n 1944 Rudolf Wittkower published

two essays on Palladio's architecture.

The essays, later included i n his book.

Architectural Principles in the Age of

Humanism,

featured 11 schematic drawings of Palladio's vil-

The Geo-Politics
of the Ideal Villa

las which "Wittkower used to reinforce his argument for reading Renaissance architecture in
terms of irreducible rules or principles.' These
drawings showed that architectural artefacts

Andrea Palladio and the

Project of an Anti-Ideal City

such as Palladio's villas were not merely episodic

formal studies but systematic variations of the
same compositional logic. Architectural princi-

Pier Vittorio Aureli

ples were thus implicitly proposed as an intellectual framework for architectural form, superior to
the functional, programmatic or aesthetic goals to
which architectural history was then still bound.
As a core component of architecture's
einerging historiography, Wittkower's reading

allowed these buildings to be classified as villas

rather than palaces. The barchesse, i n this sense,

scholarship. Vi'ithin postwar reconstruction i n

are Palladio's geo-political context because they

England, for example, his project established a

fig-ure as the key metonymical register for the

point of reference for a generation of architects

whole typology.

In particular, his drawings, reducing Palladian

villas to proportional and spatial schemes,
offered the possibihty of defining a more profound rationality than could be provided simply
by technology. This commitment to seeing and
interpreting a contemporary condition through
a Renaissance precedent was reinforced five
years later (and more radically still) by Colin
Rowe, whose The Mathematics

of the Ideal Villa

famously established a comparison between

Palladio's Villa Foscari in Malcontenta and
Le Corbusier's Villa Stein i n Garches.^"

hile Wittkower's impact on a

PaUadio's villas themselves were commissioned at the highpoint of widespread social and
economic reforms advanced by the Serenissima
Republic i n the sixteenth century, and their particular formal composition - a central palace
flanked by two barns - is deeply embedded in
the political, social and formal impetus of such
reform. If, as James Ackerman has argued, the
viUa is one the most radically ideological architectures because i n claiming self-sufficiency
within the countryside it hides its economic
dependency on the city, then Palladio's palace +
barchesse composition openly signals the villa's
relation with its regional and agricultural economic context.3 This immediately suggests an

wider, contemporary architectural

alternative interpretation of Palladio's architec-

discourse was as unsuspecting as i t

ture to the ones advanced by Wittkower and

was unintentional, Rowe's iconoclastic compar-

Rowe. This counter position does not define

ison of two villas - one f r o m the sixteenth cen-

Palladio's relevance to contemporary discourse

tury, the other f r o m the twentieth - seems to

in terms of proportion or the 'mathematics' of its

have been a deliberate attempt to interfere wit h

architectural composition, but reads the villa as

the traj ectory of postwar architectural mod-

one element within a larger, latent proj ect.

ernism. This desire to subvert was established

Rather than taking Palladio's 'ideal' as a model

not only by his argument for the comparable

for an equally ideal urban configuration, it views

nature of Renaissance and modern architec-

the geography and politics of the villa as a frame-

ture, but also by his pointing to the possibility

work for rethinking and re-theorising the signifi-

of a rigorous close reading of architectural f o r m

cance of Palladio's work as a project for an

independent of its historical circumstances.

anti-ideal city.

For this reason, the villas of Palladio and Le

Corbusier were deliberately extrapolated f r o m
their geographical and political context; Rowe
even argued that the architects' lyrical site
descriptions celebrating their best-known villas
- 'La Rotonda' and the Villa Savoye at Poissy offered a too easy point of entry for comparison.
I n this way, Rowe's text reinforced Wittkower's
Villa Poiana at Poiana Maggiore
Villa Cornaro at Piombino Dese
Villa Malcontenta at Mira
Geometrical pattern of Palladio's villas

sense of context but a semiotic distinction that

be influential far beyond academic historical

nocratic impetus of functionalist modernism.

Villa Sarego at Meiga

Villa Zeno at Cessalto
Villa Emo atFanzolo
Villa Rotonda near Vicenza

nent of Palladio's villas, providing not only a

of Renaissance architecture quickly proved to

searching for formal legitimacy beyond the tech-

v i l l a Thiene at Cicogna
Villa Badoer at Fratta Polesine
Villa Pisani at Monatagnana
Villa Pisani at Bagnolo

agricultural sheds and were an essential compo-

radical denial of Palladio's site-specificity,

apparent i n the removal of the barchesse in his
schematic drawings o f t h e villas. These adjoining loggias were adapted f r o m local Venetian

AA FILES 59

First, however, let's deal with the name,

Palladio, bombastic and slightly ridiculous i n
its overioaded pretention. This was the name
conferred on Andrea della Gondola when he
was already in his 30s, having completed a long
apprenticeship in a stonemason's workshop.
The man who named h i m - the Renaissance poet,
humanist and diplomat Giangiorgio Trissino
Opposite: Schematic plans of 11 of Palladio's villas,
f r o m Rudolf Wittkower,.4rc/!itectura/f'rmci)3/es
in the Age of Humanism, 1949

n 1944 Rudolf Wittkower published

two essays on Palladio's architecture.
The essays, later included in his book,

Architectural Principles in the Age of

Humanism,

featured i i schematic drawings of Palladio's vil-

The Geo-Politics
of the Ideal Villa

terms of irreducible rules or principles.'These

drawings showed that architectural artefacts

Andrea Palladio and the

Project of an Anti-Ideal City

same compositional logic. Architectural princi-

the ascendancy of the Goths had paralleled the

decline ofthe Roman Empire and Italy's descent
into political and cultural chaos. Drawing inspira-

Pier Vittono

Aureli

Palladio's early designs as an architect include

a classical facade for a series of city houses and a
proposal for the Palazzo Civena - austere, simple

tual framework for architectural form, superior to

and thus repeatable prototypes, ready to be dis-

the functional, programmatic or aesthetic goals to

seminated within the gothic fabric of Vicenza.s

which architectural history was then still bound.

The palazzo was fused with the more modest

agricultural sheds and were an essential component of Palladio's villas, providing not only a

emerging historiography, Wittkower's reading

sense of context but a semiotic distinction that

of Renaissance architecture quickly proved to

allowed these buildings to be classified as villas

be influential far beyond academic historical

rather than palaces. The barchesse, i n this sense,

scholarship. W i t h i n postwar reconstruction i n

are Palladio's geo-pohtical context because they

England, for example, his project established a

figure as the key metonymical register for the

point of reference for a generation of architects

whole typology.

searching for formal legitimacy beyond the tech-

Palladio's villas themselves were commis-

nocratic impetus of functionalist modernism.

sioned at the highpoint of widespread social and

In particular, his drawings, reducing Palladian

economic reforms advanced by the Serenissima

villas to proportional and spatial schemes,

Republic in the sixteenth centuiy, and their par-

offered the possibility of defining a more pro-

ticular formal composition - a central palace

found rationality than could be provided simply

flanked by two barns - is deeply embedded in

by technology. This commitment to seeing and

the pohtical, social and formal impetus of such

interpreting a contemporary condition through

reform. If, as James Ackerman has argued, the

a Renaissance precedent was reinforced five

villa is one the most radically ideological archi-

years later (and more radically still) by Colin

tectures because i n claiming self-sufficiency

Rov/e,whose

within the countryside it hides its economic

The Mathematics

ofthe Ideal Villa

famously established a comparison between

dependency on the city, then Palladio's palace +

Palladio's ViUa Foscari i n IVIalcontenta and

barchesse composition openly signals the villa's

Le Corbusier's Villa Stein i n Garches.^

relation wit h its regional and agricultural eco-

hile Wittkower's impact on a

nomic context.3 This immediately suggests an

wider, contemporary architectural

alternative interpretation of Palladio's architec-

discourse was as unsuspecting as it

ture to the ones advanced by Wittkower and

was unintentional, Rowe's iconoclastic compar-

Rowe. This counter position does not deflne

ison of two villas - one f r o m the sixteenth cen-

Palladio's relevance to contemporary discourse

tury, the other f r o m the twentieth - seems to

in terms of proportion or the 'mathematics' of its

have been a deliberate attempt to interfere wit h

architectural composition, but reads the villa as

the trajectory of postwar architectural mod-

one elementwithin a larger, latent project.

ernism. This desire to subvert was established

Rather than taking Palladio's 'ideal' as a model

not only by his argument for the comparable

for an equally ideal urban configuration, it views

nature of Renaissance and modern architec-

the geography and politics of the villa as a frame-

ture, but also by his pointing to the possibility

work for rethinlcing and re-theorising the signifi-

of a rigorous close reading of architectural f o r m

cance of Palladio's work as a project for an

independent of its historical circumstances.

