Andrea Palladio: The Architect in His Time - Hardcover

Boucher, Bruce

3.62

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9781558593817: Andrea Palladio: The Architect in His Time

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1558593810 ISBN 13: 9781558593817

Publisher: Abbeville Press, 1994

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Andrea Palladio was an Italian architect active in Venice in the 1500's. The Palladian style of architecture is named after him and he is considered to be one of the most influential in the history of architecture.

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Review:

This comprehensive volume on the most influential architects in Western history is meant to be, in the words of its author, "user-friendly." Bruce Boucher suggests that Andrea Palladio might "fit comfortably into a suitcase or a backpack for a trip to Vicenza," the city west of Venice where the 16th-century architect Palladio lived and where most of his villas stand.

For art historians and architects, Boucher effectively synthesizes the more than 30 years of research that has been accomplished since James Ackerman's seminal 1966 work on Palladio. Boucher's style is balanced and highly readable. In discussing the architect's bridges, he paraphrases Palladio's advice that "an even number of piers should be used because nature endows every creature with an even number of legs to support its weight." "This last observation," Boucher writes, "is typically Palladian in its appeal to the natural world as a justification of what was simply an aesthetic preference."

Thanks to the extraordinary photographs of Paolo Marton, you will find yourself dreaming of an Italian vacation even before you begin reading Boucher's text. Marton's pictures make the exteriors of Palladio's villas, churches, bridges, and palaces look as if they were appearing before us, bathed in fresh spring light and set against a startlingly blue sky. His interior exposures are minutely sensitive to shadow as well as to light, and Marton precisely captures the soaring, airy volumes of Palladio's incomparable spaces.

This perfectly designed book also includes photographs of the original floor plans and elevations, as well as several helpful addenda, such as maps showing the locations of Palladio's buildings, a glossary, and a chronology.

From the Back Cover:

More than any other architect in history, Andrea Palladio transformed the built landscape of the Western world. Elegant and powerful, his buildings won him acclaim in his lifetime and enduring fame in the four centuries since his death in 1589. His profound influence has crossed boundaries of both space and time; indeed, there are few major cities in the world without buildings that echo the crisp lines and impeccable design of his villas, palaces, and churches, and even the post-modernism of recent years can be seen as a reworking of themes first explored by Palladio. Though the great Renaissance architect's buildings have often been photographed and numerous specialized monographs have been written about his career, never before have his life and times been brought together in such a lively and comprehensive narrative as this volume. Richly illustrated with newly-commissioned photography as well as period plans and drawings, this book traces Palladio's rise from apprentice stonemason to a young intellectual engaged in a vivid debate about the importance of buildings in civic life. The book follows him through his first private residential commissions and the triumph of his Basilica in Vicenza, from the grand churches of San Giorgio Maggiore and the Redentore in Venice to the publication of his seminal Quattro Libri, or Four Books On Architecture, and culminates in the peerless villas that are associated with his name: the imposing Malcontenta and the aristocratic Rotonda. While the buildings are discussed in terms of their importance in art history, Palladio's remarkable career is also defined against the backdrop of the dramatic events and personalities of the age. Studying the pastwith an archaeologist's zeal, Palladio created an extraordinary series of buildings that deftly adapted the language of classical architecture to the requirements of sixteenth-century life. This handsome volume about Andrea Palladio, who has been revered and imitated for four hundred years, is indispensable not only for architects but for anyone with an interest in history and art.

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