Palladianism

Palladianism. Classical style based on the architecture of the C16 Italian architect Andrea Palladio, disseminated primarily by his Quattro Libri dell'Architettura (The Four Books of Architecture—1570), which contained illustrations of his designs, described them and his ideas, and promoted his work. The first Palladian Revival was instigated by Inigo Jones in England in the reigns of James I and VI (1603–25) and Charles I (1625–49), having studied Palladio's buildings in Vicenza and its vicinity in 1613–14 as well as his publications, notably Le antichità di Roma (1554). Key buildings were the Queen's House, Greenwich (1616–35), the Banqueting House, Whitehall, London (1619–22), and the Queen's Chapel, St James's (1623–5). Certain features derived from Palladio's buildings appeared in the works of van Campen in The Netherlands (e.g. the plan reminiscent of Italian villas at the Mauritshuis, The Hague (1633–5)), and Holl in Germany (e.g. the restrained severity of the Town Hall, Augsburg (1615–20)), but the main source for these architects seems to have been Scamozzi. The second Palladian Revival of the early C18 began in Venetia (where it was evident in ecclesiastical and secular buildings) and in England (where it was mostly overt in domestic architecture, especially the grand country-house). The key figures of the English Revival were Colen Campbell and Lord Burlington, who also promoted a reappraisal of the first Revival led by Jones. As the high-priest of English Palladianism, Burlington not only designed exemplary buildings but promoted the interests of architects sympathetic to the cause and encouraged publications that established the architectural vocabulary and language that were to dominate (even tyrannize) taste for most of the century. Important in disseminating such elements as the temple-front and the serliana were Vitruvius Britannicus (1715–25) and Leoni's The Architecture of A. Palladio (1715–20) which remained the standard text-book until Ware's more scholarly tome of 1738. English Palladian ideals were exported, notably to Prussia (Knobelsdorff's Opera House on the Unter den Linden, Berlin (from 1741—based on Campbell's Wanstead House, Essex), was a fine example, although, influenced by Algarotti, Potsdam acquired variants on the Palazzi Thiene and Valmarana in 1750), Anhalt (Erdmannsdorff's Schloss Wörlitz (1769–73— very similar to L. Brown and Holland's Claremont House, Esher, Surrey)), Russia (the architecture of Cameron and Quarenghi), and the USA (the influence of Jefferson).

Bibliography

Ackerman (1966, 1967);
Boucher (1998);
J. Harris (1981, 1994);
Köster (1990);
Palladio (1570, 1965, 1997);
Parissien (1994);
Rykwert (1999);
Summerson (ed.) (1993);
Tavernor (1991);
Whitehill & and F. Nichols (1976);
Wittkower (1974a, 1998);
Worsley (1995)