopt this name once his course to revive the spirit and deeds of Roman antiquity was set: through his example, and like Trissino’s fictional Palladio, he would guide his patrons and fellow architects in order to vanquish the “barbarians” who had brought Roman civilization to its knees (Palladio himself talks this way in the Quattro libri).
It was the despoiling of Rome in their own times, and the subsequent migration of artists northward, that provided the impetus for architectural change in the Veneto. Florence had been the first to enjoy the Renaissance of classical values during the fifteenth century. The restoration of Rome followed, particularly under the leadership of popes Nicholas V (in the mid-fifteenth century) and Julius II (in the early part of the sixteenth). However, the catastrophic yack of Rome in 1527 by the troops of Emperor Charles V had impoverished the city and caused the artistic elite assembled there to scatter northward. Palladio was fortunate to encounter some of the leading architects amongst these, and therefore had an opportunity to learn about their approach to Vitruvian architecture all’antica. With the support of Trissino he was also able to study the monuments of Rome himself, and through his influential contacts among the noble families of Vicenza to develop and promote the classical language of architecture in north Italy.
to Padua with Trissino between 1538 and 1540, where he encountered Alvise Cornaro (c. 1484—1566), administrator to the bishopric of Padua and a pivotal figure in the artistic and literary community of that city. Cornaro was also knowledgeable about architecture and ancient art, which he had studied when in Rome, around 1522, with the Veronese painter-architect Giovanni Maria Falconetto, with whom he subsequently returned to Padua. There
EDUCATION THROUGH EXPERIENCE
ndrea’s pupilage under Trissino led to an increasingly peripatetic life. He moved back
they jointly designed a five-bay loggia in the grounds of Cornaro’s Paduan house, which was to act as a permanent setting for the theatrical events he organized. Cornaro later built another small building next to it, which he called the Odeo. This has a central-vaulted, octagonal room for chamber music. Its form influenced the layout of Palladio’s subsequent villa designs, which ? often have a large square or round space centrally placed. The theatrical loggia, placed at right angles to the Odeo, provided Palladio with an early introduction to the kind of setting used for classical theater as it had been revived in Rome.
Midway through his Paduan sojourn, Palladio returned briefly to Vicenza to attend a modern theatrical performance at the Palazzo Porto on 16 February 1539. This was being staged by Sebastiano Serlio (1475-1554), a Bolognese painter turned architect who had worked in the Vatican workshop under Bramante, Raphael, and Baldassare Peruzzi. Trissino had known Serlio in Rome and they had moved north at the same time, after the sack of Rome, Serlio settling for a while in Venice. For the Porto family in Vicenza Serlio designed a temporary, semicircular timber auditorium fronted by a stage, which had one large proscenium arch behind, and to the sides of which were painted flats depicting the scene types of the classical theatre—tragic, comic, and satiric—which Vitruvius had described. The event brought the Porto family and the citizens of Vicenza considerable praise from their guests, one of whom opined that Vicenza is “more virtuous than Athens, greater than Milan, and richer than Venice, her mistress.” It inspired the noblemen of Vicenza eventually to found their own Academy 1 in 1555-—the Accademia Olimpica—containing the first permanently covered theater since antiquity, to “exalt those of its citizens who love virtu.” The Teatro Olimpico was designed by Palladio as a classical theater, with a scene front in the form of an ancient palace facade, much influenced by Vitruvius’ description of one. It was under construction by the time of Palladio’s death.
Serlio must have made a great impression on Palladio at this time. Not only did he introduce Palladio to his interpretation of classical theater, but he was probably the first to J introduce him to the ancient buildings of Rome through the collection of drawings he had made himself and those he had inherited from his mentor Peruzzi. Many of these were to be included in an architectural treatise Serlio was compiling, L’architettura, which was to comprise seven books, five of which were published separately, and nonsequentially, in his lifetime. They were brought together posthumously in 1584, and again in 1619, as Tutte I’opere d’architettura et prospettiva. Serlio’s drawing of Villa Madama, the building on which Trissino based his Villa Cricoli facade design, appears in Book III of the series, Delle antiquita, published in Venice in 1540 (the same year as and just prior to Torello Sarayna’s book on the antiquities of Verona, De origine et amplitudine civitatis Verotiae): this was preceded in 1537 by Book IV, on the five column types, in which Serlio acknowledges Alvise Cornaro’s guidance.