For this reason, the villas of Palladio and Le
Corbusier v/ere deliberately extrapolated f r o m
their geographical and political context; Rowe
even argued that the architects' lyrical site
descriptions celebrating their best-known villas
- 'La Rotonda' and the Villa Savoye at Poissy offered a too easy point of entry for comparison.
I n this way, Rowe's text reinforced Wittkower's
radical denial of Palladio's site-specificity,
Villa Poiana at Poiana Maggiore
Villa Cornaro at Piombino Dese
Villa Malcontenta at Mira
Geometrical pattern of Palladio's villas

classicist terms, a new Italian civilisation finally

ples were thus implicitly proposed as an intellec-

As a core component of architecture's

villa Sarego at Meiga

villa Zeno at Cessalto
villa Emo at Fanzolo
Villa Rotonda near Vieenza

a model for an Imperial Roman city - that is, in his

tion from Trissino's classicist urban ideology,

such as Palladio's viUas were not merely episodic

formal studies but systematic variations of the

this programme was the reinvention of Vicenza as

liberated from the Goths. According to Trissino,

las which Wittkower used to reinforce his argument for reading Renaissance architecture i n

- was making clear from the outset that Palladio

was invested with a programme.'' For Trissino,

apparent i n the removal of the barchesse i n his

schematic drawings of the villas. These adjoining loggias were adapted f r o m local Venetian

AA FILES 59

anti-ideal city.
First, however, let's deal with the name,
Palladio, boiubastic and slightly ridiculous in
its overloaded pretention. This was the name
conferred on Andrea della Gondola when he
was already in his 30s, having completed a long
apprenticeship in a stonemason's workshop.
The man who named h i m - the Renaissance poet,
humanist and diplomat Giangiorgio Trissino

merchant house to form a new quasi-bourgeois

domus. The centrality of the house and thus of
secular domestic life, along with the systematic
recovery of Roman architecture, provided the
core of Palladio's attempt to deflne a universal

formal grammar for the city,

ut Palladio's flrst intellectual mentor

was politically at odds with the

Venetian repubhc. Trissino saw the fragmented

city as a symptom of the larger political, cultural
and social fragmentation of the nation after the
coUapse of the Roman Empire. Like Dante mDe
Monarchia, he called for a universal civic government, identiflable through the singular flgure of
Holy Roman Emperor Charles V.*" This universal
government was to represent a new Roman
Empire, a secular power free f r o m both feudalism and ecclesiastical authority. Fundamental to
these aspirations, the city and its architecture
remained a key priority, and set against the
gothic medieval city, Trissino promoted Roman
architecture as the appropriate language for his
political proj ect.7 This promotion was organised
as a Idnd of research programme - evidenced by
the series of four fleld-trips Palladio made with
Trissino to Rome as exercises i n generating f o r m
through first-hand experience. The careful study
of Roman antiquity was the express goal of this
research, and the drawings Palladio made during these visits would become the source book of
his architectural grammar. What is important
to note here is Palladio's drawing method.
Infiuenced by Raphael's recommendations
about the depiction of ancient ruins, he avoids
pictorial perspective and instead uses a flat
orthogonal technique anticipating modern conventions of orthogonal projection - a method
that contributed enormously to his systematic
approach to the architecture of the city.'
Architecture was not visionary and picturesque
but scientific, the product of carefully deflned
rules. This fundamental distinction enabled the
original f o r m to be reconstructed out o f t h e ruin,
emancipating it f r o m its reality as a fragment
and giving it a new status as a component i n a

Opposite: Scliematic plans of 11 of Palladio's villas,

f r o m Rudolf Wittkower, Architectural Principles
in the Age of Humanism, 1949

potential imperial city in Vicenza, and later

across the Veiieto.

77

alladio's last trip to Rome i n 1557 provided the material for two books, one
of them a guide to the city's antiquities
that would remain the standard reference for
tourists for the next two centuries, the other
a curious guide for pilgrims that documented
Rome's many churches.'' If Roman antiquity
offered the source for Palladio's universal architectural grammar, the mapping of churches many of them located i n what was their typically
suburban and de-populated, fragmented
context - enabled h i m to present the city as
an archipelago of monuments. These flnite,
autonomous artefacts carried a highly charged
ritualisde geography, even when presented
in isolation. But Palladio went beyond this by
ordering the descriptions o f t h e churches
according to the pilgrim's peripatetic approach
to the city. I n other words, the guide does not
describe these churches as monumental forms
removed f r o m their context, but addresses them
within site-speciflc patterns of an urban itinerary. I n addition to his study of antiquity, therefore, PaUadio's interestin compiling a pilgrim's
guide is of exceptional interest because i t signifles his familiarity with the geographic symbolism of the city. And it is precisely this act of
locating and marldng that seems to underpin
Palladio's abihty to define the city through
its architecture.

The heroic mission of Trissino and Palladio

to recast Vicenza as a latter-day imperial city
was prompted, somewhat more prosaically, by
a fleeting celebration of religious authority: the
entrance of Cardinal Ridolfl to the city i n 1543.
For this occasion, Palladio designed a sequence
of temporary luarkers to delineate the cardinal's
procession towards the cathedral. Two of the
most exemplary urban landmarks of the Roman
city - the triumphal arch and the obeUsk - symbolised the veritable analogous city generated by
this circuit, and were considered by Palladio as
ideal and instant devices for urban reinvention,
radically transforming the gothic f o r m of the city
into a classical landscape.""The theme of the triumphal procession also highlights the city as a
contested held of directions to be mapped and manipulated by a series of punctual interventions. Palladio's approach to the city, then, as his
temporary instaUation for Vicenza makes clear,
is based not on an overall urban plan but on
the strong formal continuity and universalism
evoked by his classical references. Yet, i n contrast to the Roman city model, Palladio's universalism is deflned by the concrete flgure of
architecture as a clearly circumscribed artefact,
distinct f r o m the void ground of the city spaces
surrounding it.
Palladio's mapping of Roman churches,
therefore, and his processional installation
for Vicenza, reflects his mastery of the programming of architectural sequences. The variety
of contexts in which he operated - the city of
78

Vicenza, the Veneto countryside and the Venice

Lagoon - offered a multi-scalar array of urban situations in which he could test the seamlessness
of an architectural langfuage against the inexorably fragmented nature of a city. The strategic
link between the two extremes - continuity and
discontinuity - is precisely the core dialectic of
Palladio's urban design methodology.
In the sixteenth century Vicenza was one of
Italy's most violent cities. Inflghting among the
most important families and political turmoil
among the populace made it a theatre of almost
perpetual mayhem and murder." The physical
manifestations of this violence also unfolded
w i t h i n a larger conflict involving the local oligarchy, the colonial power of Venice and the
adversarial relationship between the church and
the Veneto (at that time, Vicenza was the Italian
epicentre of Calvinist and heretical sensibilities). Given this context, the attempt by Trissino
and PaUadio to recast Vicenza as a model for an
imperial city that evoked the Pax Romana seems
a very obvious and deliberate provocation - or,
conversely, not so much a provocation as an
attempt to use the unifying architectural language of classicism to project a self-harmonising civic sense of calm.
For Palladio the grammar of this classicism
lay i n his impeccable use of the flve orders as a
way to make architecture intelligible as form, i n
contrast to the irrational patterns ofthe medieval
city. There is i n this aUegiance an interesting parallel between Palladio's systematic use of the
flve orders and Trissino's poUtical vision, based
on the idea of a unifying secular government.
Trissino (ever the poet and diplomat) was especially concerned with the reform ofthe Italian
language, as evidenced by his letter to Pope
elemente VII about the urgent need to address
vernacular or coUoquial Italian, and by his translation of Dante's)e VulgariEloquentia. I n many
ways, Trissino's interest in the idea of grammar
as a meta-historical political tool can be seen
as the inspiration for Palladio's systematic
approach to architecture, where classicism is
used not simply as a means of representation
and authority but also as an ordered set of repeatable elements whose influence could extend
beyond the construction of buUdings to embrace
the whole manifestation of the city itself. I n order
to be established, however, a grammar relies on
clear examples. It is not by chance that Palladio's
debut as an independent architect, under
Trissino's mentorship, resulted in a design
for the most important public monument in
Vicenza: the completion of the Palazzo deUa
Ragione, a vast civic hall built in the fifteenth century, and renamed (significantly) by PaUadio as
the 'Basilica'. PaUadio's intervention was nothing more than a lintel-arch-lintel device, stacking
two serUane orders built in white stone, so that
they wrapped the existing hall and shops underneath. The irregular structure of the existing

building was absorbed by varying the length of

the lintel without altering the arches. The building was thus conceived as a didactic display of
the orders and their ability to support, correct
and mask the existing irregular gothic structure.
Moreover, his restructuring of the BasUica placed
classicism at the heart of the civic space of the
city, as the hegemonic and universal architectural language of a long-desired civitas.
The Basilica, like many other Palladio buildings, would not be completed during his lifetime. A permanent state of instabUity defined
by wars, economic crises, disease and, more
spectacularly, the tormented vicissitudes of
the families for whom Palladio worlced, delayed
or prevented their construction. I t is easy to
imagine that a desire to counteract this flux
was the key impulse
behindlQuattroLibri
dell'Architettura, which sets out all of his projects
i n order and according to his original design,
regardless of alterations made during their construction. The Four Books, i n this sense, suggest
the emancipation of the idea of architecture
f r o m its material reaUsation. Confronted with
an unstable and complex environment, the language of building cannot tame the city in all its
manifestations, but can only insert exemplary
forms into its unstable body. As with his experiment with the triumphal route for Cardinal
Ridolfl, Palladio's confidence i n the city is
revealed by the way he positions a building, even
if he never proposed any ideal urban scheme.
The architectural historian Franco Barbieri has
suggested that although Palladio never predetermined the site of his projects, the location of his
buUdings seems to follow the Roman street layout that was still legible i n medieval Vicenza
(and that remains legible today - the intersection of a north-south cardo axis and an east-west
decumanus is provided by the Corso Palladio and
the route that goes f r o m the ruins of the Roman
Berga theatre to the Pusterla Bridge on the river
Bacchigiione)." Trissino's Utopian vision for
Vicenza as a Roman city thus seems to emerge
f r o m Palladio's insistence on this layout as the
ordering principle of his interventions.

f we follow this hypothesis diachronically,

we find along the decumanus the highly
abstract forms o f t h e Palazzo Chiericati
(1550), the sophisticated facade of the Casa
Cagollo (1559-62), and the Palazzo Pojana
(1560-61). Nearby was the site of an unbuilt
project for the Palazzo Capra (1563-64) and,
at the end of the decumanus, directly opposite
the Palazzo Chiericati, another Palazzo Capra.
Following the perpendicular cardus, we start at
the ruins of the Berga theatre (itself a strategic
precedent for Trissino and Palladio i n their
vision ofresurrectingVicenza's latent Roman
plan) and then pass the bridge of San Paolo
(which i n the sixteenth century was believed to
be another Roman structure), before arriving at
the loggias of the Basilica and the del Capitano

