Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2008/05/04/palladio_in_the_hood.php

Palladio in the Hood

Sunday, May 4, 2008

Lost amidst the chaos that ensued after the Hood Museum’s now-infamous “Hip-Hop in the Hood” exhibition debut, the five hundredth anniversary of the birth of Italian architect Andrea Palladio (1508-1580) continues to be celebrated in both Rauner Special Collections Library and on the first floor of the Hood, overlooked by the student body. In an attempt to raise awareness of the event, the Hood recently hosted Ms. Tracy Cooper, Associate Professor at the Tyler School of Art of Temple University, who lectured on the topic “Palladio and the Politics of Classical Architecture.”

A much quieter celebration than the Black Womanhood exhibit upstairs (neither 50 Cent nor Timbaland was to be heard in the Albright Gallery where the Palladio piece is displayed), the Hood features English artist Charles Cameron’s study of the baths of Rome. This study is most dependent upon Palladio’s drawings, engravings of which Cameron found in English architect Lord Burlington’s 1730 publication Fabriche Antioche. The exhibit in Rauner Library displays three examples of the great master’s work: first, a 1567 edition of Vitruvius’ M. Vitruvii Pollionis de architectura libri decem, featuring illustrations by Palladio; second, a 1570 edition of Palladio’s master treatise I Quattro Libri dell’Architettura, which contains drawings and advice for builders; and third, the just-published Excerpts from the Four Books on Architecture, which features Palladio’s models, key passages which Palladio himself wrote, and analyses of his technique from sundry modern architects. “Webster Hall, with its Palladio-inspired interior and windows, is a particularly fit setting for a celebration of perhaps the most influential architect in Western history,” boasts the card at the Rauner display’s front.

— Palladio’s Il Redentore in Venice —

Unfortunately, the layman may not be familiar with the name of Andrea Palladio—after telling a fellow student that I was writing a review of the work of “perhaps the most influential architect in Western history,” the acquaintance then declared with a snort that he had never thought that much of Fallingwater anyway! The designs of Frank Lloyd Wright do not appear to have inspired an entire style of architecture as those of Palladio have done, however.

The style known as Palladian architecture owes much to the architect’s years spent studying ancient Roman (and to a lesser extent, Greek) buildings as a youthful mason. The style bearing his name figures prominently in the buildings of Inigo Jones and Thomas Jefferson, to name a few, constructed centuries after Palladio’s death. Palladio built only three types of buildings: urban palazzos, countryside villas, and, of course, churches. Most of his creations are in Venice, and Palladio built nothing outside of the Veneto region. The design for Villa La Rotunda, one of his most famous works, is on display in Rauner. Not only is the building itself fascinating, but the viewer can also see the architect’s painstaking diagrams, arrows, and mathematical calculations that accompany the illustrations of his trademark porticos and arch-topped windows. How did a man who built only within the confines of a relatively tiny Italian region leave a permanent imprint upon the shaping of European architecture?

It is likely Palladio would have remained an entirely local sensation had it not been for his Four Books of Architecture. This work catapulted the architect to fame and served to spread his influence far beyond Veneto, where the entirety of his oeuvre was located. Jefferson acquired a copy of Palladio’s Four Books of Architecture shortly after he began teaching himself Italian in 1764, when he purchased an Italian-English dictionary and the works of Machiavelli. Palladio’s treatise caused the ever-curious Jefferson’s interest in architecture to burgeon. In fact Jefferson later referred to the work as his Bible, and he appears to have devoted himself to it during his time not spent in public office. “Architecture is my delight and putting up and pulling down one of my favorite amusements,” Jefferson remarked only two years before he died. Judging by the extent to which the University of Virginia’s Rotunda is a clear homage to Palladio and the Pantheon in Rome, Jefferson was hardly exaggerating.

Although he was by no means a professional architect, Jefferson nonetheless made a significant impact upon the design of many buildings in Washington. A telling example is a somewhat bossy suggestion he once made in 1804 to Benjamin Latrobe, the architect who was beginning to sketch early designs of the Capitol building: “Would it not be best to make the internal columns of well-burnt brick, moulded in portions of circles adapted to the diminution of the columns? Burlington, in his notes on Palladio, tells us that he found most of the buildings erected under Palladio’s direction, and he described in his architecture, to have their columns made of brick in this way and covered with stucco. I know an instance of a range of six or eight columns in Virginia, twenty feet high, well proportioned and properly diminished, executed by a common bricklayer. The bases and capitals would of course be of hewn stone.”

Although he was confined to Italy during his own lifetime, Andrea Palladio’s influence remains pervasive in Western architecture, appearing even in some of America’s most significant buildings. The modest displays of Signor Palladio’s works at Rauner Library and the Hood Museum have none of the PR frenzy of “Hip-Hop in the Hood,” but we nevertheless owe it to ourselves, and to Thomas Jefferson, to give the exhibits at least a cursory study, thus commemorating the life of an extraordinary artist about whom the general public curiously seems to have forgotten.