Architecture: A Very Short Introduction

_{15. Villa Capra, Vicenza, Italy (1569); architect: Andrea Palladio (1508–80). Palladio published an illustrated treatise showing his own designs alongside his restorations of some of the great ruins of antiquity, such as the Pantheon (Figure 14). He worked at Vicenza and in Venice, and designed villas and churches for the Venetian nobility, who had palaces in Venice and farmland on the mainland in the province known as the Veneto, which is where Vicenza is to be found. Most of Palladio’s villa designs were for buildings that operated as the base for the running of an estate, which made them more or less farmhouses with a few ceremonious palatial rooms that would be used by the lordly family when they visited during the summer months. The Villa Capra is unusual because it was not used in that way, but was set up as a retreat at a short distance from Vicenza, where it sits on a small hill and looks out across the surrounding countryside with varied views in all directions. It was never a principal residence, but was used for entertaining. A typical Palladio villa would have had a portico with columns at the principal entrance, but this building uniquely among his designs, has four, all identical, looking out into the countryside equally on all four sides. In the centre of the building there is a circular room, from which one can circulate freely out into the porticoes and into the landscape.}

Palladio’s four books are very practical in their outlook, and very clearly written, intended for architects and their patrons rather than a scholarly audience. In England they were taken up by Inigo Jones in the 17th century. He had travelled to Italy and had been won over to Palladio’s ways of thinking, and he put up some remarkable buildings influenced by him, such as the Queen’s House in Greenwich and the Banqueting House in Whitehall. What is most remarkable about these buildings is that they were erected at a time when the princes of continental Europe were building increasingly elaborate Baroque palaces, whereas in England the greatest Baroque flourishes were still in the future — St Paul’s Cathedral by Sir Christopher Wren, for example was not conceived until towards the end of the 17th century, after the Restoration of the monarchy had brought splendour back on to the agenda, and the Great Fire of London had cleared the ground. Inigo Jones’s architecture involved simple massing and a concern for the harmonic proportions favoured by Palladio, who, influenced by the proportions that resonate beautifully in music, liked volumes to have simple ratios in their dimensions, so that a room might happily be as high as it was wide, and be twice as long as the width. This would be a double cube, and these are the proportions of the Whitehall Banqueting House that Jones built for Charles I, and outside which Charles was executed. There are Baroque gestures here, such as the flamboyant painted ceiling by Rubens, but the taste overall is austere when compared with that of the court at Versailles.

The English Palladians