The treatise that made Palladio the most imitated architect in history. Four books (on the orders and the elements of building, on houses, on public works, and on the temples of the ancients), illustrated with woodcuts of Palladio’s own buildings, dimensioned so that readers could build from them.
Andrea di Pietro della Gondola, a stonemason from Padua renamed “Palladio” by his humanist patron Gian Giorgio Trissino, built villas, palaces and churches across the Veneto. In 1570 he published his life’s work as a manual: short chapters of plain instruction, each followed by clear plates of plans, elevations and sections with figures in Vicentine feet.
What made the book so powerful was that it presented Palladio’s own designs as the natural continuation of antiquity. Through Inigo Jones in the seventeenth century and Lord Burlington and Isaac Ware in the eighteenth, it shaped English country houses, American plantation houses and public buildings, and Thomas Jefferson called it his bible.
The book, part by part
I Book I: The orders and the elements of building
Materials, foundations and walls; the five orders, each with its pedestal, base, capital and entablature; the diminution and swelling of columns; floors, ceilings and the seven most beautiful proportions for rooms; the heights of vaulted rooms by arithmetic, geometric and harmonic means; doors, windows, chimneys, stairs (including spiral and oval stairs) and roofs.
Rules: Palladio’s orders · The seven most beautiful room shapes · The height of a vaulted room · Rooms paired about the axis · Stronger below, lighter above
II Book II: Private houses
The houses of the ancients (the Greek and Roman house as Palladio reconstructs it) and Palladio’s own palaces in Vicenza and villas on the mainland: the Rotonda, the Villa Barbaro at Maser, the Malcontenta, the Villa Emo, each with plan and elevation. The villa is a farm and a temple at once, its central block flanked by barchesse for farm work.
Rules: The temple front on the house · Rooms paired about the axis
III Book III: Public works
Streets and roads, bridges (including his timber truss bridges and the design for the Rialto), piazzas, and basilicas, among them his own Basilica in Vicenza with its loggias of serliane.
Rules: The Serliana
IV Book IV: The temples of the ancients
Measured reconstructions of Roman temples: the Pantheon, the temples of Fortuna Virilis, Vesta at Tivoli, Mars Ultor, the Maison Carrée at Nîmes and, as the only modern work admitted among the ancients, Bramante’s Tempietto.