Serlio’s treatise was revolutionary in that it freed itself from the usual scholarly commentary on Vitruvius and provided instead an illustrated account of ancient and modern architecture, including Serlio’s own inventions: these were accurately drawn as scaled plans and views in perspective of building elevations and architectural fragments. The publication of Book III, Delle antiquita, was paid for by the French king, Francis I, and Serlio decided to move to Fontainebleau in the autumn of 1541 to serve as architectural consultant to the king: a decision which had a profound impact on the development of French Renaissance architecture.
For Palladio Venice proved irresistible: it was not only the dominant political power in the region, but architecturally it was the most beautiful of cities. Palladio later described it as ' “the sole remaining exemplar of the grandeur and magnificence of the Romans” (QL, I, 5), and he had an opportunity in these years to see three important buildings being constructed
next to one another, which form the end and one side of the Piazzetta San Marco: the Zecca or Mint, the Library of St. Mark’s, and the Loggetta, which were begun at intervals one year apart starting in 1536. Designed by Jacopo Sansovino (1486—1570), who practiced successfully in Florence and Rome before moving permanently to Venice, they introduced the rigorous application of architectural ornament all’antica to Venice. The library combines the accurate repetition of Vitruvian-inspired columns, in the Roman manner, with a secondary system of abundant ornamentation which modulates surfaces and provides the colonnades with visual depth. This was well received by Venetians, whose architectural sensibilities were accustomed to a feast of color and rich detail. After all, the architectural magnificence that Palladio referred to there was more Byzantine in flavor than Roman.
Meanwhile, still in Padua, Palladio would have seen the work of Michele Sanmicheli (c. 1484—1559). Girolamo Cornaro, a distant cousin of Alvise and the Venetian commander in Padua, was employing Sanmicheli for his fortification skills. His designs for palazzi in Verona, which were built there after the early 1530s, are more simply and plainly ornamented externally ?J than Sansovino’s Venetian work: the Palazzo Pompei, for example, has a heavily rusticated stone elevation at ground-floor level, capped by a balustrade with plain cornices, from which rise fluted Doric half-columns, separated by tall round-headed windows punctuated by grotesque heads. This was one of the sources for Palladio’s subsequent urban architecture when ^ he returned to Vicenza.
Alvise Cornaro undoubtedly exerted his own direct influence on Palladio’s development, as well as providing him with powerful social connections. Girolamo’s son Zorzon Cornaro was to commission Palladio, and Alvise Cornaro had family connections with the Paduan branch of the Pisani family—Vettor Pisani was also an important patron for Palladio. His cousins Daniele Barbaro (who graduated from Padua University in 1540) and his brother Marc’Antonio became important collaborators as well as patrons. Alvise Cornaro’s intellectual leadership was valuable too. He was the author of the celebrated Trattato della vita sobria (Treatise on the Sober Life), in which he advocated a realistic and pragmatic humanism founded on experience. Indeed, he claimed he had learned more “from the ancient buildings than from the book of the divine Vitruvius,” and while bookish wisdom and the drawings of ancient buildings were useful to Palladio’s development, they were no substitute for firsthand experience of the buildings themselves. After Padua, it is not surprising to learn that Palladio’s next major absence from Vicenza involved a journey south to Rome, embarked on with Trissino early in 1541. This was the first of five visits to Rome, which enabled him to record many of the most famous monuments there and en route.
DRAWING ON ANCIENT ROME
Palladio found his initial trip to Rome inspiring: he was greatly moved by the “stupendous ruins” (QL, I, 3), though it took some imagination to understand their original extent, as they were often partially buried under centuries of debris. Even in their dilapidated condition the ancient structures were “much worthier of study than I had first thought” (QL,
I, 5), for he had detected in them “clear and powerful proof of the virtu and greatness of the Romans” (QL, I, 3).
