Open your eyes

Palladio: His Life and Legacy
Royal Academy, until 13 April

In a truly civilised society, a basic understanding and appreciation of architecture would be taught in schools. After all, most of us spend a large portion of our lives in buildings. Yet you only have to look around you to see that architecture is dishonoured and despised in England. How have we come to this? We have a good share of fine buildings scattered about the land, and even poor desperate built-upon London retains quite a few architectural marvels. Why then are we prepared to accept almost without comment acres of disfiguring ugliness? I refuse to believe that the English have no visual sense — though this is often said of our triumphantly literary nation. No, I think it’s more to do with using our eyes and forming our own judgments. Somewhere we lost faith in our ability to assess the visual.

An exhibition of the quality and enjoyableness of Palladio at the RA should do something to reaffirm an interest in buildings. Most architectural shows are boring — full of plans and elevations not always easy to decipher— but this one is a feast. Not just because the drawings are clear and of a very high quality, but because there are a quantity of beautiful architectural models made from beech and lime with porcelain biscuit details, a number of fine paintings and, last but by no means least, the exhibition has been designed, by Eric Parry Architects, with a fitting elegance and clarity. I have only one quibble, though it’s quite a serious one: the labelling is not always legible. White lettering on a grey ground may look good, but it’s not easy to read. This slightly mars the experience of visiting the show, but makes it important to sit down afterwards with the catalogue (another weighty tome, £27.95 in paperback), and think about what you have seen.

Actually, a much better short guide is available to the general public at £3.95 (while stocks last), and free to teachers and full-time students with an exhibition ticket. This introduction has been written with admirable concision by Kate Goodwin, and is an excellent aide-memoire to the show. As you discover more about Andrea Palladio (1508–80), and his great gifts for reinterpreting the glories that were Rome in a contemporary idiom, you begin to see his influence around you. It is immensely fitting that this exhibition should be at the Academy, as Burlington House is Palladian, or rather 17th century remodelled in the Palladian style. The restyling was carried out by Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington, a distinguished amateur architect who also built the eminently Palladian Chiswick House.

The exhibition opens with El Greco’s quietly dignified portrait of Palladio, hung to the right of the entrance, with a fragment of Books III–IV of Palladio’s own great treatise The Four Books of Architecture (1570), in a display case below. In this first room are a number of eye-catching artefacts and models, including a superb Istrian stone carving of the city of Padua. Palladio was born 500 years ago in Padua, and the area with which he is most closely associated is the Veneto in north-eastern Italy, that territory surrounding Venice and including Verona and Vicenza as well as Padua. In fact it was Vicenza, the rich tributary state of Venice, that became the Palladian heartland, the cradle of his greatest achievements.

Palladio apprenticed as a stone-mason (see Bassano’s painting ‘The Tower of Babel’ for an idea of his duties) and was dedicated to architecture from an early age, unlike those artists-turned-architects Michelangelo and Raphael, who never exercised the same influence over architecture as Palladio, however brilliant their interventions in building design. Palladio was to become both theoretician and practitioner, totally devoted to building, and was very fortunate to have been taken up by scholar and amateur architect Giangiorgio Trissino. Trissino introduced him to the ideas and principles of the great Roman architect Vitruvius, and took him to study at first hand in Rome. It was from Vitruvius that Palladio got the key to his own system of proportion, which was based on the human body. From this he evolved a simple rational language of architecture, noted for its grace and beauty, its clarity and dignity. Classical in origin, it adapted traditional ideas and reinterpreted them with a sure touch, introducing the triangular pediment to domestic architecture (shocking at the time) and designing villas with barrel-vaulted halls, large loggias and entry flights of stairs more familiar from churches or ancient temples.

Palladio became brilliant at orchestrating façades, adept at the intervals between windows, pediments and arcades, a genius with space. His villas suited the paintings of Veronese, who frescoed the Villa Barbara for instance, the building depicted in his ‘Susanna and the Elders’ to be found in the second room of the exhibition. Elsewhere there’s a Titian and several Canalettos, continuing the theme of portraits of the people and places under discussion. There are exquisite drawings throughout, some highly finished for presentation, others freely composed to explore ideas. There are account books and a beautiful set of 16th-century Italian drawing instruments made of steel damascened with gold and silver. It’s a splendid show.

Inigo Jones (1573–1652) visited Vicenza and brought back many of Palladio’s drawings to England, reinterpreting his ideas in his own masterpiece, the Banqueting House in Whitehall. Thomas Jefferson imported Palladian ideals to the public buildings of youthful America. Although Palladio is often called the architects’ architect, his best buildings — such as Villa Capra (‘La Rotonda’) and San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice — exercise a mesmeric effect on anyone with eyes to see. Even that strict modernist Le Corbusier was influenced by him. Open your eyes to Palladio and see the world about you with renewed care.