Word: palladio
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With a love of classical architecture inspired by his study of Italian Architect Andrea Palladio, Jefferson began designing the house himself, sketching perfectly symmetrical octagonal wings extending from a central section. It will make an admirable setting for one of the most notable private libraries in the Colonies (more than 1,200 volumes...
...Palladio built nothing outside northern Italy, and several of his greatest houses stand in tracts of the Venetian countryside that are out of the way today and must have been almost inaccessible to travelers in the 17th and 18th centuries. Yet his principles were studied as avidly in Stockholm and Leningrad as they were by Thomas Jefferson in Virginia, or by the elite of English Palladian architects like Inigo Jones, William Kent and Lord Burlington. By 1850, two continents were dotted with Palladian structures. Even Jefferson's design for the President's Mansion was a copy...
...then the decisive moment in his career had come; in the late 1530s, while he was working on the construction of Villa Cricoli near Vicenza, its owner took him under his wing. Giangiorgio Trissino, a wealthy humanist with a special interest in architecture, renamed his protégé Palladio, after an Angel of Architecture who appeared in one of Trissino's own cumbrous poems. He took the young man on several journeys to Rome. There, awed by the half-buried ruins, Palladio began the long work of measurement, analysis and drawing that would turn him into the leading...
...from Rome that Palladio got his most typical device: the temple-like portico in front of his buildings supporting a triangular pediment. He had seen it on temples like the Pantheon; in an odd but characteristic misapprehension, Palladio guessed that this stately entrance had come from the lost dwellings of antiquity. "I thought it most convenient," he explained, "to begin with the houses of private persons, as thinking it reasonable to believe that these in time gave rise to public edifices." So if the temple was a magnified house, a house could look like a temple. No solution could have...
Light in Parenthesis. Formal and rational as a Mondrian, Palladio's planning is mathematics made concrete, a triumph of that certezza that was the goal of high Renaissance planning. When arguing that the ideal church plan should be circular-"the most proper figure to show the unity, infinite essence, uniformity and justice of God"-Palladio echoed a longstanding Renaissance fascination with absolute geometric shapes as metaphor. His purism was extreme. It is strange, for instance, to find an architect in 16th century Venice, a contemporary of Veronese (who frescoed the Barbaro villa), objecting to murals in churches-"Among...