On this and subsequent trips, Palladio made many detailed drawings which did not record the ancient monuments as ruins but as entire buildings as he imagined they may have </ been originally intended by their architects, as potent symbols of civilized virtu. He appears to have deliberately shunned the painterly approach to recording buildings adopted by Serlio,
who, while often drawing to scale, frequently represented buildings and their details for effect, in perspective, as if they were fragments of stone as he had found them, in situ. Palladio’s working drawings are invariably drawn to scale, and they indicate the main external elevations
cornices, and other details, and arranged on large sheets in an orderly fashion. Indeed, Palladio presents buildings as if he were an impartial scientist, and his sections through the body of a
jabrica. Vesalius (1514—1564) was Professor of Anatomy at Padua University from the late 1530s, and his anatomy classes at Bologna a few years later were open to the public. In his Fabrica, published in Basel in 1543, the cadavers are portrayed as living and willingly exposing their inner workings to the viewer: the parallel to Palladio’s representation of buildings is remarkable.
Palladio’s commanding drawing style may equally have been nurtured by the Paduan graduate, scholar, and diplomat Daniele Barbara (1514-1570), who became Palladio’s guiding light after the death of Trissino in 1550. Daniele had represented Venice in England and Scotland between 1549 and 1551, and he was rewarded on his return with the title Patriarch-elect of Aquileia, which provided him with an income but precluded him from holding public office.
Palladio had probably begun transforming an existing building at Maser into the Villa ?J Barbara, for Daniele and his younger brother Marc’Antonio (1518-1595), during 1549. Marc’ Antonio later became a leading statesman in Venice and promoted Palladio there. Meanwhile, Andrea and Daniele made a trip to Rome together in the mid-15 50s where they met Cardinal d’Este and Pirro Ligorio, the architect of the Cardinal’s villas at Tivoli and on the slopes of the Quirinal in Rome. Ligorio was admired for his drafting skills and as an accomplished antiquarian. He had made drawings of the so-called Temple of Clitumnus, the Roman villa at Anguil-i lara, and Palestrina, which Palladio borrowed and redrew. In exchange, Ligorio made use of Palladio’s surveys of the Porta Aurea, Ravenna, and the amphitheater at Verona, amongst others. While in Rome, Palladio also made some spectacular reconstructions of public buildings, such as the ancient Baths of Agrippa and the Pantheon. According to the chronicler of Renaissance artists and architects Giorgio Vasari, Palladio may well have made these with a future publication in mind, though some may also have been earmarked for Daniele Barbara’s critical edition of Vitruvius. The Barbara Vitruvius of 1556 is particularly remarkable for its precise reconstructions of Greek and Roman buildings and ornaments. It set new standards in architectural publishing, the design of its woodcuts being pared to the minimum of information, to elucidate rather than embellish the text. These were the type of drawings that Palladio was to v' adopt for his own Quattro libri: indeed, some of Barbara’s drawings were designed by him. Barbara acknowledges Palladio’s involvement and specifically cites his work on the ancient Roman theater.
of buildings as vertical, orthogonal planes. Instead of perspective, he used shading to indicate recessed and projecting planes; and he treated sectional elevations, which cut through the
!: , buildings, as if they were physical models. In this way he revealed the thickness of the enclosing walls and the ornament that covered them, accurately and with a minimum of artistic judgment so that they would be generally useful for reference purposes in the future. Furthermore, his published drawings are annotated with key dimensions, to show the positions of columns,
J building resemble in their precision, clarity, and detachment the extraordinary anatomical drawings designed by artists of the school of Titian for Andreas Vesalius’ De humani corporis
ANCIENT AND MODERN INFLUENCES ON PALLADIO’S ARCHITECTURAL PRACTICE
The effect of Rome on the development of Palladio’s architecture was immediate. His designs for Villa Valmarana at Vigardolo and Villa Pisani at Bagnolo, of 1541 and 1542, adapt details of modern and ancient buildings he had seen there. Villa Valmarana has a particular kind of entrance motif composed of three openings, the central one with an arch resting on columns, those on either side lower with square heads. This symmetrical arrangement of openings derives from a window design by Bramante and Raphael which, having been described J by Serlio in his treatise, became known as a serliatitv, through its extensive use by Palladio and subsequent Palladians, it became known in England and America as a Palladian or Venetian window. In an early, unpublished design for the Villa Pisani, the grand entrance is a half-circle in plan, probably inspired by similar layouts Palladio had seen at the Roman baths, Trajan’s Market, and Bramante’s Belvedere Court in the Vatican, or perhaps the built portion of Raphael’s Villa Madarna. It reappears in his published designs for the later Villa Trissino as double curving entrance wings (QL, II, 60). In the published drawings of the Villa Pisani there is a central cruciform main room, called a sala, that is barrel-vaulted, with large semicircular windows at either end of the vault like those in the Roman baths (they are called thermal windows, 7 after the thermae, or baths)—another recurring element in Palladio’s architecture (QL, II, 47). Palladio acknowledged the significance of Bramante’s architecture for his own development in the Quattro libri (as had Serlio before him), and presents two drawings of Bramante’s exquisite Tempietto, built on the slopes ofMontorio, in Book IV, amongst the temples of the ancients.
