Andrea Palladio

By ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

New York
The most universally admired, widely emulated, eternally influential and consistently bowdlerized and degraded of all architects is Andrea Palladio, born Andrea di Pietro in Vicenza in 1508, whose rise from simple stonecutter to master of the principles of classical antiquity made him the most celebrated builder of his time and forever thereafter. His work and reputation have continued to resonate throughout the centuries and the world.

Andrea Palladio's Buildings

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A present-day shot of the iconic Villa Almerico Capra Valmarana, known as La Rotonda, in Vicenza.

A fortuitous confluence of circumstances guaranteed his fame. He was, of course, sublimely talented. This was the moment when the buildings and artifacts of ancient Greece and Rome were being rediscovered as a source of artistic inspiration, initiating what we know as the Renaissance, which also changed everything forever.
The only surviving Roman text on architecture was the treatise written by Vitruvius in the first century B.C., and although it contained abundant rules and instructions, its illustrations had been lost. Through careful, and often conjectural reconstruction of Vitruvius's descriptions, Palladio established the standard for the way Renaissance architects saw and used the buildings of the ancient world. But he took his own admiration for classical precedents beyond their literal imitation to a new level and an elegant new style.
All that Palladio learned from Vitruvius and from two later trips to Rome in the 1540s became the basis of the most influential books on architecture ever written, his Quattro Libri dell'Architettura, published in Venice in 1570. Translated into French in 1650 and retranslated into English in 1663, with expanded English versions in 1715 and 1720, Palladio's "Four Books of Architecture" became an essential part of every distinguished library, including that of Thomas Jefferson, who helped himself liberally to their examples. They remain text and model to the present day.
For Palladio, the Quattro Libri served both a polemical and a promotional purpose. While they were meant to spread the gospel of the new classicism, they were illustrated with examples of his own work, which served as presentation drawings for potential clients. (Some things don't change—the profusely illustrated two-ton coffee-table tomes put out by today's architects have the same purpose but lack the redeeming larger theme.)
The fact that Palladio's drawings still exist may well be due to the English passion for collecting all things Greek and Roman or of later, classical inspiration and carting them back home (the contested Elgin marbles, for one conspicuous example). Many of Palladio's drawings were brought to England by Inigo Jones in 1614, with more retrieved by Lord Burlington in 1719; all are now in the collection of the Royal Institute of British Architects in London.
Thirty-one of these rare drawings, on loan from the RIBA, are on display in this country for the first time at New York's Morgan Library & Museum in "Palladio and His Legacy: A Transatlantic Journey." The exhibition traces the course of the Anglo-Palladianism inspired by the books and drawings that swept Britain in the 18th century and quickly crossed the ocean to the U.S., to be adopted immediately by a young country seeking an appropriate national identity.
Sponsored by the RIBA Trust and the Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio in Vicenza, the show also features handsome new models and some of the earliest publications of Palladio's work from the RIBA's and the Morgan's collections, including Lord Burlington's own copy of the Quattro Libri. A number of the drawings are supplemented by exquisite, small, bas-relief facades mounted on the wall beside them.
Seeing the original ink-and-wash drawings made almost 500 years ago, with Palladio's handwritten notes, often done on the site, erases the centuries; they create a miraculous fusion of the distant past and immediate present, a kind of aesthetic time warp that brings the man and his moment wonderfully alive. The hand of the artist and the ink on the page connect instantly with the eye, mind and heart of the viewer. There is an intimacy, a sense of the architect's presence that no reproduction can achieve.
As important archives go online and the original works of art remain in zealously protective conditions, the tradeoff for universal accessibility is the loss of this direct contact with the authentic work for the deeply personal and moving experience that is what looking at art will always be about. A glossy image on a computer screen is a poor substitute for the real thing.
Another reason to see this show is the exemplary scholarship and comprehensible labels that offer generous information for both the specialist and the layman, to the extent of the visitor's desire or energy to absorb it. But the best reason of all is the way these seductively beautiful drawings reveal the real Palladio, as opposed to all the pallid imitations that have followed.

Palladio & His Legacy

The Morgan Library & Museum
Through Aug. 1

The exhibition starts with Palladio's investigations of Vitruvius's incomplete texts and proceeds to his own interpretations, from ideas or freehand sketches; to the use of instruments for precise measurements and proportions; and, finally, to presentation drawings that indicate light, shade, depth and detailed ornamentation.
There are drawings and models of iconic buildings like the Villa Rotonda in Vicenza, a pilgrimage point for architects from Inigo Jones to Le Corbusier, and the formal villas in the working farmland of the Veneto region, linked to the outbuildings that serve as storage barns in stunning, symmetrical, classical compositions—a serenely beautiful arrangement, as the Morgan label diplomatically notes, "more often informed by architectural criteria than by functional logic." (Have I mentioned that some things never change?)
What happened to American Palladianism after that transatlantic journey is a fascinating story. It began impressively, with Jefferson's first version of Monticello and his proposal for the Virginia State Capitol, James Hoban's competition-winning design for the White House, and aristocratic plantations like Drayton Hall, just outside of Charleston, S.C.—all early, ambitious versions of the popular Palladian style.
This early efflorescence was followed by 19th-century builders who used pattern books derived from the original publications and spread columns, domes and porticos across the land in more modest bids for dignity and fashion. Classicism endured in state capitols, courthouses and financial institutions, with a final, extravagant burst in the Beaux Arts elaborations of the "White City" of Chicago's 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. It continued in a more chastened form well into the 20th century, from the imposing colonnaded facade of George P. Post's 1903 New York Stock Exchange to Cass Gilbert's Supreme Court and John Russell Pope's National Gallery of Art in Washington of the late 1930s.
But somewhere along the way, as American government and business bureaucracies grew, classicism was reduced to empty formulas and public and institutional buildings established a denatured, clichéd correctness with a horrible life of its own. Huge structures employed numbingly endless columns and redundant motifs in a debased version of the Palladian ideal that reduced a glorious tradition to embalmed monotony.
And it got worse. Increasingly remote from its origins, devoid of Palladio's superb understanding of scale, mass and detail and their subtle and delicate balance, the style was eviscerated and dumbed down to caricature in hack commercial versions. Shopping malls pasted on meaningless pediments and pilasters; advertisements for McMansions featured "palladium" windows. What was not dead on arrival was Disneyland.
Rejections and revivals of the classical tradition are an enduring part of architectural history, and architects will keep finding new ways to interpret its timeless appeal. Even Jefferson revised his design of Monticello after he had seen the latest neo-classicism in France. Tastes change; and taste and talent are not mutually exclusive. There will always be good buildings and bad buildings, and style is irrelevant to those critical relationships of proportion, plan and detail and to the mastery of the elusive elements that define our ideas of beauty and how we experience a building in its time and place. Whether it is "traditional" or "modern" is a specious argument at best.
But architectural golden ages are few and far between. The unique combination of historical, social, cultural and economic factors that brings an unprecedented time and talent together cannot be replicated; there is no way to recapture the magic moment that changes the course of art. Although Palladio's monuments will continue to influence and inspire, the golden age of Palladianism is past. Only those drawings bring it back to life.
Ms. Huxtable is the Journal's architecture critic.