AA FILES 59

at the intersection with the decumanus. The

cardus would then lead us to two of Palladio's
most impressive buildings - the Palazzo
Montano Barbarano (1569-70) and the Palazzo
Porto (1549). Finally, we would end up at the
Casa Bernardo Schio (1565-66). Following the
streets that run parallel to the cardo, towards the
east we would flnd the Palazzo Da Monte (1541
45), Palazzo Thiene (1542-46), aprojectfor a
palazzo forGiacomo Angarano (1564) and a
fragment of the Palazzo Poj ana (1555). Similarly,
following the streets that run parallel to the
decumanus, on the north we would find projects
for the Palazzo Trissino (1558) and a palazzo for
Giambattista Garzadori, along with other minor
but signiflcant works such as Palladio's youthful
interventions at the Pedemuro workshop w i t h
the Church of Santa Maria i n Foro (1531) and the
city's cathedral (1534-36). Collectively, these
interventions can be summarised as the mediation between two opposite forces which constitute the two major ingredients of all of Palladio's
projects: on the one hand an abstraction of the
orders, proportion and symmetry, and on the
other a site-speciflcity, w i t h each building being
carefully inserted into the tight and complex
medieval fabric of the city.

he project that most fully articulates

this mediation is the Palazzo
Chiericati. Strategically located on
the edge of the Isola (the beginning o f t h e
decumanus and thus at the city gate approaching
f r o m Padua and Venice), the main facade of the
palazzo consists of two superimposed loggias
powerfully framed by the orders. But what is
most striking about this design is that for the
flrst time in the Renaissance the composition
of the facade is rigorously projected into the
interior. The elevation thus becomes a veritable
index of the worldngs of the plan and section.
At the same time, the space onto which this
U t o p i a n architectural language is projected is
far f r o m ideal - the loggia is directly at odds w i t h
the narrow and long f o r m of the site, derived
in t u r n f r o m the city's complex topography.
Forcing the building to fit into its unlikely site
generated an unprecedented compression i n
the plan, which reads as a kind of sixteentli-century barcode, w i t h its sequence o f compressed
versions of atria, internal loggia and a garden.
Moreover, w i t h i n this logic, the facade's classical f o r m may be understood as a clear political
manoeuvre. Expandingthe building's transverse section by only a few metres, the loggia
occupies a portion o f t h e Isola, not only creating
a noble public gesture i n one of the city's most
important civic spaces, but also projecting a
highly formal grammar. The peculiarities o f t h e
site (the exception) and the generative principle
of the building (the rule) are thus intrinsically
linked and mutually reinforced, producing a
paradoxical combination of formal abstraction
and radical site-specificity.

AA FILES 59

It is precisely Palladio's mastering of the

dialectic between continuity and discontinuity
that theatrically emphasises the urban role of
his buildings as civic actors within Vicenza's
analogous city - a dialectic also perfectly
depicted by Canaletto i n his own analogous
city i n the f o r m of the painting he made o f t h e
bridge of the Rialto, composed with two other
buildings f r o m Vicenza, the Palazzo Chiericati
and the Basilica. Rather than the actual bridge,
Canaletto shows the bridge as designed by
Palladio and presented i n his QuattroLibri.
These forms are interpreted by Canaletto i n all
their paradigmatic integrity and yet disposable,
to be used and combined according to unpredictable urban inventions.
More than his bridges and palazzos, however,
it is the villas in the Veneto region for which
PaUadio is most celebrated. "What is impressive
about these buildings is not so much their architectural quality as their quantity. With the exception perhaps of Frank Lloyd Wright, no other
architect has offered a portfolio filled with designs
of such impressive continuity. The fashion for villas, a patrician typology of the Roman Empire, was
revived in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.''*
I n a rural economy, its reappearance marked the
transition from feudalism to the economic power
ofthe estate, and fuelled by this succession,
Palladio assigned the villa a position of exceptional importance in his Quattro Libri: five chapters of the Second Book are devoted to the
architectural principles of this type, which is
treated with the same attention to detaU as other
crucial city types such as palaces and religious
buildings. By the time the Quattro Libriwas published Palladio had already designed a large number of villas, and the serial nature of the solutions
he developed (akin to the repeating rules he
employed in his palaces in Vicenza and churches
in Venice) allowed h i m to define a consistent formal lexicon. Although made up of very few principles, this language was very strict in its application
- notably, a clear symmetry of plan, an abundance
of loggias in the form of belvederes and barns, the
unconventional use of pediiuents and (PaUadio's
most striking typological cross-contamination for
rural buildings) the reinterpretation of the spatial
intricacy of the imperial Roman bath within the
interior of the viUa's central building.

number of historians have addressed

PaUadio's mixing of classical and
vernacular elements and his villa
typology as both a retreat and an economically
and culturally productive rural hub. Much, too,
has been written about his use ofthe pediment
which, but for one exception, had previously
been conflned to religious buildings.
Significantly less, however, has been said about
how the interior space of PaUadio's villas appropriated the spatiality ofth e imperial baths which
he obsessively mapped, drew and reconstructed
during his field-trips to Rome, and whose

Vicenza, the Veneto countryside and tlie Venice

Lagoon - offered a multi-scalar array of urban situations in which he could test the seamlessness
of an architectural language against the inexorably fragmented nature of a city. The strategic
link between the two extremes - continuity and
discontinuity - is precisely the core dialectic of
Palladio's urban design methodology.
In the sixteenth century Vicenza was one of
Italy's mostviolentcities. Infighting amongthe
most important families and political turmoil
among the populace made it a theatre of almost
perpetual mayhem and murder." The physical
manifestations of this violence also unfolded
within a larger conflict involving the local oligarchy, the colonial power of Venice and the
adversarial relationship between the church and
the Veneto (at that time, Vicenza was the Italian
epicentre of Calvinist and heretical sensibilities). Given this context, the attempt by Trissino
and Palladio to recast Vicenza as a model for an
imperial city that evoked the PaxRomana seems
a very obvious and deliberate provocation - or,
conversely, not so much a provocation as an
attempt to use the unifying architectural language of classicism to project a self-harmonising civic sense of calm.
For Palladio the grammar of this classicism
lay in his impeccable use of the five orders as a
way to make architecture intelligible as form, i n
contrast to the irrational patterns of the medieval
city. There is i n this allegiance an interesting parallel between Palladio's systematic use of the
five orders andTrissino's political vision, based
on the idea of a unifying secular government.
Trissino (ever the poet and diplomat) was especially concerned with the reform of the Italian
language, as evidenced by his letter to Pope
elemente VII about the urgent need to address
vernacular or colloquial Italian, and by his translation of Dante'sfle VulgariEloquentia. I n many
ways, Trissino's interest i n the idea of grammar
as a meta-historical political tool can be seen
as the inspiration for Palladio's systematic
approach to architecture, where classicism is
used not simply as a means of representation
and authority but also as an ordered set of repeatable elements whose influence could extend
beyond the construction of buildings to embrace
the whole manifestation of the city itself. In order
to be established, however, a grammar relies on
clear examples. It is not by chance that Palladio's
debut as an independent architect, under
Trissino's mentorship, resulted i n a design
for the most important pubhc monument in
Vicenza: the completion of the Palazzo della
Ragione, a vast civic hall built i n the fifteenth century, and renamed (significantly) by Palladio as
the 'Basilica'. Palladio's intervention was nothing more than a lintel-arch-lintel device, stacking
two serliane orders built i n white stone, so that
they wrapped the existing haU and shops underneath. The irregular structure of the existing

building was absorbed by varying the length of

the lintel without altering the arches. The building was thus conceived as a didactic display of
the orders and their ability to support, correct
and mask the existing irreg-ular gothic structure.
Moreover, his restructuring of the Basilica placed
classicism at the heart of the civic space of the
city, as the hegemonic and universal architectural language of a long-desired civitas.
The Basilica, like many other Palladio buildings, would not be completed during his lifetime. A permanent state of instability defined
by wars, economic crises, disease and, more
spectacularly, the tormented vicissitudes of
the families for whom Palladio worked, delayed
or prevented their construction. I t is easy to
imagine that a desire to counteract this flux
was the key impulse
hehindlQuattwLibri
deli'Arclritettura, which sets out aU of his projects
in order and according to his original design,
regardless of alterations made during their construction. The Four Books, i n this sense, suggest
the emancipation of the idea of architecture
f r o m its material realisation. Confronted with
an unstable and complex environment, the langxiage of building cannot tame the city in all its
manifestations, but can only insert exemplary
forms into its unstable body. As with his experiment with the triumphal route for Cardinal
Ridolfi, Palladio's confldence i n the city is
revealed by the way he positions a building, even
if he never proposed any ideal urban scheme.
The architectural historian Franco Barbieri has
suggested that although Palladio never predetermined the site of his projects, the location of his
buildings seems to follow the Roman street layout that was still legible i n medieval Vicenza
(and that remains legible today - the intersection of a north-south cardo axis and an east-west
decumanus is provided by the Corso Palladio and
the route that goes f r o m the ruins of the Roman
Berga theatre to the Pusterla Bridge on the river
Bacchigiione)." Trissino's Utopian vision for
vicenza as a Roman city thus seems to emerge
f r o m Palladio's insistence on this layout as the
ordering principle of his interventions.
f w e follow this hypothesis diachronically,
we flnd along the decumanus the highly
abstract forms of the Palazzo Chiericati
(1550), the sophisticated facade of the Casa
CagoUo (1559-62), and the Palazzo Pojana
(1560-51). Nearby was the site of an unbuilt
project for the Palazzo Capra (1563-64) and,
at the end of the decumanus, directly opposite
the Palazzo Chiericati, another Palazzo Capra.
Following the perpendicular cardus, we start at
the ruins of the Berga theatre (itself a strategic
precedent for Trissino and Palladio i n their
vision of resurrecting Vicenza's latent Roman
plan) and then pass the bridge of San Paolo
(which i n the sixteenth century was believed to
be another Roman structure), before arriving at
the loggias of the Basilica and the del Capitano