This was the only example of a modern building to be included here: “since Bramante was the first to make known that good and beautiful architecture which had been hidden from the time of the ancients till now, I thought it reasonable that his work should be placed amongst J those of the ancients” (QL, IV, 64).
Two major projects in Vicenza are likely to have brought the former architectural elite of Rome into direct contact with Palladio. The Palazzo della Ragione, which after Palladio’s involvement there became known as the Basilica, was a mid-fifteenth-century public building—a Palace of Justice—wrapped by a two-story colonnade which had partially collapsed soon after its completion. While there were good stonemasons in Vicenza, such as those of the Pedemuro workshop to which Andrea had been apprenticed, they were apparently unable to satisfy local demands for a new colonnaded enclosure which would marry with the existing structure and improve the appearance of this prominent building in the city center. Consequently, numerous famous architects were invited to suggest suitable designs. During the years up to 1541 they included Sansovino and Serlio (just prior to the latter’s departure from Venice for France), and Michele Sanmicheli from Verona. Giulio Romano (1492/9—1546), Raphael’s chief assistant in Rome who became architect to the Gonzaga court in Mantua, was tempted to Vicenza for his advice by a substantial consultancy fee in 1542. Eventually, however, Palladio succeeded in convincing the Council to adopt his own design, submitted in association with the Pedemuro workshop, which perhaps incorporated some of the better ideas already received from the distinguished visiting architects. Constructed in stone, it took over seventy years to build, from 1546 to 1617, and is presented in detail in the Quattro libri (III, 41-43). Outwardly, his design bears some comparison with aspects of Sansovino’s design for St. Mark’s Library and the serliana windows of a palazzo design published by Serlio in his Book IV. It is uncertain what ideas Palladio may have incorporated from Sanmicheli or Giulio Romano, though Giu-lio’s Palazzo Te in Mantua incorporates serliane in its garden elevation. Giulio provided Palladio
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with his first major building commission in Vicenza, for a new palazzo for the Thiene family. This was conceived in 1542, and although Giulio probably initiated its design Palladio published it as his own in the Quattro libri (II, 12—15)-—perhaps not unreasonably, as Giulio died four years later and, until then, was fully active in Mantua, while Palladio was involved in its construction for sixteen years, until 1558.
The long construction periods, and the need to resolve previously unimagined difficulties on site, inevitably led to many of Palladio’s designs being modified or left incomplete. Consequently, his numerous projects for villas and palazzi published in the Quattro libri in 1570 illus-J trate schemes which best represent his original intentions, and were presented as worthy models to be emulated by others—as indeed they were for over two centuries by would-be Palladians.
I QUATTRO LIBRI D E LL’ A R C HIT E T T U R A , AND ITS RECEPTION
The range and quality of Palladio’s architecture is exceptional. His palazzi, from the Basilica to the private residences of prominent families, dominate Vicenza, and his villas punctuate the surrounding countryside. In Venice, the churches of San Giorgio Maggiore and the Redentore sit on spectacular sites across the water from Piazzetta San Marco, in the heart of that city. These buildings have made an impression on many visitors to northern Italy in recent centuries, but it was Palladio’s decision to publish the Quattro libri which made him accessible internationally, and for all time.
Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472) was the first Renaissance architect to write an architectural treatise, the De re aedijicatoria. It was written in Latin around the middle of the fifteenth century, before printing had been introduced in Italy, and consequently was read only by the very few who could afford a manuscript copy and could comprehend Alberti’s scholarly Latin (the reader was moreover obliged to rely on his words alone, as Alberti had left the text unillustrated). The first printed edition was produced in Florence in i486, well after Alberti’s death, and it was not rendered into Italian until 1546, when Pietro Lauro translated it into the Venetian dialect. Four years later Cosimo Bartoli produced a Florentine version which he accompanied with his own illustrations; this was reprinted in Venice in 1565, just five years before Palladio’s own books.
Like Vitruvius’ influential writings, Alberti’s De re aedijicatoria was composed in ten books d and followed a similar format: he wrote about the origins of architecture; the materials employed and the construction of buildings; public and private works; ornaments and those relating to sacred, public secular, and private buildings; and finally the restoration of buildings. It is thought that his treatise began as a commentary on Vitruvius, but that it developed into something original as he struggled with Vitruvius’ obscure terminology and descriptions, and as he reached his own conclusions about the complex art of building through firsthand practical experience. His was a vast intellectual achievement, and his buildings were models of a rigorous approach to architecture all’antica, though there remained a need among practicing architects and craftsmen for graphical depictions of the ancient building types and their ornamentation.
Palladio’s close contemporary, the architect Giacomo Barozzi Vignola (1507-1573), produced Dr regola delli cinque ordini dell’architettura, which was composed of a short introduction followed by 32 drawings each with only a brief explanatory caption. This was published in 1562, and in his attempt to characterize the five orders of architecture Vignola provided his successors with a valuable graphical canon of column types, every part of each being carefully identified and proportioned. Some of Vignola’s own work is also included. Another useful model for Palladio, as its title suggests, was I quattro primi libri di architettura by the Sienese
architect Pietro Cataneo (1510?—1574?), which was published in Venice in 1554. Like Serlio, Cataneo knew Peruzzi well, and probably assisted him on design projects around 1530. Cataneo worked as a fortifications engineer on urban defense projects, and his treatise considers military and civil architecture together. In 1567 he published L’architettura di Pietro Cataneo Senese, which brought together four new books—on ornament, water resources, geometry, and perspective—with the four already in circulation. Palladio knew Cataneo personally, and even claims that Cataneo appropriated his rule-of-thumb method for proportioning column shafts for his first four books on architecture (QL, I, 15).
Amongst Palladio’s mentors, Gian Giorgio Trissino, Alvise Cornaro, and Daniele Barbaro combined scholarship with some practical architectural experience when building for themselves, though none of them contributed to architecture as profoundly as Alberti had. Nor did they offer would-be architects direct practical guidance through their writings, though Serlio through his publications showed how Vitruvius’ view of antiquity could be updated to the domestic and public needs of sixteenth-century society, a message made seductive and driven home to a wide audience by its integration of text and strong images. Palladio did something similar with the Quattro libri, though the extra precision of its scaled and dimensioned drawings meant that he could rely more heavily on the images, and so avoid the lengthy descriptions common in Serlio. Palladio’s background as a stonemason meant that he understood the need for an architecture book which would speak directly and clearly to those who wished to build. Consequently, the Quattro libri is laid out simply and is devoid of academic pretension, and it succeeded in appealing to craftsmen and their patrons alike.
The first Book outlines the preparations, foundations, and materials necessary before building can commence, then proceeds to a description of the orders of architecture. Like Serlio, Palladio describes five column types which increase in quality from Tuscan and Doric through to Ionic, Corinthian, and Composite. (Vitruvius omits the Composite, whereas Alberti is the first to introduce it—as the Italic order—but omits the Tuscan.) Their proportions are related simply, and he deliberately avoids unfamiliar Greek jargon, referring to the bulging middle of the column shaft, for example, as “swelling” rather than by the term entasis used by Vitruvius. He concludes this book with an account of different room types and the main parts of a building. Book II characterizes complete dwellings, starting with the Greek and Roman private house, and Palladio moves on to illustrate how his own designs for palazzi and villas have adapted such precedents for his own patrons. Book III is concerned with public works— squares, roads, bridges, and basilicas—and is again a balance of ancient example and his own projects. Book IV, apart from a description of Bramante’s Tempietto, is given over to ancient sacred architecture, especially the temples of Rome.
