The London Traveler

Andrea Palladio’s life spans most of the sixteenth century, from 1508 to 1580, and he was an inheritor of all the ideals of the Italian Renaissance.

If you want to see the best of his work, you have to go to Venice, or to Vicenza. His churches and public buildings, and above all his wonderful villas in the North Italian countryside, are gems of geometrical perfection - architecture that is reasoned, measured, and completely under control, but which is also elegant, civilised and warm.

For the next few months, though, you’ll be able to see Palladio’s work in an exhibition at the Royal Academy. While it’s not quite the same as seeing the buildings themselves, the exhibits are impressive.

There are large scale models of some of the buildings - including the famed Villa Capra known as ‘La Rotonda’, a domed villa with porticoes on all four sides that seems to be influenced as much by the Roman Pantheon or the Castel Sant’Angelo as by domestic architecture.  Computer animations mimic the experience of walking through a Palladian building. It’s not quite the same as taking the real world trip, but it’s a huge advance on looking at pictures in books.

You can also see some of Palladio’s own drawings for his projects - as well as later views of his buildings by artists like Canaletto.

While Palladio’s career as a practising architect was restricted to North Italy, he wielded huge influence on later generations of architects across Europe through his books on architecture - the ‘Four Books’. They’re a DIY guide - classical architecture for Dummies - text-light, and full of pictures and diagrams. It’s full of practical information too - where to put the stables, or the kitchen. And the Books, too, figure largely in the exhibition.

You also get the bonus of portraits by Titian, Veronese and Tintoretto - showing Palladio’s clients, who also patronised the great Venetian painters of the century.

You do have to be a teensy bit of an architecture nerd to get full value out of this exhibition, I think. (I haven’t seen the London exhibition yet but it was exhibited in Vicenza, and will move on to America later; I’m assuming it’s pretty much the same as in Vicenza.) Still, I am an architecture nerd so I’m going to enjoy it.

And the lovely thing about seeing the real Palladio in London is that he had a massive impact on later English architecture. Although only Inigo Jones really picked up the Palladian style in the seventeenth century - Wren, Hawksmoor and Vanbrugh took architecture off on a Baroque tangent from about 1660 to 1700 - later architects discovered Palladio’s pure classical values and put them into practice in a series of fine houses. In my next few posts I’ll be looking at some of these Palladian works that you can visit in and around London.

And you know, I don’t think London would be anything like what it is today without Palladio. You can make a good case that it was Palladio’s style, trickling down from the great houses to the speculative builder, that created the Georgian town house - the superb squares of Fitzrovia, the terraces of Bloomsbury.

Where: The Royal Academy, Piccadilly

When: 31 January to 13 April 2009

How much: £10.50 adult, and various concessions

Photo credit - Patrick Denker on Flickr