AA FILES 59

at the intersection with the decumanus. The

cardus would then lead us to two of Palladio's
most impressive buildings - the Palazzo
Montano Barbarano (1569-70) and the Palazzo
Porto (1549). Finally, we would end up at the
Casa Bernardo Schio (1565-66). Following the
streets that run parallel to the cardo, towards the
east we would find the Palazzo Da Monte (1541
45), Palazzo Thiene (1542-46), a project for a
palazzo for Giacomo Angarano (1564) and a
fragment of the Palazzo Pojana (1555). Similarly,
following the streets that run parallel to the
decumanus, on the north we would flnd projects
for the Palazzo Trissino (1558) and a palazzo for
Giambattista Garzadori, along with other minor
but significant works such as Palladio's youthful
interventions at the Pedemuro workshop with
the Church of Santa Maria i n Foro (1531) and the
city's cathedral (1534-36). Collectively, these
interventions can be summarised as the mediation between two opposite forces which constitute the two major ingredients of all of PaUadio's
projects: on the one hand an abstraction of the
orders, proportion and symmetry, and on the
other a site-specificity, with each building being
carefully inserted into the tight and complex
medieval fabric of the city.

he proj ect that most fully articulates

this mediation is the Palazzo
Chiericati. Strategically located on
the edge of the Isola (the beginning of the
decumanus and thus at the city gate approaching
f r o m Padua and Venice), the main facade of the
palazzo consists of two superimposed loggias
powerfully framed by the orders. But what is
most striking about this design is that for the
first time i n the Renaissance the composition
of the facade is rigorously projected into the
interior. The elevation thus becomes a veritable
index of the workings of the plan and section.
At the same time, the space onto which this
Utopian architectural language is projected is
far f r o m ideal - the loggia is directly at odds with
the narrow and long f o r m of the site, derived
i n turn f r o m the city's complex topography.
Forcing the building to fit into its unlikely site
generated an unprecedented compression i n
the plan, which reads as a kind of sixteenth-century barcode, with its sequence of compressed
versions of atria, internal loggia and a g a r d e n .
Moreover, w i t h i n this logic, the facade's classical f o r m may be understood as a clear political
manoeuvre. Expanding the building's transverse section by only a few metres, the loggia
occupies a portion of the Isola, not only creating
a noble public gesture i n one of the city's most
important civic spaces, but also projecting a
highly formal grammar. The peculiarities of the
site (the exception) and tlie generative principle
of the building (the rule) are thus intrinsically
linked and mutually reinforced, producing a
paradoxical combination of formal abstraction
and radical site-speciflcity.

AA FILES 59

It is precisely Palladio's mastering of the

dialectic between continuity and discontinuity
that theatrically emphasises the urban role of
his buildings as civic actors w i t h i n Vicenza's
analogous city - a dialectic also perfectly
depicted by Canaletto i n his own analogous
city i n the f o r m of the painting he made of the
bridge of the Rialto, composed with two other
buildings f r o m Vicenza, the Palazzo Chiericati
and the Basilica. Rather than the actual bridge,
Canaletto shows the bridge as designed by
Palladio and presented i n his QuattroLibri.
These forms are interpreted by Canaletto i n all
their paradigmatic integrity and yet disposable,
to be used and combined according to unpredictable urban inventions.
More than his bridges and palazzos, however,
it is the villas i n the Veneto region for which
PaUadio is most celebrated. What is impressive
about these buildings is not so much their architectural quality as their quantity. With the exception perhaps of Frank Lloyd Wright, no other
architect has offered a portfolio fiUed with designs
of such impressive continuity. The fashion for villas, a patrician typology of the Roman Empire, was
revived in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.'"
In a rural economy, its reappearance marked the
transition from feudalism to the economic power
of the estate, and fueUed by this succession,
Palladio assigned the villa a position of exceptional importance in his Quattro Libri: flve chapters of the Second Book are devoted to the
architectural principles of this type, which is
treated with the same attention to detail as other
crucial city types such as palaces and religious
buildings. By the time the QuattroLibriwas published Palladio had already designed a large number of villas, and the serial nature of the solutions
he developed (akin to the repeating rules he
employed in his palaces in Vicenza and churches
in Venice) allowed h i m to define a consistent formal lexicon. Although made up of veiy few principles, this language was very strict in its application
- notably, a clear symmetry of plan, an abundance
of loggias i n the form of belvederes and barns, the
unconventional use of pediments and (Palladio's
rnost strildng typological cross-contamination for
rural buildings) the reinterpretation of the spatial
intricacy of the imperial Roman bath within the
interior of the villa's central building.

number of historians have addressed

Palladio's mixing of classical and
vernacular elements and his villa
typology as both a retreat and an economically
and culturally productive rural hub. Much, too,
has been written about his use of the pediment
which, but for one exception, had previously
been confined to religious buildings.
Significantly less, however, has been said about
how the interior space of Palladio's villas appropriated the spatiality of the imperial baths which
he obsessively mapped, drew and reconstructed
during his field-trips to Rome, and whose

orgaiflsation - a sequence of monumental

spacesjuxtaposed along axes of symmetry-lent
his countryside villas a quintessentially metropolitan air. I n many ways, the theatrical spatial
complexity of the Roman bath offered an indoor
miniaturised city. It is thus possible to speculate
that Palladio's appropriation of the imperial
bath and the pediment (taken f r o m the model
of the religious building, with the implied argument that temples and houses share the same
origin), and the conflation of these typologies
with an agricultural context, is part of a strategy
that goes beyond erudite references to Roman
classicism and the accommodation of the material demands of the estate. Instead, it seems to
have more to do with the idea of figuring the
ground as an assemblage of metropolitan structures where the political and economic power of
the Venetian archipelago (until then constituted
bythe sea) is projected analogically - that is,
via the example of imperial Rome - towards
the Veneto countryside. I t is precisely this complex of analogical appropriations that made
Palladio's architecture so successful and influential as an urban model.
Underlying all of Palladio's architectural
output was the biggest crisis then facing the
Serenissima Republic. Founded some time during the first decades of the eighth century and
developed as a mercantile city-state, economic
transaction, i n the f o r m of maritime commerce,
had been Venice's raison d'tre. Throughout its
early history, this trade was bolstered not only by
the city-state's geographical position at the edge
of the Adriatic and the defeat of other maritime
repubhcs such as Genoa, but also bythe influence of the Byzantine Empire, which helped to
establish Venice as a privileged economic hub
linking the Mediterranean basin with commercial routes towards the east. However, Venice's
impetuous rise carne abruptly to an end with two
major events. The flrstwas the War of the League
of Cambrai (1508-1516), when the most important European superpowers - Pope Julius 11,
Emperor Maximilian i and King Louis x i i of
France - united against the Serenissima i n order
to l i m i t its land expansion. The second decisive
event, whose consequences would only slowly
become apparent over the course of the sixteenth century, was the discovery of the New
World and the consequent shift of major maritime trafflc f r o m east to west.
Confronted with this crisis, the oligarchy
of the Serenissima became convinced that they
were about to enter a period of decline. What is
interesting about their response, though, is that
they accepted the prospect of their diminishing
fortune and, rather than seeking to reverse what
seemed inevitable, they did something politically and conceptually far more radical: they
attempted to slow down the decline, so that
instead of precipitating a sudden collapse, the
republic's waning influence could be tamed

79

and governed as a Utopian condition of'duration'. Their response consisted of a complex

series of strategic manoeuvres, all of them predicated on a shift of Venice's economic basis f r o m
the sea to the land; f r o m maritime commerce
to agriculture. W i t h i n this transfer, the ground
or terra firma suddenly took on the status of a
territorial project - one that included land reclamation, cartographic mapping and the hydrological control of the network of rivers that
descended down into Venice f r o m liigh i n the
Alps.'7 And so, rather than projecting itself solely
towards the sea as a stato del mar, Venice turned
inwards, towards its territorial lands - a (re)discoveiy of its more earthly influence that must
be seen as the defining context for Palladio's
unprecedented succession of countryside
villas, each commissioned by patricians of the
Serenissma regime, and which would ultimately
give Venice's project of duration its most enduring historical form.

Andrea Palladio, Villa Emo, Fanzolo, 1556,

from I Quattro Libfi dell'Architettura, 1570

ffering some kind of theoretical legitimacy to this shift f r o m sea to land were
the ideas of the theorist and patron of
the arts Alvise Cornaro (1484-1566), who argxied,
in particular, for the promotion of agriculture as
an alternative to Venice's existing mercantilist
economy. Author of i a Vita Sobria, a treatise on
the virtue of living in the countryside, Cornaro
was one of the most active political thinkers during the Veneto's economic crisis, His ideas largely
concerned the reclamation of land, and the promotion of agriculture over trade as the basis for a
more solid relationship between power and territory.'" Before Cornaro, country life (of which the
villa was the most idealised form) was typically
understood as radically anti-political because it
turned its back on the political space par excellence, the city. After Cornaro, however, this image
was subverted: rather than being predicated on
the fundamentally apolitical ideas of disinterest
and denial, the countryside became highly politicised by its promotion of a new formal model and
its explicit rejection ofthe existing one - Venice.
To represent his vision of a civic life, Cornaro
built his own analogous city i n tlie countryside
near Padua, Palladio's birthplace. I n the 1520s,
he commissioned the Pa duan painter Giovanni
Battista Falconetto to produce a garden loggia,
and a year later an odeon was built next to it to
host the performances of a famous local dialect
actor Angelo Beolco (better know by his pseudonym, Ruzzante). I n Cornaro's garden, therefore,
it is possible to see an attempt to elevate the rustic
countryside to the level of a new, cultivated civic
condition - one that lay beyond the city's monumental spaces but had a competing measure of
cultural and social charisma. Falconetto's loggia
- the first example in the Veneto of architecture a
la Romana - was clearly built as a highly symbolic
prototype, an example. Its key feature is the formal theme of the loggia itself, with its generous
openings, didactic exposition of the orders as a

