Word: palladio
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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ROME, my Mistress. Vitruvius, my Master, Architecture, my Life." Such was the trinity acknowledged by Andrea Palladio (1518-80), a stonemason's son from Vicenza, Italy, who grew up to rule over a whole generation of fellow architects and to recast the classic style of Rome and Greece with such elegance and authority that his Palladian style became one of the longest-lasting and most widely accepted personal idioms in the history of architecture. In an effort to preserve Pal-ladio's work (many of his most beautiful structures were made of common brick and perishable stucco...
Designing them in masterful, detailed drawings, or working out the relations of masses with building blocks, Palladio took the massive, awe-inspiring design of classic Rome, domesticated it in terms of an intimate yet princely style. To oversee the construction of his villas (as many as four going up at the same time), Palladio floated leisurely up and down the Brenta on a splendid, gilded barge, equipped with a studio for his ten to twelve apprentices, shaded by a yellow-and-black linen awning. The villas that resulted won in later years the admiration of English Architects Inigo Jones...
Wine-Soaked Roof. Although used for endless entertaining, Palladio's villas were meant for what that luxurious age considered casual living. Wide windows and huge doors opened on fine river views and prospects, tempting water gardens and statuary-decked lawns. Linking the central, porticoed mass to grounds were long colonnades on either side-a device which, whether repeated in Ireland, England or Virginia, appears to set the building harmoniously in the landscape...
...first and only time in British history, an interest in and knowledge of the arts became fashionable," writes the present Duke of Wellington, for the exhibition's catalogue. The English gentry, he points out, enthusiastically studied the architectural plans Lord Burlington published of the Italian villas by Palladio, proceeded to plan their parks and redesign their stately homes, hanging the walls with Spitalfields silk and decorating them with the furniture of Chippendale. To furnish them with art, English artists labored prodigious hours at their easels...