PALLADIO, ANDREA. - Andrea di Pietro dalla Gondola, "monaro" (miller), b. on 30 Nov. (P. Gualdo) 1508 (as attested by three documents, of 1524, '28 and '34), d. at Vicenza on 19 Aug. 1580.
A document, discovered by Erice Rigoni in 1949, attests that P. was born at Padua, as recorded in the deposition of three witnesses, made in that same city on 24 May 1563. In 1521 the thirteen-year-old boy was apprenticed at Padua to the art of the "lapicida" (stonecutter), under the sculptor Bartolomeo da Sossano. But, for unknown reasons, he fled to Vicenza, with his father, in 1523 and in 1524. In this city he enrolled in the guild of the sculptors and stonecutters (1524) and dwelt there from then on. At Vicenza he also found the affectionate guidance of his master, Giovanni da Pedemuro, and the enlightened patronage (documented from 1538) of Giangiorgio Trissino, poet and humanist, who one day would bestow on him the appellation, which made him immortal, of Palladio.
The first work of P. that is securely dated (1540) is the Villa Godi-Porto, now Valmarana, at Lonedo (Vicenza). Three arches and a flight of steps, between two crisp forward-projecting wings of rustic flavor, in the manner of a villa-farm. This work (the only certain one preceding the journeys to Rome) concludes the first phase of P.'s life.
Verona must have been the initial destination of his itineraries and of his surveys of Roman monuments, continued later at Rome, Pola, Spalato, in France, etc. The second period of P.'s life opens with the journeys, undertaken with Trissino, to Rome; the first, in July-Sept. 1541 (return by way of Viterbo, Bagnaia, Florence, Bologna); the second, between 1545 and 1547; the third at the end of 1549, the year in which P. emerged victorious in the competition for the project of the Basilica, against great competitors, such as Sansovino, Serlio, G. Romano. The loggias of the Basilica (designed under strict constraints, so as to take account of the windows of the pre-existing Gothic Palazzo) stand apart from P.'s other conceptions as a unicum, for their dynamic sequence of chiaroscuro.
But P.'s most authentic vein manifests itself in the theme of the villas, which he dreamed of as abstract and faintly amber-toned volumes, in contrast with the soft shadows of colonnades, amid the green of nature; as new values of light and tone, which have forever remained his secret. The Villa Angarano, near Bassano, comes first; there follow: the Villa Badoer at Fratta Polesine (1549), the Malcontenta (1551) and the first conception of that authentic masterpiece which is the Rotonda (1550-53; Zorzi). In 1551 the Palazzo Chiericati rises, somewhat stiff in its solid wall between the shadows of the porticoes. Of 1552 are the Palazzi Iseppo de Porti and Thiene (Zorzi); the strong rustication led it to be considered of a later period. This, between 1549-52, is the happiest season of P., who, after the "discovery" of Rome, in which he had assimilated imperial art and the art of the Bramantesque Renaissance, had succeeded in making of it something new, original, truly created, in a variety of accents and tones. The third Palladian period begins in 1554, with the journey to Rome, undertaken with certain Venetian gentlemen, and with the publication of his little work L'antichità di Roma, which must have sold like hotcakes, since it was reprinted 22 times up to 1722. This is a period of more intense activity as a treatise-writer, and of an architecture sometimes less spontaneous; or one that shows in its chiaroscuro blending, and in the preciousness of its treatment, the influence of new contacts. A subtle Michelangelism is present in the Palazzo Valmarana at Vicenza (1566). There follow in succession: the Palazzo Antonini at Udine (1556), unfinished; the Villa Pisani at Bagnolo (1561); the Villa Cornaro at Piombino-Dese (1565); the most precious Villa Barbaro at Maser (1566) frescoed by Veronese; the Villa Mocenigo at Marocco, near Mestre; the Villa Pisani at Montagnana, etc. Of 1570 and the following years are the Vicentine palazzi: Porto-Barbaran, Porto-Breganze and the Loggia del Capitaniato, which presents, facing the spontaneous Basilica, the accent of the weariness of maturity, through a certain gigantism, which was already present in the facades of the Venetian churches: S. Giorgio (1566), S. Francesco della Vigna (1568), Redentore (1576).
From P.'s hand are the drawings commenting on Daniele Barbaro's Vitruvius (1556). In 1570 his Quattro libri dell'Architettura see the light in Venice with the collaboration of his sons: Leonida, in the drawings, and Silla, in the text; an authentic encyclopedia, which later had many editions and brought together drawings of ancient works, architectural orders, streets, bridges, piazzas, basilicas, temples, the Bramantesque tempietto of S. Pietro in Montorio, and various Palladian buildings. In 1575 P. publishes the Commentari of Julius Caesar with 42 drawings. Of P.'s passionate graphic work there remain, known, about 500 drawings, of which 400 are in London, 80 in Vicenza, and 6 in Verona, some (for S. Petronio) in Bologna. Baths, fora, amphitheaters, theaters, sanctuaries, temples, building projects, thus come alive again from the
(phot. Alinari)
PALLADIO, ANDREA - Facade of the church of S. Giorgio (1566), Venice.
hand of P., who was an excellent draftsman as well as architect and careful archaeologist. The artist was able to make his inventive genius flourish, not by imitating, but by leavening the ancient material. Thus the Roman house returns, but transfigured, in the conception of certain palaces (e.g., Porto Barbaran) and in the cloister of the Carità in Venice (1561). The curved layout of the imperial fora reappears in the hyperbola of the Villa Mocenigo on the Brenta (never built) and in the conception of the Villa Trissino at Meledo (from which perhaps Bernini would draw a suggestion for his colonnades of St. Peter's). The organisms of S. Giorgio in Venice and of the grandiose Villa Thiene at Quinto seem, in some parts, inspired by the Baths; from the survey of the Teatro Berga there finally blossoms, like a sonorous and steadfast song of the genius that was dying out, the Teatro Olimpico (1580).
The first biographer of P. was Paolo Gualdo, his contemporary. The 17th century did not understand P. Scamozzi in Vicenza and Longhena in Venice blocked his path. A return came in the 18th century, fortunate for the extension of the Palladian empire, but with varying fortune as regards the understanding of such a genius, rare in the centuries. In 1730-32, the Baths were published by Lord Burlington and Leoni. New editions and updatings of the Palladian work came from Francesco Muttoni (1740-48) and from Ottavio Bertotti-Scamozzi (1776-83). The dissemination that these men made of it harmed P., shifting the values of the inspired, luminous, warm Palladian material into the shadowed rigor of copperplate engraving. Thus neoclassical criticism (Temanza, 1762; Milizia, 1827), incapable of penetrating the abstract value of relationships and tones of Palladian art, but capable only of codifying, often promoted a flowering of presumptuous and strained academicism, which invaded England, Europe, Russia and the Americas, with only a few graceful exceptions. Fundamental remained the biography by Magrini (1846) and that by Zanella (1880), all veined with subtle poetry. A new return to P. occurred, in the declining 19th century, especially through the work of German architects such as Burkhardt, Durm, Burger (1909) and, more recently, Pee.
At the head of today's Italian scholars stands, for his numerous discoveries, publications, identifications, G. G. Zorzi. Precious are the researches, with the deepenings of Fiocco. Excellent is the "tonal" interpretation of Palladian art, due to Argan. Fundamental is the publication of Pane, for the settling of the authentic poetic values of P., accompanied by an ingenious history of Palladian historiography. - See pl. XLIX.
Bibliography13 works
Fausto Franco