AA FILES 59

new lingua franca of civic life, and theatrical

framing of the garden which made the loggia
both the scenery and the spectator's tribune.
This compositional dialectic between subject
and object, between a point of view and a space
framed within it, would be the basis of Palladio's
own unique approach to landscape. In all of his
work, the encircling territory is not a passive
ground to be activated by the imposition of a flgure, but a speciflc site made of existing natural
and artiflcial elements of which the object - the
villa - becomes a theatrical frame. In this sense,
Palladio's villas are not simply objects enclosed
within a reconstructed context (think ofthe Medici
villas in the Florentine hills or Pirro Ligorio's Villa
d'Este), but speciflc objects that frame and redefine the existing landscape as an economic,
cultural and political counter to the city.
Let's talce a look at two of Palladio's better
known vUlas. The Villa Emo i n Fanzolo (1556) is
perhaps the building that best shows the radicalism of Palladio's approach to the relationship
between the villa and its immediate landscape.
It is his simplest and most obviously minimal
villa and yet its structure, like all the others, is
based around the clear juxtaposition of the casa
dominicale (palace) with the flanking barchesse
(barns), which served as storage and as a covered
gallery passage between the central body and
the symmetrical colombare along its two sides.
Unlike his othervUlas, however, this juxtaposition is revealed along the same frontal plane, a
device that accentuates the Vla Emo's perpendicularity against the horizontality of the surrounding Veneto plains. I n its simplicity, the villa
heightens the importance of directing the landscape, not by imposing on i t a new, meticulously
regulated ground arrangement, but by figuring it
through the simple act of framing. PaUadio does
this by developing one side of the villa as a continuous row of loggias and the other side as a row
of windows, thereby establishing, i n a very powerful way, the experience of front and back within
the vastness of the building's landscape.
W i t h the villa Emo we see, once again, the
classic Palladian paradox of a building that has
been designed according to its own compositional logic (typically based on symmetiy), yet at
the same time is also inflected so as to react to its
specific site condition. This paradox is further
radicalised i n Palladio's most famous (and most
bizarre) building, the Villa Capra or La Rotonda
(1567). I n the Quattro Libri, this villa is included
i n the section dedicated to urban palaces, an
aspirational characterisation that further reveals
Palladio's attempt to transform a buUding i n
the countryside into averitable civic form.'s
The equation of city and countryside i n
Palladio is already visible in the very obvious formal similarities between his rural villas and civic
palaces (but for the absence of the barns, the
palaces are the same as the vUlas - for example,
the Palazzo Aiitolini in Udine bears a striking

and governed as a utopian condition of 'duration'.''' Their response consisted of a complex

series of strategic manoeuvres, all of them predicated on a shift of Venice's economic basis f r o m
the sea to the land; f r o m maritime commerce
to agriculture. W i t h i n this transfer, the ground
or terra firina suddenly took on the status of a
territorial project - one that included land reclamadon, cartographic mapping and the hydrological control of the network of rivers that
descended down into Venice f r o m high i n the
Alps.'7 And so, rather than projecting itself solely
towards the sea as a stato del mar, Venice turned
inwards, towards its territorial lands - a (re)discoveiy of its more earthly influence that must
be seen as the deflning context for PaUadio's
unprecedented succession of countryside
viUas, each commissioned by patricians of the
Serenissmaregiine, and which would ultimately
give Venice's project of duration its most enduring historical form.

O
i

Andrea Palladio, Villa Emo, Fanzolo, 1556,

from I Quattro Libri dell'Architettura, 1570

ffering some kind of theoretical legitimacy to this shift from sea to land were
the ideas of the theorist and patron of
the arts Alvise Cornaro (1484-1566), who argued,
in particular, for the promotion of agriculture as
an alternative to Venice's existing mercantUist
economy. Author of l a Vita Soin'cz, a treatise on
the virtue of livingin the countryside, Cornaro
was one of the most active political thinkers during the Veneto's economic crisis. His ideas largely
concerned the reclamation of land, and the promotion of agriculture over trade as the basis for a
more solid relationship between power and territory." Before Cornaro, country life (ofwhich the
viUa was the most idealised form) was typically
understood as radically anti-political because it
turned its back on the political space par excellence, the city. After Cornaro, however, this image
was subverted: rather than being predicated on
the fundamentally apolitical ideas of disinterest
and denial, the countryside became highly politicised by its promotion of a new formal model and
its explicit rejection of the existing one - Venice.
To represent his vision of a civic life, Cornaro
buUthis own analogous city in the countryside
nearPadua, PaUadio's birthplace. In the 1520s,
he commissioned the Paduan painter Giovanni
Battista Falconetto to produce a garden loggia,
and a year later an odeon was built next to it to
host the performances of a famous local dialect
actor Angelo Beolco (better know by his pseudonym, Ruzzante). I n Cornaro's garden, therefore,
it is possible to see an attempt to elevate the rustic
countryside to the level of a new, cultivated civic
condition - one that lay beyond the city's monumental spaces but had a competing measure of
cultural and social charisma. Falconetto's loggia
- the flrst example i n the Veneto of architecture a
la Rotnana-was clearly built as a highly symbolic
prototype, an example. Its key feature is the formal theme of the loggia itself, with its generous
openings, didactic exposition of the orders as a

AA F I L E S 59

new linguafranca of civic life, and theatrical

framing of the garden which made the loggia
both the scenery and the spectator's tribune.
This compositional dialectic between subject
and object, between a poin t of view and a space
framed within it, would be the basis of Palladio's
own unique approach to landscape. In all of his
work, the encircUng territory is not a passive
ground to be activated by the imposition of a flgure, but a speciflc site made of existing natural
and artiflcial elements ofwhich the object - the
villa - becomes a theatncal frame. In this sense,
PaUadio's villas are not simply objects enclosed
within a reconstructed context (think ofthe Medici
villas in the Florentine hiUs or Pirro Ligorio's VUla
d'Este), but speciflc objects that frame and redefine the existing landscape as an economic,
cultural and political counter to the city.
Let's take a look at two of PaUadio's better
known viUas. The Villa Emo i n Fanzolo (1556) is
perhaps the building that best shows the radicalism of Palladio's approach to the relationship
between the viUa and its immediate landscape.
It is his simplest and most obviously minimal
villa and yet its structure, like all the others, is
based around the clear juxtaposition of the casa
dominicale (palace) with the flanking barchesse
(barns), which served as storage and as a covered
gallery passage between the central body and
the symmetrical colombare along its two sides.
tJnlike his other vUlas, however, this juxtaposition is revealed alongthe same frontal plane, a
device that accentuates the ViUa Emo's perpendicularity against the horizontality of the surrounding Veneto plains. I n its simplicity, the villa
heightens the importance of directing the landscape, not by imposing on it a new, meticulously
regulated ground arrangement, but by figuring it
through the simple act of framing. Palladio does
this by developing one side of the villa as a continuous row of loggias and the other side as a row
ofwindows, thereby establishing, in avery powerful way, the experience of front and back within
the vastness ofthe building's landscape.
W i t h the Villa Emo we see, once again, the
classic Palladian paradox of a building that has
been designed according to its own compositional logic (typically based on symmetry), yet at
the same time is also inflected so as to react to its
speciflc site condition. This paradox is further
radicalised i n Palladio's most famous (and most
bizarre) building, the Villa Capra or La Rotonda
(1567). I n the Quattro Libri, this villa is included
i n the section dedicated to urban palaces, an
aspirational characterisation that further reveals
Palladio's attempt to transform a building in
the countryside into a veritable civic form.'5
The equation of city and countryside i n
Palladio is already visible i n the very obvious formal similarities between his rural villas and civic
palaces (but for the absence of the barns, the
palaces are the same as the viUas - for example,
the Palazzo Antolini i n Udine bears a striking

similarity to the Villa Pisani in Montagnana). And

yet at the Rotonda the unity of city and countryside is further radicalised, as if the building were
some kind of manifesto. Situated on a hUltop just
outside Vicenza, the villa was clearly designed as
an ideal 'observatory' towards the landscape (a
conceptual and iconoclastic programme revealed
by the long description of the site that prefaces
this project in the Quattro Libri). The vastness
and variety of this landscape is exeiuplifled in the
form and peculiar composition ofthe villa itself:
a rather small building with four huge porticos
made up of colonnades, pediments and ramps.
As is well documented, this unusual f o r m for a
house was inspired by PaUadio's own reconstruction of the temple at the top of the Sanctuary of
Fortuna Primigenia i n Palestrina, a monumental
complex Palladio visited while in Rome. Yet with
the Rotonda, the monumentality and depth of the
viUa's porticos appear as exaggerated against the
scale of the actual b u i l d i n g - a contrast which
suggests that rather than being grand entranceways into the villa, they are actually orientated
outwards, towards the surrounding countryside.
In otherwords, the porticos actmore Uke theatres
for a spectacle that pre-dates the buUding: the
landscape all around. If we follow this reading,
then the classical view of Palladio's Rotonda as
a pyramidal composition in which the building
forms the pinnacle of the hill is subverted, if not
inverted, by the fact that the diagram of the villa
is not about a conventional architectural relationship in which the outside is drawn towards the
inside but of the inside always projecting out.
The formal symmetry of the building is thus an
index of the Rotonda's territorial site-speciflcity.
Moreover, the fact that the buUding's symmetry
required aU four sides to have a portico, and that
above them Palladio places a dome (the flrst time
such a detail was used in a residential buUding)
conveys not a unidirectional aspect but a roundness that suggests an analogy with the inflnity
of the landscape outside. The result is that the
Rotonda subverts not only architectural convention, with its inversion of the dominance of the
building over its site, but also the conventions of
Renaissance drama and the rigidities of proscenium front-to-backprojection. Fundamentally,
then, the building is as radical theatrically as
it is architecturally.
" ^ ^ " W " Itimately, and to a certain extent,
I naturally, it was in Venice that
Palladio flnally seemed able to satisfy
his project of the city. His buildings constructed
there, mostly churches, can all be seen against
the baclcdrop of Venice's economic, geographic
and political crisis, but more immediately they
relate to two signiflcant proposals for restructuring and preserving the city in the wake of the
Serenissima demise. The flrst was a project
initiated by Cristoforo Sabbadino (1489-1543),
Venice's flrst and most illustrious hydraulic
engineer, who began to develop the city's
81

