At Home - Bill Bryson [157]
The height of all oblong rooms should be calculated by adding together their measured length and width, taking one half of this total, and using the result for the height. But in the case of exedrae or square oeci, let the height be brought up to one and a half times the width.… The height of the tablinum at the lintel should be one eighth more than its width. Its ceiling should exceed this height by one third of the width. The fauces in the case of smaller atriums should be two thirds, and in the case of larger one half, the width of the tablinum.… Let the busts of ancestors with their ornaments be set up at a height corresponding to the width of the alae. The proportionate width and height of doors may be settled, if they are Doric, in the Doric manner, and if Ionic, in the Ionic manner, according to the rules of symmetry which have been given about portals in the Fourth Book.
Palladio, following Vitruvius, believed that all rooms should be one of seven elementary shapes—one circular, one square, five rectangular—and that particular rooms needed always to be built in particular proportions. Dining rooms, for example, had to be twice as long as they were wide. These shapes alone made for pleasing spaces, though why they did exactly he didn’t say. (Neither, come to that, did Vitruvius.) In fact, however, Palladio followed his own precepts only about half the time. Some of the rules Palladio decreed are doubtful, in any case. The idea of a hierarchy among column types—Corinthian always above Ionic, and Ionic always above Doric—appears to be the invention of Sebastiano Serlio, a contemporary of Palladio’s. The rule isn’t mentioned by Vitruvius at all. Palladio also made one very fundamental error. He put a portico with columns on every villa he built, unaware that these were found only on Roman temples and never on homes. This is probably his most copied device and yet it is, from the perspective of fidelity, completely wrong. But it may also be the happiest error in architectural history.
Had he merely built a scattering of fine homes around Vicenza, Palladio’s name would never have become an adjective. What made him famous was a book published in 1570, toward the end of his life. Called I quattro libri dell’architettura (The Four Books of Architecture), it was partly a book of floor plans and elevations, partly a declaration of principles, and partly a collection of practical advice. It was full of rules and particulars—“Of the height of the rooms,” “Of the dimensions of the doors and windows”—but also useful tips. (For example: don’t place windows too near corners, for they weaken the overall structure.) It was the perfect book for gentlemen amateurs.
Palladio’s first and greatest champion in the English-speaking world was Inigo Jones, the theatrical designer and self-taught architect who discovered Palladio’s work on a visit to Italy twenty years after Palladio’s death and was smitten to the point of obsessiveness. He bought every Palladio drawing he could lay his hands on—some two hundred in all—learned to speak Italian, and even modeled his signature on Palladio’s. On his return to England, he began putting up Palladian buildings at every opportunity. The first was the Queen’s House in Greenwich, built in 1616. To modern eyes, it is a rather dull square block that brings to mind the central police station in a small midwestern city, but it was stunningly crisp and modern in Stuart England. Every building in the country suddenly seemed to belong to another, fussier age.
Palladianism became particularly associated with—and largely indistinguishable from—the Georgian period. This era of architectural orderliness began in 1714 with the accession of George I and lasted through the reigns of three more Georges and the son of a George, William IV, whose death in 1837 brought in Queen Victoria and a new dynastic era. In practice, of course, things were not that precise.