It is known that Palladio had started work on Book II of the Quattro libri by the mid-1550s: Daniele Barbaro mentions this in his Vitruvius (Barbaro 1556, 179; 1987, 303), and Vasari saw a revised text in 1566. Yet, for reasons unknown, Palladio was under pressure to complete these books for publication in 1570: when describing the Palazzo Barbarano in Vicenza he mentions that the published design is mostly of an earlier scheme, and that he had not been able to revise the drawing of the plan to match “the plan which has just been completed and according to which the foundations have now been laid down because I was not able to make the woodcut in time for it to be printed” (QL, II, 22). Nor was the intended publication entirely complete then. The title of his treatise refers unequivocally to just four books (in fact, three different versions of it were published in 1570 as the list of editions below shows—I due libri, I due primi libri, as well as I quattro libri), yet related books were to have followed, presumably as separate editions: he refers specifically to one on antiquities in the Quattro libri (I, 12, 52). According to the Vicentine Paolo Gualdo, canon of Padua cathedral,
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who wrote a biography of Palladio in 1616, drawings had been prepared by Palladio of “ancient temples, arches, tombs, baths, bridges, towers, and other public buildings of Roman antiquity,” J but his death prevented their publication: in 1581, a year after Palladio’s death, his sons were preparing an expanded edition with a fifth book he had completed, but it was left unpublished. This has prompted the suggestion that Palladio had intended to publish a total of ten books on architecture, like Vitruvius and Alberti before him, and that the additional six would have covered theaters, amphitheaters, triumphal arches, baths, tombs, and bridges in some detail (Lewis 1981, p. 10, n. 16). While there are many drawings by Palladio of such buildings in the v collection of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) in London, there is no hard evidence that he would have presented them in a series of ten books. Indeed, as the Quattro libri combines his own building designs with those of ancient origin, it is equally likely that he would have wished to have published his church designs in Venice in a subsequent book, but they cannot be suitably contained within this list of missing building types.
Also referred to in the Quattro libri is a work published a few years later which is only marginally concerned with architecture, Palladios I commentari di C. Giulio Cesare (Venice, 1574—1575). It records the ingenuity of Julius Caesar and Palladio’s personal fascination with military strategy, an interest which was kindled in him by his architectural mentor Trissino, as his preface to the commentary declares with gratitude. It was also a subject, as I have mentioned J already, close to Cataneo’s heart, though whereas he had combined military and civil architecture in his treatise (indeed, he was the last Renaissance writer to do so), Palladio treated them vas distinctly separate subjects.
'	Palladio had earlier written two separate books with an architectural focus: Le antichita di
Roma . . . raccolta brevemente dagli auttori antichi, &moderni, nuovamenteposta in luce, and Descritione de le chiese, stationi, indulgenze & reliquie de Corpi Sancti, che sono in la cittd de Roma. Published in Rome in 1554, during his visit there with Daniele Barbaro, they were essentially guidebooks to the key monuments of that city. The first contains brief descriptions for travelers of the appearance and history of the classical ruins, and Palladio wrote it as a replacement for a popular '/medieval guidebook, the Mirabilia urbis Romae, which perpetuated, albeit rather delightfully, some extravagant myths about the marvels of Rome. In his own book Palladio sought facts instead of fiction, and he scrutinized the accounts of respected authors recent and ancient before organizing the material gathered into short, readable sections. Over the next two hundred years Le antichita di Roma was bought by thousands of visitors and ran to more than thirty editions; in the early eighteenth century it was attached to the Quattro libri as the “fifth” book. His other guidebook, the Descritione de le chiese, was written to provide pilgrims with a religious itinerary complemented by Palladio’s own appreciation of the relative artistic value of the works being visited. It too became a standard guide to Rome, gradually displacing the Mirabilia for the more discerning visitor. The success of both of these earlier architecture books can only have encouraged him in the more ambitious and widely influential endeavor of I quattro libri dell’architettura.
