Andrea Palladio was no Palladian. The “Palladian style” was celebrated throughout the Western world, yet the Master,s own works fir few of the formulas…
…And here for the first time in the history of mankind, was an architecture that had not been produced by the political,economic, religious, social, and cultural conditions of the day and place, but had been lifted out of another age, so distant as to seem ideal. The discrepancy was so glaring that it must have struck everyone. In the contemporary setting, ancient architecture was bound to look fictitious, hence also factitious. Antiquity, hailed as the answer, thus turned out to be the problem. Although acclaimed as the very essence of reality and as the materialization of nature’s laws, when applied by its advocates to contemporary purposes it turned into something that seemed illusory and artificial.
—One of Palladio’s most beautiful buildings is the Palazzo Chiericati in Vicenza. click image for source…
Not so at first. During the Florentine phase of the Renaissance the actual forms of antiquity mattered less than the principles which caused them to be beautiful. They were the principles of mathematics, or rather those proportions and ratios which, as Pythagoras had discovered two thousand years earlier, mathematics shared with musical harmony. It was the fitting definition of Schelling’s definition of architecture as “frozen music.” Proportion was even regarded as yet another manifestation of God; divine proportion sent from the heavens, the sort of arguments acceptable to the most orthodox theologian.
And that in a way, was the trouble with such criteria. They remained too abstract, too intellectual. The rules could not be understood without telling examples. Those examples existed and were being unearthed with growing speed: the buildings of ancient Rome. They came to be viewed, one might say, as the historical incarnation of the Eternal Laws. But with the concrete exhumation of antiquity, the discrepancy between it and the modern setting became overt. And it is in his attitude towards this incongruity that Palladio manifests his true greatness.
—Opposite the enormous Basilica is this very pretty ‘loggia’ designed by Palladio in 1571 to take the place of a medieval building which was the residence of the ‘capitano’, the highest Venetian authority in Vicenza. Constructed on two levels and incorporating huge ‘composite’ columns it does give the impression of being a rather grand triumphal arch. The red brick and white stucco does give it an interesting depth and the niches contain two statues, one representing a god of naval victory and the other of peace.—click image for source…
Paladio chose to face these problems through a method of total contradiction, such as connecting inner with outer structures. The solving of the problem was rendered acceptable through his celebrated “Palladian motifs”, often tall central arches flanked by smaller rectangular apertures. such that our attention ends up neglecting the unaccented and irregular in contrast to the classical image. ( to be continued)…
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