London,

Andrea Palladio: His Life And Legacy

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Royal Academy Of Arts
Burlington House, Piccadilly, W1J 0BD

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Description: A major exhibition of the 16th century Italian architect's works, including a number of large-scale models, computer imagery, animations and paintings in celebration of the quincentenary of his birth.

Phone: 0207300 8000
Website: www.royalacademy.org.uk

Trains: Tube: Green Park/Piccadilly Circus , Tube / Bus: 9, 14, 19, 22, 38,

Opening hours: Mon-Sun 10am-6pm (Fri until 10pm)

Extra info: Food, Party Hire, Pub

 

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Palladio the pedant

 

Heaven-sent: Palladio’s Church of San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice, by Canaletto. The building was loathed by John Ruskin, who described it as “barbarous”, “childish in conception”, “servile in plagiarism” and “insipid in result”

Homage: Chiswick House in west London, in the style of Palladio

Home: a model of his Villa Rotonda outside Vicenza, a construction that was a man-made complement to the natural landscape

Architects’ architect: Andrea Palladio by El Greco

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Andrea Palladio was an architect of exceptional grace and skill. His villas and churches are balanced, confident, well made, well pitched. Weight and lightness are nicely tuned, and plainness and decoration, and brightness and shadow. They are well proportioned and sit on their sites, in North Italian fields, in city streets and on Venetian canals, as if they belong there.

Works such as the Villa Rotonda, poised and four-square on a little hill outside Vicenza, are man-made complements to the natural landscape. They are also full of ideas that became conventional but in the 16th century were brave and startling, like putting the pediment and colonnade of a Roman temple on the front of rural houses. 

Palladio was practical and serious, not your usual perverse and moody genius. He was not like Flaubert’s description of architects as “all idiots, they always forget to put stairs in the houses”. Apprenticed to stone-masons, he knew how buildings were built. He was concerned about controlling their costs, making them work and avoiding collapse or chunks dropping from over-ambitious cornices onto the street below. He thought about the best location for beds relative to windows, fireplaces and latrines, and developed engineering principles that lasted hundreds of years.

He studied, measured and drew ancient Roman buildings, not to copy them but to learn their principles. He even studied military formations, believing that a well-organised army was a better defence for a city than fortified walls. Unusually for an architect, he didn’t think construction was the answer to everything. He was public-spirited and believed that a man “should not just be born for his own ends but also to be useful to others” and published books so that others could learn from his discoveries.

The Royal Academy, in pitching its meticulous and beautiful new exhibition of drawings and models, calls him “the most significant figure in the history of Western architecture”. This begs to be challenged: how about Le Corbusier or Michelangelo, or Abbé Suger, the patron who launched Gothic architecture? Or Imhotep who, by stacking up burial mounds 5,000 years ago, invented the pyramid, and with it kicked off Western architecture altogether and, better than the peerages now awarded to leading architects, was made into a god?

Palladio is certainly, to quote another historian, “the most imitated architect in history”. Almost every house built in England from the 1720s to the 1830s bears his influence, and libraries, museums, banks and parliaments the world over borrow his arrangements of columns, pilasters and pediments to lend themselves dignity. From the tsars’ palace at Pavlovsk to the presidents’ residence of the White House, to classically styled McMansions in Texas, mock-Georgian homes in Weybridge and the radiator grille of a Rolls-Royce, the motifs and ideas of the studious Italian are endlessly imitated. When Michael Flatley desired a 60,000 sq ft house, the largest in Ireland, on Rossmore Island in County Kerry, the lord of Riverdance chose for it the style of the long dead Italian.

In England, Palladio was picked up with particular passion. Here he is venerated far more than in Italy, where he is seen as one of several great architects. When Inigo Jones brought Italian Renaissance architecture to Britain in the early 1600s, it was in Palladian form. A century later, aristocratic connoisseurs collected his drawings, translated his books and launched the all-conquering neo-Palladian style of architecture. Protestant Brits, nervous about learning from Catholic Rome, were more comfortable with an architect of the independent-minded Venetian Republic. 

Palladio invented a brand without meaning to, and without knowing what a brand is. Its elements were cylinders, triangles and rectangles in certain classical proportions and arrangements, usually rendered in white or off-white. From the beginning, the brand signified dignity, quality and authority and evolved over time into class, poshness and status.