It is ironic that although it was intended as a popular work on architecture, the first edition of the Quattro libri outside of Italy was in Latin. This was published in Bordeaux in 1580, but any damage to its wider appeal was limited as only Book I was so rendered. Other translations of Book I followed, in Spanish (Juan Lasso, 1625), and as a partial translation in French by Pierre Le Muet (Langlois, 1645). It was not until the complete French translation by Roland Freart de Chambray (Paris, 1650) that all four books by Palladio were accessible to those who had no Italian. In 1698 a limited edition was made available in German, this time of Books I and II.
ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS
Although the influence of Palladio’s Quattro libri is to be appreciated in the architecture of Inigo Jones in the first half of the seventeenth century, English readers had their first glimpse of Palladio in their native language as late as 1663, through Godfrey Richards’ translation of Book I. This was taken directly from the Italian, though the illustrations came from Le Muet’s French edition of 1645. To these Richards also added new text and images referring to recent English constructional practice. This particular combination of theory and practice proved to be extremely popular, and the book ran to twelve editions, the final one being in 1733. By then the first English translation of all four books had appeared. It was signed by James Leoni, an emigre Venetian who had arrived in England around 1713. James, more correctly Giacomo, Leoni worked with an Englishman of French extraction, Nicholas Dubois, a military engineer turned architect, to produce an edition intended to have a wide appeal. They accompanied the Italian text with a dual English and French translation, and Leoni designed new engravings after Palladio’s original woodcuts. They were mostly prepared by a small team based in London, though some were done in Amsterdam by the highly regarded engraver Bernard Picart, who was later engaged by Leoni to produce the copper-engraved plates which accompanied Leoni’s 1726, three-volume translation (Italian and English) of Alberti’s treatises on architecture, painting, and sculpture. Also new was the allegorical frontispiece designed by the London-based Venetian painter Sebastiano Ricci. Aided by this considerable array of talent Leoni had made what he considered to be “many necessary corrections” and “improvements” to Palladio’s books—especially to the illustrations, changes which were influenced by the more extravagant stylistic tendencies favored at that time. Leoni’s edition appeared in installments between 1715 and 1720, and was followed by an edition in English only in 1721. It was to have incorporated a transcript of the notes Inigojones had made in his own copy of the 1601 edition of the Quattro libri, but this was denied by its then owner, Dr. George Clarke. Nonetheless, it was a popular success, and just over two decades later, in 1742, Leoni published a third, corrected edition, supplemented with the text of Palladio’s Le antichita di Roma and byjones’ notes, which were made available to Leoni after Clarke’s death (Jones’ copy of the Quattro libri was among the material Clarke bequeathed to Worcester College, Oxford, in 1736). Leoni’s version of Palladio remained popular into the next century, and (along with books by James Gibbs and Robert Morris and other, less erudite pattern books on architecture) informed the spread of Palladianism in the American colonies: Thomas Jefferson, the most distinguished of the gentlemen architects, owned a copy, and it was his primary guide to architectural invention and construction.
Less popular and influential, but certainly truer to the original, was Isaac Ware’s Palladio edition of 1738, dedicated to Lord Burlington. It followed Ware’s compilation of the Designs of Inigo Jones, published three years before. Ware was a distinguished Palladian architect who had been nurtured by Lord Burlington, a powerful patron of the arts and architecture who was himself the architect of Chiswick House (begun c. 1725) and the Assembly Rooms at York (1731-1732). Burlington advocated a more simple and direct approach to classicism, exemplified by Palladio and Jones, in preference to the version of Palladianism favored by James Gibbs and Leoni, with its baroque inventions; and it is probable that Burlington had encouraged Colen Campbell, the architect who had first introduced him to Palladianism, to produce an edition of Palladio of which he could approve. But Campbell got no further than Book I, which was published first in 1728 (as Andrea Palladio’s First Book of Architecture) and then, with a revised title, the following year, as Andrea Palladio’s Five Orders of Architecture. Ironically, con-