Palladio

One crowded, layered drawing exhibited here shows a series of intricate façade studies meandering down the page and culminating at the bottom with a rendering of Andrea Palladio’s own left hand. It echoes a Titian portrait in an earlier room of the architect and artist Giulio Romano, who was perhaps the greatest influence on Palladio’s work. There, too, the eye is drawn to the architect’s hand, in this case holding a drawing. This focus on the hand and the drawn line is the affirmation that the architect is no longer merely a chief builder, but an artist, an alchemist capable of transforming inert, geological matter into cityscapes of intricate and organic beauty.
Venetian vision: ‘The Church of San Giorgio Maggiore’, by CanalettoPalladio (1508-80) became Britain’s most influential architect, although he never set foot here. And, through Britain’s appetite for empire, he became, arguably, the first globalised architect. From London’s Chiswick House and Horse Guards Parade to the White House and Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello in the US to the chilly perfection of St Petersburg, his influence straddles the world.
It seems curious that this most Italian of architects should have been proselytised through London. It happened through the acquisition of his drawings by Inigo Jones, architect to the courts of James I and Charles I. Jones’s own drawings for the city’s Banqueting House (1619-22) are included here, displaying an elegant, subdued Palladian stone façade that must have sat in astonishingly serene contrast to the dense brick and timber streets of London before its Great Fire in 1666. By then, Palladianism was enjoying a new lease of life, having been reinvented as a refined riposte to the Catholic excesses of the Baroque, which was in the ascendant in Palladio’s homeland.
What Jones began, Lord Burlington (1694-1753) continued. Buying up more drawings, dilettante architect Burlington remodelled his Piccadilly house in Palladian style, creating the venue for this show: the building that became the Royal Academy. Most of the drawings here belong to the Royal Institute of British Architects and constitute arguably the world’s most important collection of architectural material. And here, exposed to the public for the first time in a generation, it is easy to see why.
Palladio, unlike his aristocratic English successors, emerged from the dust of the building site. His understanding of detail, his endless formal invention, treating architecture as sculpture as much as structure, is visible in every façade and every quick-sketched column capital. Our image of his work is embodied in the pristine villas of the Veneto and in his Four Books, in which his designs are idealised for a global audience.
Model of venice’s Il Redentore churchYet equally interesting are his urban interventions. Many of his most impressive buildings work within constraints, recladding or inserting. The vast Basilica in Vicenza (begun in 1549), the town he transformed, sees him develop a language and rhythm of arcading flexible enough to accommodate the exigencies of the existing basilica and create a stunning loggia which, though appearing completely regular, is far from it. It also creates a very modern shopping mall. His plans for Venice’s Rialto encompassed a pair of civic piazzas for public debate (the public space takes precedence over the shops in his version) at either end of a glorious bridge never built yet imagined more than a century later by Canaletto in a wonderful caprice also on show here.
The architect’s churches, particularly San Giorgio Maggiore and Il Redentore, became the cornerstones of Canaletto’s Venetian visions, which give a wonderful lift to the sepia tones of the drawings.
And then there are the houses – the endless, theatrical invention of the villas Rotonda, Foscari, Chiericati and the others, the country home statements of the merchant class that so inspired British architects and in particular a stretch of the Thames in London from Chiswick to Richmond that became a northern Veneto. It ends with Palladio’s final building, the stunning Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza, the most theatrical of theatres, an internalised dream cityscape as influential as its own Roman precedents and a perfect epitaph.
This show, designed by architect and academician Eric Parry, is serious, scholarly and superb. Models, drawings, books and paintings are used to illustrate Palladio’s invention, skill and development of an architectural language that has survived through five centuries (re-emerging in post-modernism and a neo-Palladianism still stubbornly popular among country retreats of the merchant elite).
It is, perhaps, a little uncritical: Palladio’s theatricality occasionally led to a superficial architecture in which the house is reduced to a stage-set folly, a showpiece. But there is such depth here – a profile of an infinitely inventive magpie mind that could assimilate studies of Roman military formations into a villa plan or conjure ingenious everyday dwellings as easily as imagine an absurdly overblown mountain of classical detail – that you can forgive almost anything.

‘Andrea Palladio: His Life and Legacy’ runs from January 31 to April 13
www.royalacademy.org.uk