迷失畫廊
逛畫廊，看世界， 記下自己的心得
Palladio: the father of Renaissance architecture
A major exhibition at the Royal Academy celebrates the Venetian architect Andrea Palladio this Spring. His reliance on Roman heritage may have been misguided.
In 1816 Colonel Isaac A. Coles described his conversations with the third President of the United States, Thomas Jefferson. They had "conversed at length on the subject of architecture". Palladio, Jefferson had said, "was the Bible – you should get it and stick close to it".
Thomas Jefferson was an exceptional man, a founding father of the United States, as well as being an amateur architect. His views about the art of building, however, were conventional for an English-speaking gentleman of the 18th century. He thought that subject had been summed up for all time by Andrea Palladio over two centuries before.
Palladio (1508-80), was, as the art historian James Ackerman roundly put it, "the most imitated architect in history". This spring the 500th anniversary of his birth is celebrated by a major exhibition at the Royal Academy, "Andrea Palladio: His Life and Legacy".
Being the most influential of architects, however, is not the same as being the best. Palladio was the creator of wonderful structures. As you look out across the water from the Doge's Place in Venice, there, right at the centre of that celebrated view, is Palladio's monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore.
It wasn't his contributions to the fabric of Venice, however, that made him so imitated. Indeed, though Palladio is certainly a contender for the title of "greatest architect of the Italian Renaissance", most critics and historians would award the crown to Michelangelo, Bramante or Brunelleschi.
Palladio was transformed from a man into an adjective, "Palladian", by a publication. His Four Books of Architecture (1570) was not only among the earliest how-to-do-it manuals in European history, it still remains admirably clear, concise and beautiful to look at.
Crucial to its success was that Palladio's handbook is essentially visual. The reader is led through a series of elegant plates illustrating reconstructions of ancient Roman buildings, and Palladio's own schemes. The latter form a sort of retrospective exhibition on paper – the perfect method of self-publicity. As a result, Palladio's ideas were duplicated on English heaths, Scottish moors and – in Jefferson's case – the top of a small hill in Virginia named Monticello.
Palladio's text is full of practical information. There are wise words on foundations, how to site your country villa to get the best aspect and most sunshine. And a reminder to keep the stables, and their dung hills, conveniently out of sniffing distance from the main dwelling.
He implied, in effect, that if you follow these steps you won't go wrong. In architecture Palladio was, in the words of Adolf Placzek, "the spokesman for the belief that there are valid rules, immutable canons". In other words, he thought there was one correct way to design buildings: the way that the ancient Romans had done it. And, he insisted, "although the ancients did vary, they never departed from some universal and necessary rules of art". Palladio believed he had discovered these by diligent study of classical ruins.
He had spent much time studying the remains of the ancient past, or as he put it, "very great fatigues and voyages, and... great study." He was not, by origin, however, either a gentleman or a scholar (although many of his future readers were both).
He has born in Padua with the excellently Venetian name Andrea di Pietro della Gondola and apprenticed to a stone cutter at 13. He broke his contract in 1524, and moved to nearby Venice where he became an assistant in a stonemason's workshop. This was a good grounding in the practical craft of building, but hardly preparation for an author and architectural theorist.
In his 20s, Palladio's life was changed. Unexpectedly, the young stone cutter was taken up by a local aristocrat and intellectual, Giangiorgio Trissino (1478-1550). Trissino was an author and amateur archaeologist, and it was he, it seems, who gave Palladio his new name. Readers of Trissino's 27,000-line epic poem l'Italia Liberata dai Goti ("Italy freed from the Goths") – who are extremely few these days – will discover that one of the characters is the guardian angel of General Belisarius and also an expert on the technology of buildings and military camps.
This Byzantine angel/architect was called "Palladio", though why Trissino decided to name his local protégé after him is far from clear. What we do know about Palladio the man is that, apart from being greatly gifted, he had a way about him. His biographer, Paolo Gualdo wrote that, "Palladio was very agreeable and witty in conversation, much to the relish of the gentlemen and signori with whom he dealt, but also to workers, whose services he enlisted. Always keeping their spirits up by entertaining them with many pleasantries, he made them work in good cheer".
In time Palladio came to build many town houses and rustic villas for gentlemen living in the area around Venice. Life in the villas provided a combination of gentlemanly farming, healthy outdoor sports, and peace in which the mind – as Palladio wrote – "fatigued by the agitations of the city, will be greatly restored and comforted, and be able quietly to attend to the studies of letters and contemplation". It sounds like a template for life in the Georgian country house.
Trissino took the renamed mason with him to Rome, where Palladio began his archaeological studies. Eventually, he wrote a guide to the city which, like his architectural primer, was used for centuries. It is not surprising, however, that Palladio didn't actually get Roman architecture entirely right. A great deal of art history consists of creative misunderstandings. Palladio looked at the ruins – often a chaotic jumble of tumbled and half-buried walls – and interpreted them through the eyes of his new friends, the cultivated Renaissance gentlemen of Trissino's circle. They came out more carefully ordered, symmetrical and harmoniously proportioned than they actually had been.
Sometimes he just made the rules up. As the architectural historian Peter Murray notes, there weren't any ruins of private Roman houses for Palladio to examine, so he assumed that they had resembled the ancient temples he could study. Therefore, he gave his country villas impressive columned entrances, which no Roman home would have had. "It should be remembered", Murray went on, "that every English country house of any importance has an enormous, inconvenient and draughty portico simply because Palladio misinterpreted ancient architecture."
Similarly, Palladio's followers in Georgian England and revolutionary America – working from the book – misinterpreted him. Palladio's actual buildings are much more theatrical, more sensuously concerted with colour and light – in a word, more Venetian – than the typical British "Palladian mansion". The latter sometimes looks more like a chilly exercise in architectural good manners.
You could argue that Palladio's influence was disastrous – indeed the Edwardian architect Sir Reginald Blomfield did. "With the touch of pedantry that suited the times and invested his writings with a fallacious air of scholarship, he was the very man to summarise and
classify, and to save future generations of architects the labour of thinking for themselves."
Writing recently in the art magazine, Gavin Stamp wondered whether Palladio's followers did him justice and if, indeed, "his influence was benign or pernicious". What can't be doubted is the magnificence of Palladio's own creations, and that without him and his influence the world would look significantly different. Few architects can claim as much.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/4140732/Palladio-the-father-of-Renaissance-architecture.html