borders i n the f o r m of a ring of waterfront

fondamenta - large embanl<ments that would
enclose and deflne Venice's/orma urbis (the
Fondamenta Nuove and Fondamenta Zattere,
two of the city's most suggestive sites, still visible
today, were the result of this proposal). For
Sabbadino, this ring was not only a functional
element and a necessaiy l i m i t to the city, but
also a new monumental space that if realised
i n its entirety would have opened up the city
towards the vastness of the Lagoon.^"

he second vision, culturally more complex and sophisticated, was an elaboration by Alvise Cornaro of the concept
of the theatre he had constructed i n his garden
in Padua. Like Sabbadino, Cornaro aimed to synthesise two apparently contradictory forces by
opening the city towards the Lagoon while at the
same time insisting on a clearly deflned urban
edge. The project itself was articulated in two
parts. The flrst consisted of a man-made grove of
trees planted on a linear island, built i n the f o r m
of a floating city-wall. This wooded isthmus was
proposed not just as a defence system, offering
protection f r o m military attacks and the forces
of the sea, but as social infrastructure for the city
- i n effect a gigantic park. The project's second
part focused on the most strategic and monumental point i n the city; the basin of San Marco,
the vast and monumental space triangulated by
the Piazzetta of San Marco, the Punta della
Dogana and the island of San Giorgio Maggiore.
W i t h i n this space Cornaro imagined another triangulation - a floating theatre a la Romana; an
artificial island i n the f o r m of a 'shapeless little
h i l l ' , built out of the m u d extracted f r o m the
city's canals, planted with trees and topped with
a loggia; and a spring-water fountain set on the
edge of the piazzetta, right between the two
monumental columns featuring Venice's twin
patrons, the lion of St Mark and the statue of St
Teodoro of Amasea, which framed the view of
the basin f r o m St Mark's Square. The rationale
(and, as Manfredo Tafuri has noted, powerful
ideological resonances") behind this composition seems to have been based around the idea
of introducing a territorial condition into
Venice' s largely aquatic universe. Yet what is
interesting about this insertion is that i t is formalised not by destroying Venice's insularity,
but by theatrically emphasising the silhouette
of the Lagoon as an archipelago.
The schemes of both Sabbadino and
Cornaro were designed to expand the city
beyond the limits of its traditional monumental
spaces, until then iconographically controlled
by the Piazza San Marco. Elements of Cornaro's
urban vision - notably the freshwater spring
and the linear wooded glade - were also clearly
meant to introduce, analogically, the theme
of agriculture and land management into a
city that had previously developed only through
its maritime economy. Moreover, the island
82

theatre, imagined as a place of public spectacle,

and thus, like the archipelago of trees, conceived
as a piece of social infrastructure, emphasised
the performative character of the entire project.
W i t h i n the context of the Serenissima Republic,
the theatre was the most popular formal register
of some kind of intrinsic, collective art of memory, which made i t the most effective formal
typology for staging broader political and cultural ideas. What is interesting to note here is
that Cornaro's theatre on water was imagined
accordingto the precepts of Vitruvius's ancient
Roman theatre as reconstructed by Daniele
Barbaro i n his 1556 edition oiDeArchitectura
an edition illustrated by Palladio. Thus an island
(Venice's deflningurban form) i n the f o r m of a
theatre (the classical type par excellence) offered
the centrepiece of Cornaro's territorial project
for Venice, and made explicit precisely what was
also at the core of Palladio's analogical language;
the Utopian and timeless abstraction of architecture, and its ability to evoke potential or even
pregnant geographic and political scenarios.
The difference between Sabbadino's urban project and Cornaro's vision is that while Sabbadino
aimed at the consolidation of the existing city,
Cornaro imagined a new Venice that radically
invested architecture by stressing the analogy
between the singularity ofthe architectural artefact and the insularity of the city form.
Both projects, however, were united i n introducing an urban theme that is key to Palladio's
monumental interventions i n Venice. This is the
idea of the urban edge not just as city f o r m but
as a new monumental space linking the city to
its territorial context: i n this case, the Lagoon.
I n other words, there is a link between the idea
o f t h e edge, as introduced by the projects of
both Sabbadino and Cornaro, and the physical
location of aU of PaUadio's Venetian buildings.
Of course, Palladio never actively chose the site
for any of these projects (that always went with
the commission), but i n retrospect it is impossible not to see that nearly all of his interventions
i n Venice were situated on the edge of the
c i t y - for example, the facade for San Pietro di
Castello (1559), the facade o f t h e Church of San
Francesco alia Vigna (1564-65), the Church and
Monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore (1560-65),
the Church of the Redentore (1592) and the
Church of the Zitelle (1574). As much as their
occupation of the periphery, all of these projects
also share the same formal language, and above
all a common lexicon for the facade: an austere
and hieratic classicism made by the rigorous
use of the orders; the superimposition of
facades (a technique invented by Palladio but
clearly inspired both by Bramante and by
Vitruvius's description of the Fano Basilica);
and, most obviously, by the unprecedented use
oiPietra d'lstria, awhite stone thatrenders the
buildings i n marked contrast to the vernacular
brick, plaster and wood colours of the city.

Visually pronounced, then, not simply by their

removal to the edge but also by their striking
white stone elevations, Palladio's churches - i n
particular the San Giorgio Maggiore, Redentore
and Zitelle - also radiated their difference
through their foreground, the open Giudecca
canal or basin. If the palaces i n Vicenza are still
flanked by the existing medieval fabric, and if
the viUas across the Veneto are mediated by vernacular elements such as the barchesse, then it
is only i n Venice - through the wide open expansiveness of the Venetian Lagoon and the loaded
neither-sea-nor-land archetype of the archipelago - that Palladio was able to establish his
architecture as an absolute geo-political f o r m .

n the end, i n order to fully understand

PaUadio's analogical Venice we need to
go back to his earliest failed assault on
the city and the first of two proposals he made
for a new Rialto Bridge (1556). I n this project
Palladio programmatically established an
approach to the city that is anything but classical.
The bridge - a central theme of Roman urbanism
where infrastructure and monument are indissolubly linked - is conceived here as a civic hub
made up of two parallel rows of shops spanning
the Grand Canal. On either side, two identical,
gigantic squares frame the approaches to the
bridge, enclosed by an uninterrupted columned
gallery. Though only ever illustrated in plan, the
form of this project is impressive. And as with
everything Palladio produced, i t should be seen
not in vacuo but i n relation to the tight and intricate gothic fabric of the city - of absolute space
miraculously emerging out of the existing dark,
labyrinthine city structure.
I n the second version of the project - the one
published i n the Quattro Libri and painted by
Canaletto - PaUadio focused only on the bridge.
At its centre he placed a classical square framed
by two symmetrical colonnaded porticos. The
square and the porticos are flanked by the shops.
By moving the theme ofthe square f r o m the
entrances to the centre of the span, PaUadio
transformed the bridge into a forum, a microcosm dialectically linl<ed to the city by virtue of
its radical autonomy as a city within the city. The
analogical motive of the Rialto Bridge - as Tafuri
once noted - is the radical contrast that Palladio
established between the static, somewhat sober
character ofthe forum/square (the elevation of
which was designed i n the form of a temple,
topped by a pediment), and the everyday hustle
and bustle of the canal activities below - a contrast perfectly captured i n Canaletto's painting.
Accordingto this analogy, Palladio's bridge acts
as a frame for Venice's constituent elements a 'mental montage', as Tafuri described it, that
defines PaUadio's approach to the city."Tafuri
went on to argue that 'the Utopian character of
the Rialto project seems to have been generated
by a design principle that transformed the city
into a territory. In this city-territory the heroic

AA FILES 59

image of architecture entered the city i n the form

of finite parts, of points that deflned the city, without reducing it to an all-encompassed form'.^'
It is precisely this now characteristically
modern dialectic between the absoluteness of
architecture and the openness of the city that
Palladio's unique architectural approach sought
to establish. Using forms and typologies to effect
contextual relationships and political visions,
he fundamentally re-imagined not only the physical manifestation of the city but its very idea.
Signiflcantly, however, unlike most other key theorists of architecture - such as Vitruvius, Alberti,
Filarete or Serlio - Palladio never produced a
comprehensive theory, plan or even a general
view of the city. In spite of the fact that his architecture, as we have seen, takes the form of repeatable prototypes, his projects are always rigorously
site-speciflc. The effect is to place Palladio outside one of the topics through which architectural
culture in the flfteenth and sixteenth centuries
is repeatedly deflned - the 'ideal city'.
I n the popular imagination, ideal cities are
those rationally planned, perfectly harmonious
Renaissance municipalities whose structure and
image reflected the rediscovery of humanist values within a culture of civic coexistence. But i n
order to effectively understand how the radicalism of Palladio's proj ect for the city subverted
this image, the conventional interpretation
needs to be exposed. What is traditionally
referred to as an 'ideal city' is i n fact a complex of
theories, projects and actions for a city designed
according to rational and scientiflcally intelligible criteria. Its origin dates back to GraecoRoman times and the founding of ex novo
settlements according to repeatable principles
independent f r o m the context i n which they were
to be applied. These principles, often under the
umbrella of a singular urban layout, aimed to
more effectively link the internal social management of a city with its defence against outside
enemy forces. Mediating between the ancient
Greek oilcos (household) and polls (city-state), the
idealism of the city therefore incorporated everything f r o m the private space of the family house
to the militarisation ofthe city-state.^''

ith the fall of the Roman Empire

in 476 c E, however, there ensued
in Europe a paralysis i n the evolution of the city that lasted right through to the
eleventh century, as settlements took the f o r m
only of smaU, self-sufflcient citadels or fortress
cities, diagrams almost of the politics of feudalism. The feudal model, of course, proved to be
as economically unsustainable as itwas architecturally unnavigable, and itwas against this
model that the city as civitas was rediscovered
as the fundamental structure for human coexistence f r o m the fourteenth century onwards.
It is precisely this rediscovery, together with the
recovery of the juridical implications of being
a citizen as opposed to a feudal subditus, that

