Vicenza celebrates the 500th birthday of Andrea Palladio.
Andrea Palladio was born in Padua, Italy in 1508. He worked as an assistant in a Vicenza guild of masons and stone-cutters before he met the amateur architect, Giangiorgio Trissino, who took him under his wing. After a series of commissions executed in the classical tradition, Palladio worked with Daniele Barbaro on a new edition of "Vitruvius". His early commissions consisted primarily of palaces and villas (Villa Rotondo - above, La Malcontenta) for the aristocracy, but he began to design religious buildings (Venetian churches of Il Redentore and of S. Giorgio Maggiore) in the 1560s. In 1570 he published his theoretical work "I Quattro Libri dell 'Architettura". In the same year, he was appointed architectural adviser to the Venetian Republic. Influenced by the work of Alberti and Bramante, Palladio used principles that related to art and forms that related to nature to generate his style of architecture. He died in Vicenza in 1580.
Recommended book: The Villas of Palladio
by Giovanni Giaconi
Princeton Architectural Press
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