Art: GLORY OF PALLADIO

ROME, my Mistress. Vitruvius, my Master, Architecture, my Life.” Such was the trinity acknowledged by Andrea Palladio (1518-80), a stonemason’s son from Vicenza, Italy, who grew up to rule over a whole generation of fellow architects and to recast the classic style of Rome and Greece with such elegance and authority that his Palladian style became one of the longest-lasting and most widely accepted personal idioms in the history of architecture. In an effort to preserve Pal-ladio’s work (many of his most beautiful structures were made of common brick and perishable stucco), the Italian government late last year appropriated more than $3,000,000. Highest priority items for the rehabilitation program are the most delightful of all Palladio’s creations—the villas he designed along the Brenta Canal and in the gently undulating plain of the Veneto region.

Rome Domesticated. Palladia was a master at building churches, convents and palaces. At 31 he walked off with a competition to reface the great medieval Basilica at Vicenza. His improvised solution—a two-story arcade made up of Doric and Ionic columns that frame intervening arches supported by free-standing columns—was so brilliantly successful that it has since been copied the length and breadth of Europe. A decade later he was the architect Venice turned to for the plans of San Giorgio Maggiore, one of the most beautiful, classically ordered churches in the city. But it was the country villas, built for a merchant aristocracy that had recently discovered the bucolic life, that impressed succeeding generations.

Designing them in masterful, detailed drawings, or working out the relations of masses with building blocks, Palladio took the massive, awe-inspiring design of classic Rome, domesticated it in terms of an intimate yet princely style. To oversee the construction of his villas (as many as four going up at the same time), Palladio floated leisurely up and down the Brenta on a splendid, gilded barge, equipped with a studio for his ten to twelve apprentices, shaded by a yellow-and-black linen awning. The villas that resulted won in later years the admiration of English Architects Inigo Jones, Sir Christopher Wren and Lord Burlington, as well as American Thomas Jefferson, who used Palladio designs as prototypes for his own Monticello and his master plan for the University of Virginia.

Wine-Soaked Roof. Although used for endless entertaining, Palladio’s villas were meant for what that luxurious age considered casual living. Wide windows and huge doors opened on fine river views and prospects, tempting water gardens and statuary-decked lawns. Linking the central, porticoed mass to grounds were long colonnades on either side—a device which, whether repeated in Ireland, England or Virginia, appears to set the building harmoniously in the landscape.

For an age when men dressed in magnificent velvets, worked in satin, and liked their ladies in sheer tissues from Constantinople, country villas were richly decorated with murals by such painters as Veronese and ennobled with sculpture. For La Rotonda (opposite) built near Vicenza, the roof tiles were soaked in the dregs of winevats to give them a special and pleasing purple-red richness. Wrote the Vatican official who ordered Palladio to build La Rotonda, contemplating what he considered a quiet, simple life there: “I tire of Improvement and Culture. Now Middle Life approaches…I shall return to Vicenza to Meditate and administer my Roses.”