Andrea Palladio was an Italian architect who lived in Venice but who worked mainly in the city of Vicenza and its surroundings, although he also has jobs in Venice. He is the architect who knew how to update the heritage of classical forms with the reality of the central moment of the [Cinquecento]. His country villas and other works by him have had an important influence on Neoclassical architecture. Andrea Palladio was born in Padua in [1508] where he studied alongside [Giovanni Maria Falconetto] and with [Gian Giorgio Trissino] who influenced his training and who became his most determined tutor.
Summary
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- 1 Characteristics of his works
- 2 Influence of Ancient Architecture
- 3 Palladium in Rome
- 4 Some architectural works
- 5 Some Churches
- 6 gallery
- 7 sources
Characteristics of his works
Palladio’s constructions were characterized by their simplicity and balance, based on the application of strict symmetry and a logical system of proportions. in the seventeenth centuryan important English architect, Iñigo Jones, had already taken his works as a model, so that Palladianism came to be considered an English style par excellence, opposed to the ornate Baroque style that predominated in the Catholic and absolutist countries of the rest of Europe. Consequently, English architects and owners elevated Palladio’s architectural style to the status of an ideal, a norm from which one could not deviate. In this conception lay the idea that beauty was something absolute, based on objective laws and universal application.
In the first half of the 18th century [England] was filled with Palladian constructions, formed by clearly defined cubic bodies and according to a strict system of proportions, with a very austere exterior decoration and facades accentuated by a large porch in the style of an ancient temple, that is, built on a rustic plinth. By mid-centuryIn the 18th century there was a second boom in the construction of villas that led to the appearance, at the gates of London, of smaller country houses, owned by the wealthy bourgeoisie, such as the one in Wrotham Park , built in [1754] by [ Isaac Ware]. The center of this house is formed by the cube of a Palladian villa, with five rows of windows and an Ionic tetrastyle portico with irregular pediment (architecture). Later, this tradition would be transmitted to the colonies of North America , where the incipient bourgeoisie would build their villas according to these principles.
Influence of Ancient Architecture
Andrea Palladio is stimulated by the fact that the architecture of the ancients was highly expressive of ideal content and civil sentiments, and that it was also technically perfect, offering a response to practical demands and adapting both to the place and to the function. In all of Palladio’s work, these two moments appear very clear: the classical ideal as the supreme image of a perfect civil way of life, and the response to a practical requirement, sticking to specific circumstances of the place and in fact as determinations of said ideal. in the always different cases of real life.
Palladium in Rome
Palladio was in Rome in the years [1541], [1545] and in [1547] in which he took many notes, not only of the Roman ruins but also of the works of Bramante, some of which were collected in his I quattro libri dell'[Architettura], a work published when he was 62 years old, and for which he has been linked to Leon Battista Alberti. Another similarity with Alberti (is his Temple Malatestiano in Rimini, the way in which he undertook the external envelope of the Gothic Basilica of Vicenza intended for communal administration. This architect was a renovator of his time, surrounding the medieval nucleus with a crown of porticoes on two floors with arcades, gracefully and rhythmically turned, in the layout of the Serlian openings, as Sansovino had already done for the library of San Marcos, and with such success that, since then, it could also be called a Palladian motif.
The creation of small columns and columns, Tuscan below and Ionic above, lintels and arches without too many plastic appliques, except for the mythical statues that, above the cornice, prolong the axes silhouetted against the sky, or the green roof of the Gothic panel, they have such a musical and metrical emphasis that the architecture seems rocked to the rhythm of a dance and can even be ruled as an iambic poem. According to Giulio Carlo Argan, the solution adopted by Palladio for the basilica was due to his purpose of “giving or the green cover of the Gothic panel, have such a musical and metrical emphasis that the architecture seems rocked to the rhythm of a dance and can even be ruled as an iambic poem.
According to Giulio Carlo Argan, the solution adopted by Palladio for the basilica was due to his intention to “give or the green cover of the Gothic panel, have such a musical and metrical emphasis that the architecture seems rocked to the rhythm of a dance and can even be ruled as an iambic poem. According to Giulio Carlo Argan, the solution adopted by Palladio for the basilica was due to his intention to “giveVicenza classical dignity and form evoking its Roman origin”. “Transforming a Gothic communal palace by means of a classical envelope making it a Roman civil basilica implied, in the artist’s thinking, imposing on the vital nucleus of the urban community a classical and modern settlement to a time. The gallery repeats in the upper part the wide and deep openings of the portico, but the structure that unites the arcades is more complex, with greater separation between the half columns and the lateral columns twinned in depth. It is a space with clearly marked intervals according to an iambic trimeter rhythm: short-long-short. And in the same rhythm, tighter, they are in the full: columnita-half column, columnita”.
Some architectural works
The Basilica of Vicenza was begun in 1549 and completed in 1614, thirty years after Palladio’s death. This aroused the interest of the wealthy families of Vicenza, who began to commission him to build their urban palaces and country villas. It was “a nobility well framed in the structure of the republic, without ambitions of power, cultured and industrious, especially interested, at that time, in developing agricultural production, in wisely managing the vast estates that it acquired and in which it liked. to spend a part of the year. Such was the number of palaces and other civil constructions that he made that Vicenza was identified as the city of Palladio, especially the main road or Corso, which bears his name. There is the palace [Chiericat]i (1551-1553), which highlights ”
some churches
The churches that he built in Venice are: San Giorgio Maggiore (1565), “with three naves and a deep choir behind the main chapel, located on the island of its name and an obligatory view for the observer from the Piazza San Marco; the Church of the Redeemer (1577), on the island of Giudecca, which counts as the previous one, “with domes and gables and giant columns supporting neat classical pediments; and the church of [San Francesco della Vigna], and other cloisters and convents. The two Venetian churches, [San Girogio Maggiore] and the Redentorethey present notable innovations with respect to the traditional schemes of religious architecture. The interiors are large luminous openings, with which the lateral spaces are related, in a continuous display of white surfaces accentuated by the greater light intensity of the structures. “More than places of devotion, they are spaces destined for a rite that must take place in the sunlight, in the presence of people, without a shadow of mystery.” Argan says. .
