O 1508-1580 Andrea Palladio 1508-1580 ANDREA PALLADIO 1508-1580 ANDREA PALLADIO 1508-1580 First published in 2010 by The Embassy of Italy. Designed by: David Hayes. Typeface: Optima. Photographer: Pino Guidolotti. Photographer Lucan House: Dave Cullen. © The Embassy of Italy 2011. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be copied, reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, broadcast or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without prior permission of the copyright owners and the publishers. Lucan House, Co. Dublin Palladianism and Ireland NDREA PALLADIO GAVE HIS NAME to a style of architecture, Palladianism, whose most obvious Afeatures – simple lines, satisfying symmetry and mathematical proportions – were derived from the architecture of antiquity and particularly that of Rome. From the seventeenth century onwards Palladianism spread across Europe, with later examples to be found as far afield as America, India and Australia. Irish Palladianism has long been recognised as a distinctive version of the style. Editions of Palladio’s Quattro Libri dell’Architettura were second in popularity only to editions of Vitruvius amongst the Irish architects and dilettanti of the eighteenth century but, fittingly, it was another Italian, Alessandro Galilei, who may be said to have introduced the style to Ireland at Castletown, Co. Kildare (under construction from 1722). Thus began a rich tradition of Palladianism in Irish country house architecture, with notable examples at Bellamont Forest, Co. Cavan (c.1730), Russborough, Co. Wicklow (1742), and Lucan House, Co. Dublin (1773), now the Residence of the Ambassador of Italy. Ireland can also boast, in the facade of the Provost’s House, Trinity College Dublin, the only surviving example of a building erected to a design by Palladio outside his native Italy. The facade is closely derived from an unexecuted design by the master, previously used by Lord Burlington for the now demolished London house of General Wade. John Smyth, the architect of the Provost’s House (see page 28), also directly modelled his St. Thomas’s Church, Marlborough Street, Dublin (destroyed 1922), on Palladio's church of the Redentore, Venice. However, it was through the native genius of Sir Edward Lovett Pearce that Palladianism received perhaps its most distinctive Irish manifestation. A discerning critic of Palladio, Pearce had toured the Veneto in 1724 with the Quattro Libri as his guide. In the advanced European classicism of his Parliament House (now Bank of Ireland), College Green, Dublin (1729), Pearce created a distinctive and superb interpretation of the style. Pearce’s Parliament House was in turn admired and imitated through the years, with echoes and reflections of his Palladian inspired classicism to be found in a range of buildings from Thomas Cooley’s Royal Exchange (now City Hall), Dublin (1769), to James Gandon’s Four Courts, Dublin (1785), and on to Sir Aston Webb’s florid Government Buildings, Upper Merrion Street, Dublin (1904). It is the very richness of the vein of Palladianism in Ireland that makes this Irish exhibition of the original source material – the buildings of Palladio himself – so relevant and exciting. 5 6 Biography of Andrea Palladio NDREA PALLADIO (1508-1580) WAS ONE of the most influential architects in recent centuries. He was a central figure in architectural history who linked ancient Aarchitecture to the building skills of the late Middle Ages and to the growing demand for residential buildings representative of the modern age. Palladio looked at the Hellenistic and Roman worlds in his studies of ruins and ancient writings on architecture. But in his own buildings he transformed what he had learnt from antiquity into forms and types – such as the villa – that were capable of satisfying the needs of his own times and of the centuries to come. Palladio conferred a new dignity on domestic architecture, even on relatively economical town and country homes. He rationalized and refined his projects from a functional point of view. But he did more. His buildings changed the way their owners lived and represented themselves. The importance of his architecture and of his treatise, I Quattro Libri dell’Architettura (Venice 1570), was comparable to Baldassarre Castiglione's Il Cortigiano in defining a ‘gentleman’, a very different figure from the feudal landowner concerned essentially with feats on the battlefield or with hunting. With Palladio, the house, whether in the city or country, became the building in which the architect could best display his skill, not least by satisfying the owner's personal needs without neglecting the rules of good architecture. Palladio’s work constituted a broadening of the architectural compass both from the social point of view and in terms of building types. His architecture reached out towards rich merchants and untitled landowners, anticipating the later