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A Vicenza is a pleasant, prosperous city in the Veneto, 60km west of Venice. Its grand families settled and farmed the area from the 16th century. But its principal claim to fame is Andrea Palladio, who is such an influential architect that a neoclassical style is known as Palladian. The city is a permanent exhibition of some of his finest buildings, and as he was born – in Padua, to be precise – 500 years ago, the International Centre for the Study of Palladio’s Architecture has an excellent excuse for mounting la grande mostra, the big show.
B The exhibition has the special advantage of being held in one of Palladio’s buildings, Palazzo Barbaran da Porto. Its bold façade is a mixture of rustication and decoration set between two rows of elegant columns. On the second floor the pediments are alternately curved or pointed, a Palladian trademark. The harmonious proportions of the atrium at the entrance lead through to a dramatic interior of fine fireplaces and painted ceilings. Palladio’s design is simple, clear and not over-crowded. The show has been organised on the same principles, according to Howard Burns, the architectural historian who co-curated it.
C Palladio’s father was a miller who settled in Vicenza, where the young Andrea was apprenticed to a skilled stonemason. How did a humble miller’s son become a world-renowned architect? The answer in the exhibition is that, as a young man, Palladio excelled at carving decorative stonework on columns, doorways and fireplaces. He was plainly intelligent, and lucky enough to come across a rich patron, Gian Giorgio Trissino, a landowner and scholar, who organised his education, taking him to Rome in the 1540s, where he studied the masterpieces of classical Roman and Greek architecture and the work of other influential architects of the time, such as Donato Bramante and Raphael.