AA FILES 59

prompted philospophers and later architects to

retrace the legacy of antiquity as a model for the
new city. Vitruvius'sDe^rc/zitectura, rediscovered i n the fifteenth century, was an emblem of
this historicism, and supported not only an erudite antiquarianism but a treatise on city management covering aU scales of the urban project
f r o m the design of houses to warfare.
Itwas i n this context that figures such
as Alberti, Francesco di Giorgio and Filarete
expanded the remit of the architect f r o m buildings to the design of entire cities. Subsequently,
the image o f t i i e ideal city as one orderly conceived according to a rational plan, appears
i n many flfteenth-century paintings, precisely
reflecting the political immediacy of urban
design. And i t is here that the Renaissance
invention of perspective clearly resonates
because i t demonstrated the possibility of
reducing the space of the city to the manageable
logic of calculation and the mapping and organisation of spatial and geographical facts. But
for all the perspectival idealism exempUfied
by architects like Sebastiano Serlio, Italy i n the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was i n reality
so politically fragmented and unstable that
an overaU planning of its cities according to
rational criteria was quite impossible. Those
Italian cities that do appear as 'ideal' (towns like
Pienza i n Tuscany or Vigevano i n Lombardy) are
in fact fairly restricted spaces enveloped by a
medieval urban fabric. Interestingly, this is also
the case with Rome, a city long predicated on
a chaotic and somewhat haphazard model of
urban growth. Although the city's papacy i n
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries attempted
to reconstruct Rome i n accordance w i t h its
ancient splendour, such plans materialised only
in the f o r m of small interventions w i t h the existing infrastructure. For example, Bramante's
implementation of Pope Julius i i ' s vision for
Rome as an imperial city was (partially) realised,
not in the f o r m of an overaU plan, but as a strategic positioning of large-scale architectural artefacts connected by a network of straight streets.
Given the limited scope of these interventions,
architects like Bramante tended to overload the
metonymical and microcosmic resonances of
individual buildings i n an architectural organism whose formal and spatial composition (via
the use of porticos, squares, forums, viUas and
basilicas) exuded the exemplary characteristics
of ancient cities. Consider, for example, his
Belvedere i n the Vatican, where the model
of an ancient villa - with explicit references
to the Sanctuary of Fortuna Primigenia i n
Palestrina - is translated into a massive, selfcontained courtyard building. Through overly
symbolic structures like these. Renaissance
Italy's project for the city shifted away f r o m the
overall plan a la Filarete towards analogical
representations based around contained, finite
architectural compositions.

aI

theatre, imagined as a place of public spectacle,

and thus, like the archipelago of trees, conceived
as a piece of social infrastructure, emphasised
the performative character of the entire project.
W i t h i n the context of the Serenissima Republic,
the theatre was the most popular formal register
of some kind of intrinsic, collective art of memory, which made it the most effective formal
typology for staging broader political and cultural ideas. What is interesting to note here is
that Cornaro's theatre on waterwas imagined
accordingto the precepts of Vitruvius's ancient
Roman theatre as reconstructed by Daniele
Barbaro i n his 1556 edition oiDeArchiteciura
an edition illustrated by Palladio. Thus an island
[Venice's defining urban form) i n the f o r m of a
theatre (the classical type par excellence) offered
the centrepiece of Cornaro's territorial project
forVenice, andmade explicitpreciselywhatwas
also at the core of Palladio's analogical lang-uage:
the Utopian and timeless abstraction of architecture, and its ability to evoke potential or even
pregnant geographic and political scenarios.
The difference between Sabbadino's urban project and Cornaro's vision is that while Sabbadino
aimed at the consolidation of the existing city,
Cornaro imagined a new Venice that radically
invested architecture by stressing the analogy
between the singxilarity of the architectural artefact and the insularity of the city f o r m .
Both projects, however, were united i n introducing an urban theme that is key to Palladio's
monumental interventions i n Venice. This is the
idea o f t h e urban edge not just as city f o r m but
as a new monumental space linking the city to
its territorial context; i n this case, the Lagoon.
In otherwords, there is a link between the idea
of the edge, as introduced by the proj ects of
both Sabbadino and Cornaro, and the physical
location o f a l l of Palladio's Venetian buildings.
Of course, Palladio never actively chose the site
for any of these projects (that always went w i t h
the commission), but i n retrospect i t is impossible not to see that nearly all of his interventions
i n Venice were situated on the edge of the
city - for example, the facade for San Pietro d i
Castello (1559), the facade of the Church of San
Francesco alla Vigna (1564-65), the Church and
Monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore (1560-65),
the Church o f t h e Redentore (1592) and the
Church of the Zitelle (1574). As much as their
occupation o f t h e periphery, all of these projects
also share the same formal language, and above
all a common lexicon for the facade: an austere
and hieratic classicism made by the rigorous
use of the orders; the superimposition of
facades (a technique invented by Palladio but
clearly inspired both by Bramante and by
Vitruvius's description of the Fano Basilica);
and, most obviously, by the unprecedented use
oiPietra d'Istria, a white stone that renders the
buildings i n marked contrast to the vernacular
brick, plaster and wood colours o f t h e city.

Visually pronounced, then, not simply by their

removal to the edge but also by their striking
white stone elevations, Palladio's churches - i n
particular the San Giorgio Maggiore, Redentore
and Zitelle - also radiated their difference
through their foreground, the open Giudecca
canal or basin. If tlie palaces in Vicenza are still
flanked by the existing medieval fabric, and i f
the villas across the Veneto are mediated by vernacular elements such as the barchesse, then i t
is only i n Venice - through the wide open expansiveness of the Venetian Lagoon and the loaded
neither-sea-nor-land archetype o f t h e archipelago - that PaUadio was able to establish his
architecture as an absolute geo-political f o r m .
n the end, i n order to fully understand
Palladio's analogical Venice we need to
go back to his earliest faUed assault on
the city and the first of two proposals he made
for a new Rialto Bridge (1556). I n this project
Palladio programmatically established an
approach to the city that is anything but classical.
The bridge - a central theme of Roman urbanism
where infrastructure and monument are indissolubly linked - is conceived here as a civic hub
made up of two parallel rows of shops spanning
the Grand Canal. On either side, two identical,
gigantic squares frame the approaches to the
bridge, enclosed by an uninterrupted columned
gallery. Though only ever illustrated in plan, the
f o r m of this project is impressive. And as with
everything PaUadio produced, it should be seen
not in vacuo but i n relation to the tight and intricate gothic fabric of the city - of absolute space
miraculously emerging out of the existing dark,
labyrinthine city structure.

In the second version of the project - the one

published i n the Quattro Libri and painted by
Canaletto - Palladio focused only on the bridge.
At its centre he placed a classical square framed
by two symmetrical colonnaded porticos. The
square and the porricos are flanked by the shops.
By moving the theme of the square f r o m the
entrances to the centre ofthe span, Palladio
transformed the bridge into a forum, a microcosm dialectically linked to the city by virtue of
its radical autonomy as a city within the city. The
analogical motive of the Rialto Bridge - as Tafuri
once noted - is the radical contrast that PaUadio
established between the stadc, somewhat sober
character of the forum/square (the elevation of
which was designed i n the form of a temple,
topped by a pediment), and the everyday h u s e
and bustle of the canal activities below - a contrast perfectly captured i n Canaletto's painting.
Accordingto this analogy, PaUadio's bridge acts
as a frame for Venice's constituent elements a 'mental montage', as Tafuri described it, that
defines Palladio's approach to the city." Tafuri
went on to argue that 'the Utopian character of
the Rialto project seems to have been generated
by a design principle that transformed the city
into a territory. In this city-territory the heroic

AA FILES 59

image of architecture entered the city in the form

of finite parts, of points that defined the city, without reducing it to an all-enconnpassed form'.^^
It is precisely this now characteristically
modern dialectic between the absoluteness of
architecture and the openness of the city that
Palladio's unique architectural approach sought
to establish. Using forms and typologies to effect
contextual relationships and political visions,
he fundamentally re-imagined not only the physical manifestation of the city but its very idea.
Significantly, however, unlike most other key theorists of architecture - such as Vitruvius, Alberti,
Filarete or Serlio - Palladio never produced a
comprehensive theory, plan or even a general
view of the city. I n spite of the fact that his architecture, as we have seen, takes the form of repeatable prototypes, his projects are always rigorously
site-speciflc. The effect is to place PaUadio outside one of the topics through which architectural
culture i n the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries
is repeatedly deflned - the 'ideal city'.
In the popular imagination, ideal cities are
those rationally planned, perfectly harmonious
Renaissance municipalities whose structure and
image reflected the rediscovery of humanist values within a culture of civic coexistence. But in
order to effectively understand how the radicalism of Palladio's project for the city subverted
this image, the conventional interpretation
needs to be exposed. What is traditionally
referred to as an 'ideal city' is i n fact a complex of
theories, projects and actions for a city designed
accordingto rational and scientiflcally intelligible criteria. Its origin dates back to GraecoRoman times and the founding of ex novo
settlements accordingto repeatable principles
independent f r o m the context in which they were
to be appUed. These principles, often under the
umbrella of a singular urban layout, aimed to
more effectively link the internal social management of a city with its defence against outside
enemy forces. Mediating between the ancient
Greek oikos (household) and polis (city-state), the
idealism of the city therefore incorporated everything f r o m the private space of the family house
to the militarisation ofthe city-state.

