At Home - Bill Bryson [156]
The person responsible for all this architectural prescience was a stonemason named Andrea di Pietro della Gondola, who in 1524, aged not quite sixteen, arrived in Vicenza from his native Padua. There he befriended an influential aristocrat, Giangiorgio Trissino. Had it not been for this lucky acquaintanceship, the young man would very probably have passed his life as a dusty hewer of stone, his genius unplumbed, and the world today would be a very different-looking place. Happily for posterity, Trissino perceived some talent worth nurturing within the boy. He brought him into his home, had him schooled in mathematics and geometry, took him to Rome to see the great buildings of antiquity, and put before him every other possible advantage that would allow him to become the greatest, most confident, most improbably influential architect of his age. In the course of things, Trissino also bestowed upon him the name by which we all know him now: Palladio, after Pallas Athene, the goddess of wisdom in ancient Greece. (Their relationship, I feel oddly bound to note, seems to have been entirely platonic. Trissino was a well-known ladies’ man, and his young mason was happily married and en route to becoming the father of five children. Trissino just liked Palladio a good deal. It seems that most people in Palladio’s life did.)
And so under the older man’s tutelage Palladio became an architect—an unusual step for someone of his background, for architects at that time normally began their careers as artists, not artisans. Palladio didn’t paint or sculpt or draw; he just designed buildings. But his practical training as a mason gave him one invaluable advantage: it permitted him an intimate understanding of structures, and allowed him, in the phrase of Witold Rybczynski, to understand the how of a building as much as the what.
Palladio’s was a classic case of right talents, right place, right time. Vasco da Gama’s epic voyage to India a quarter of a century earlier had broken Venice’s monopoly over the European end of the spice trade, undermining its commercial dominance, and now the wealth of the region was migrating inland. Suddenly there was a new breed of gentleman-farmers who had both wealth and architectural ambitions, and Palladio knew exactly how to take the one to satisfy the other. He began to dot Vicenza and the surrounding district with the most perfect and agreeable houses ever built. His particular genius lay in the ability to design buildings faithful to the classical ideals yet more beguiling and inviting, more endowed with comfort and élan, than the more severe ancient forms from which they derived. It was a reinvigoration of classical ideals, and the world would come to love it.
Palladio didn’t design many structures—a few palazzos, four churches, a convent, a basilica, two bridges, and thirty villas, of which only seventeen still stand today. Of the missing thirteen villas, four were never finished, seven were destroyed, one was never built, and one is missing and unaccounted for. Called the Villa Ragona, if it was ever built, it has never been found.
Palladio’s methods were based on rigorous adherence to rules and modeled on the precepts of Vitruvius, a Roman architect of the first century BC. Vitruvius wasn’t a particularly distinguished architect; he was really more of a military engineer. What made him valuable to history was the accidental fact that some of his writings survived—the only architectural text from classical antiquity to do so. A lone copy of Vitruvius’s work on architecture was found on a shelf at a monastery in Switzerland in 1415.
Vitruvius laid down exceedingly specific rules regarding proportions, orders, shapes, materials, and anything else that could be quantified. Formulas ruled everything in his world. The amount of spacing between columns in a row, say, could never be left to instinct