expansion of an architecturally aware middle class in England and Holland. Palladio drew up plans for buildings with apartments in Venice and for farm outbuildings in the country. He was not a court architect and his living did not depend on one single patron unlike his immediate predecessors and contemporaries (Bramante, Raphael, Giulio Romano, Michelangelo and Vignola) who mainly worked for popes and rulers. He designed buildings at the client’s request, especially churches and patrician homes. Palladio was an excellent designer of churches and of public buildings, but his day to day activity was always associated with designing houses. Palladio’s fame and influence do not depend only on his built works but also on the Quattro Libri in which he explains and illustrates the essential grammar and language of his architecture, and in which he published many of his own works and commented on them. The presence of many of his drawings in England (since 1614 when Inigo Jones brought them with him from Vicenza), including plans for buildings that were never realized, had a profound impact on British architecture. The expansion of the middle class in Europe and North America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries led to great demand for functional, comfortable and elegant houses. Palladio’s architecture – summarized in his book – offered guidelines and specific models for the new architecture. 7 Palladio in the Veneto 8 Palazzo Thiene - Vicenza In October 1542, Marcantonio and Adriano Thiene began the renovation of the fifteenth-century family palazzo, with a grandiose project which was to cover an entire block measuring 54 x 62 metres, facing onto Vicenza’s main artery (today’s Corso Palladio). Rich and powerful, the sophisticated Thiene brothers were members of the Italian nobility and were at home in the main European courts: they therefore required an appropriate setting for their cosmopolitan status and for the nobility of their guests. At the same time, they wanted to underline their role in the city with a princely palazzo, a sign of indisputable patrician power. In 1614, during a visit to the building, the English architect, Inigo Jones, noted a piece of information given to him directly by Vincenzo Scamozzi and Palma il Giovane: ‘these plans were by Giulio Romano and executed by Palladio’. It is quite possible that the design of Palazzo Thiene can be attributed to the mature and expert Giulio Romano (who had been in Mantua since 1523 at the Gonzago court with which the Thiene family maintained very close relations) and that the young Palladio was probably responsible for overseeing the erection of the building, especially after Giulio’s death in 1546. The elements of the building referable to Giulio and alien to Palladio’s language are clearly recognizable: the four-column atrium is substantially identical to the one in Palazzo del Te (even if the vault system was definitely modified by Palladio). So too are the windows and the lower part of the façade on the road and in the courtyard, while the trabeations and capitals of the piano nobile were certainly by Palladio. Work on the building began in 1542. Giulio Romano was in Vicenza for two weeks in December in that same year for a consultation on the Loggias of the Basilica, and it was probably on that occasion that he provided his outline drawings for Palazzo Thiene. The work proceeded slowly: the date 1556 is carved on the outside façade while the date 1558 appears in the courtyard. Adriano Thiene died in France in 1552 and shortly afterwards, when Marcantonio’s son Ottavio became Marquis of Scandiano, the family’s interests moved to the Ferrara area. Only a small part of the grandiose project was therefore completed, but it is probable that neither the Venetians nor the other Vicentine nobles would have accepted a private palace on this scale in the heart of the town. 9 Villa Pojana - Pojana Maggiore, Vicenza This villa was commissioned from Palladio by the Vicentine, Bonifacio Pojana. The project probably dates from the end of the 1540s and the work was finished by 1563 when the internal decoration by the painters, Bernardino India and Anselmo Canera and by the sculptor Bartolomeo Ridolfi had been completed. Both in the Quattro Libri and in Palladio’s autograph drawings, the villa is always treated as part of a global project for the reorganization and regularization of the surrounding area with its extensive yards. The only part of this project to be built, however, was the long barchessa on the left of the villa, with Doric capitals but Tuscan intercolumns. It seems that here Palladio was seeking the utilitarian logic of the architecture of ancient baths, with an extraordinarily concise language in its forms, abstract and almost metaphysical. The absence of orders and worked stone (with the exception of the portals of the loggia) must have made the work as a whole quite economical to build.