All of which is not bad for a man born into a modest family in Padua 500 years ago, who went on to build his career in the middling town of Vicenza before finishing it in Venice. And yet, going around the Royal Academy’s show, a niggling reservation first experienced in front of his buildings refuses to go away. It’s this: the admirable Palladio, so keen on measuring and ordering architecture, on making it safe and reasonable, became the prototype of the pedantic professional who has been the bane of the art ever since. 

Other Renaissance architects tended to be painters and sculptors, and for them architecture was fluid and playful, blurring and merging into scenography and garden design. In Palladio’s lifetime other architects created villas and gardens such as the Villa d’Este in Tivoli and the Villa Giulia in Rome, works which use water, vegetation, sculpture and art as well as building to create sensuous, dramatic places, full of invention and surprise.

Palladio’s buildings are more fixed and bounded. He is, as the Royal Academy puts it, “an architect’s architect”. His architecture refers to other architecture. His means are the hard stuff of buildings, their forms and details. He arrays columns and arches and pediments, piling them up in a way which is almost pompous, and expects us to be moved by them alone. Most people would find the Villa d’Este more delightful, so it is strange that its creator, Pirro Ligorio, is so much less famous than Palladio.

He is sensitive to light and material, which are the things that really make spaces sing, but is limited in his use of them. He uses water and planting very little, and painting and sculpture only in subordinate ways. His drawings, impressively arrayed at the Royal Academy, show a delicate touch but are also flat and factual. Standing in La Malcontenta recently, one of his most famous villas, I found myself more intrigued by its frescos of tumbling giants by middling Venetian artists than by its slightly arid and fussy elevations.

A telling moment in the Academy’s exhibition comes with Palladio’s designs for the Doge’s Palace in Venice, which had been damaged by fire in 1574. Palladio wanted to rebuild it with a façade of Classical respectability. Luckily he was overruled, and the medieval palace, with its rippling tracery and its silk-like wall of patterned pink-and-white marble, was restored. If Palladio had had his way, one of the most beautiful and famous views in the world would have been made more boring.

I wouldn’t go as far as John Ruskin, who hated Palladio’s impact on Venice. In his gloriously deranged prose, he said of the church of San Giorgio Maggiore that it was “impossible to conceive a design more gross, more barbarous, more childish in conception, more servile in plagiarism, more insipid in result, more contemptible under every point of rational regard”. But the Doge’s Palace reveals the things that Palladio left out. It has an easier grace and it gives more direct pleasure than Palladio’s buildings. No sane person would now want to swap it for the latter’s parade of classical columns.

Palladio can’t be held responsible for his imitators but in succeeding centuries his style was used to replace more vital and imaginative work. In the early 18th century, England had the brooding geniuses of Nicholas Hawksmoor and Sir John Vanbrugh, who were swatted out of fashion by the more pallid architecture of the Palladian connoisseurs. Being aristocrats, they lacked the artisanal craftsmanship that is one of Palladio’s best features. Now his style is used by the Michael Flatleys of this world as a shorthand for class.

The Royal Academy’s show is as serious and intelligent a survey of Palladio’s work as you could wish for. It draws on magnificent collections of drawings in Vicenza, Venice and, thanks to those aristocratic English collectors, London. It also displays a series of impressive models, first made for an exhibition in Italy in the Seventies and since augmented. It shows, as an exhibition should do, the artist’s mind and hand at work.

It is refreshingly free of interpretative gimmicks, although a few more photographs and films, for those who don’t know the buildings, would not have hurt. Non-specialist visitors will want to glide over some of the more technical drawings but they should still go. Outside the Veneto there will never be a better chance to understand the work of someone who, despite reservations, was a great architect.

Andrea Palladio: His Life and Legacy is at the Royal Academy (0870 848 8484, www.royalacademy.org.uk) until 13 April. Daily 10am-6pm (Friday 10pm, Saturday 9pm). Admission £10.50, concessions available. We have 200 tickets to the exhibition to give away — to apply for a pair, visit standard.co.uk/rewards. Terms apply.
BRIAN SEWELL RETURNS NEXT MONTH

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