ith the fall of the Roman Empire

in 476 CE, however, there ensued
in Europe a paralysis i n the evolution ofthe city that lasted right through to the
eleventh century, as settlements took the form
only of small, self-sufficient citadels or fortress
cities, diagrams almost of the politics of feudalism. The feudal inodel, of course, proved to be
as economically unsustainable as it was architecturally unnavigable, and it was against this
model that the city as civitas was rediscovered
as the fundamental structure for human coexistence f r o m the fourteenth century onwards.
It is precisely this rediscovery, together with the
recovery of the juridical implications of being
a citizen as opposed to a feudal subditus, that

AA FILES 59

prompted philospophers and later architects to

retrace the legacy of antiquity as a model for the
new city. Vitrmius'sDeArchitectura,
rediscovered i n the fifteenth century, was an emblem of
this historicism, and supported not only an erudite antiquarianism but a treatise on city management covering all scales of the urban project
f r o m the design of houses to warfare.
It was i n this context that figures such
as Alberti, Francesco di Giorgio and Filarete
expanded the remit of the architect f r o m buildings to the design of entire cities. Subsequently,
the image of the ideal city as one orderly conceived according to a rational plan, appears
in many fifteenth-century paintings, precisely
reflecting the political immediacy of urban
design. And it is here that the Renaissance
invention of perspective clearly resonates
because i t demonstrated the possibility of
reducing the space of the city to the manageable
logic of calculation and the mapping and organisation of spatial and geographical facts. But
for all the perspectival idealism exemplified
by architects like Sebastiano Serlio, Italy in the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was i n reality
so politically fragmented and unstable that
an overall planning of its cities according to
rational criteria was quite impossible. Those
Italian cities that do appear as 'ideal' (towns like
Pienza i n Tuscany or Vigevano i n Lombardy) are
i n fact fairly restricted spaces enveloped by a
medieval urban fabric. Interestingly, this is also
the case with Rome, a city long predicated on
a chaotic and somewhat haphazard model of
urban growth. Although the city's papacy i n
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries attempted
to reconstruct Rome i n accordance w i t h its
ancient splendour, such plans materialised only
i n the f o r m of small interventions w i t h the existing infrastructure. For example, Bramante's
implementation of Pope Julius i i ' s vision for
Rome as an imperial city was (partially) realised,
not i n the f o r m of an overall plan, but as a strategic positioning of large-scale architectural artefacts connected by a network of straight streets.
Given the limited scope of these interventions,
architects like Bramante tended to overload the
metonymical and microcosmic resonances of
individual buildings i n an architectural organism whose formal and spatial composition (via
the use of porticos, squares, foruins, villas and
basilicas) exuded the exemplary characteristics
of ancient cities. Consider, for example, his
Belvedere i n the Vatican, where the model
of an ancient villa - with explicit references
to the Sanctuary of Fortuna Primigenia i n
Palestrina - is translated into a massive, selfcontained courtyard building. Through overly
symbolic structures like these. Renaissance
Italy's proj ect for the city shifted away f r o m the
overall plan a la Filarete towards analogical
representations based around contained, flnite
architectural compositions.

alladio, like Bramante, looked to the

ancient monuments of Rome not simply as sources for the correct interpretation of the orders, but as complex organisms
that i n themselves reproduced the rich architectural qualities of a city. It was for this reason that
he so carefully studied the model of the Roman
bath, an urban type he planned to devote one
whole book to i n his (unfinished) architectural
treatise. For Palladio the bathhouse was a
unique public structure because unlike temples
or basilicas it grouped together multiple programmes and activities, lending it an intricacy
through its sequence of different spaces. This
same spatiality is often evoked i n Palladio's villas, palaces and churches. Think, for example,
of the interiors of the Redentore or San Giorgio
Maggiore, the forms o f w h i c h are the result of
radically different spatial models, each developed according to their own autonomous
geometries and linked together only by the symmetry and continuity of the orders. Or consider
the two extraordinary proj ects for palaces i n
Venice, published i n the Second Book, whose
plans develop around the elucidation of a succession of spaces, the sequence o f w h i c h is not
simply reducible to the traditional tripartite
Renaissance palazzo atrium or courtyard.
The same miniaturisation of city space into
compound architectural artefacts also pushed
Palladio i n the Quattro Libri to reconstruct Greek
and Latin squares (following Vitruvius's description), as models for a variety of colonnaded
indoor and outdoor spaces. Because of tiieir
association with the forums of ancient Rome,
porticos made by colonnades became the definitive architectural response i n framing open,
public civic space. W i t h i n this analogical context, as we have seen i n the Palazzo Chiericati,
the Basilica or the Palazzo Civena, Palladio
would often introduce a ground-floor portico,
thereby instantly transforming the building
f r o m a simple, self-standing object to an entity
that symbolically resonated with all of the formal attributes of the city around it. By incorporating public spaces, these buUdings were not
simply outstanding examples of architecture,
but exemplars of an architectural relationship
to the city. It is this explicit wUl to idealise that
made PaUadio's collective series of buildings
the absolute embodiment of a project for the
city. Yet the impact of these examples should
not be viewed simply in terms of their role i n
establishing an architectural pattern book (a
subservience to type and f o r m that has made
PaUadio one of the most copied architects i n
the history o f t h e discipUne). Instead, Palladio's
portfolio is more powerfully influential w i t h i n
a cultural understanding of the Renaissance
city, offering speciflc architectural compositions
that immediately evoke paradigms of city space.
As Giorgio Agamben has written, the act
of making an example is a complex business
83

because it presupposes that i n order to represent

the canon, an example has to be conceptually
disconnected from the forms of its everyday use.^''
In the rhetorical mechanisms of an example,
form is not simply an object in itself but an object
that operates as a paradigm for something else.
Agamben also reminds us that i n Latin culture
there was a distinction between an exemplar,
something to be appreciated and understood
only with the senses - and thus something destined to be imitated - and an exemplum, a form
whose interpretation requires additional intellectual or symbolic references.
It is exactly as an exemplum thatPalladio's
architecture operates, with its subtle references
to ancient typologies and resonances to wider
geographical and political contexts. Through
Palladio, architecture extends its influence on
the city precisely by being a finite and thus clearly
recognisable thing, a 'species' i n the sense that
the Marxist philosopher Paolo Virno has used the
term, consisting of a sole individual that can only
be politically reproduced and never transposed
into an omnivorous general programme.^7 The
power of the exemplum resides i n its ability to
propose a general paradigmatic framework
rather than a set of regulations or commands to
be literally deployed. As an exemplum, Palladio's
architectural form is not located on a plan, nor
even estabUshed as an urban rule, but is invested
with the representation of an alternative idea of
the eity within the very space of the existing city.
Such an intuitively tactical understating
of architecture, not only as a coherent set of
principles but as a mobile element never tied
to an overall plan, seems to have its origin in
Palladio's passion for the art of war. I n the
QuattroLibrihe notes that i n the successful
defence of a city the imperative to construct
perimeter walls is of littie use compared to the
training of the soldiers and an accurate loiowledge of the surrounding territory - a militarised
understanding of landscape and civic management so faithfully represented i n his battle illustrations for the sixteenth-eentury publication
of Polybius'sHwtones. What it interesting about
these troop formation diagrams is the way they
replicate his villas' own framing of the landscape. This mentality that fused the stability of
architecture with the fluid complexity of new
urban spaces and forms seems to have made
Palladio deeply sceptical about any overarching
urban plan, and pushed h i m instead to frame his
(implicit) project for the city i n the same way he
understood the art of war - as a project tactically
open to the multiplicity of its territorial circumstances and yet resolute i n its formal strategy. I n
this respect, Palladio's accessible geography of
architectures can be read as exemplars of a city
no longer constrained by its walled civitas, but as
a territory whose f o r m lies i n its attempt to trace
and make explicit the geographical and political
conditions of its existence.

84

9. See Peter Vaughan Hart and Peter Hicks

[eds], Palladio's

This essay will appearin PierVittorio

Aureli's forthcoming book in the M I T
Press Writing Architecture Series, with
the worldng title, The Possibility of
an Absolute

Architecture.

e I palazzi

1. Rudolf Wittkovver, 'Principles of

Palladio's Architecture' (part one) in
Journalofthe
WarburgandCourtauld
Institutes,vu
1944, pp 102-22; (part
two), ibid,vin
1944, pp 68-102.
Arciiitectural Principles in the Age of

Barbieri, Vicenza:Storia

Review,

3. James S Aekerman, The Villa:Form and

(London:

Thames and Hudson, 1990), pp 10-14.

4. The name Palladio comes from
Pallade, a nickname given to Pallas
Athena. In Greekpollax means 'young'
and Palladium was the wood statue of
Pallas Athena. It became a famous
image of ancient Graeco-Roman
mythology and on which the safety of a
city was meant to depend. The name
was probably chosen byTrissino in reference to Angel Palladio, a character in
his poem 'L'ltalia Liberata dai Got!'.
Trissino's choice of this name is
absolutely explicit in the cultural intentions he saw the young architect as supposed to embody - in Trissino militant
(and slightly delirious) classicism,
Palladio was the resurrection of an
ancient architect. On the sources of
Palladio's name see Franco Barbieri,
Architetture Palladiane (Vicenza: Neri
Pozza, 1992), pp 211-12.

5. See Flavia Cantatore, 'Casa Civena e i

primi studi di Andrea Palladio per ease
e palazzi' in Franco Barbieri et al (eds),
Palladio 1508-1580:11

Simposio

del

Cinquecentenario (Venezia: Marsilio,

2008), pp 245-49.

6. PierfilippoCastelli,Ifly/trf/
Giovangiorgio

Trissino,

OratoreePoeta

(Venezia: Giovanni Radici, 1753), p 75.

See also Franco Barbieri, 'Giangiorgio
Trissino e Andrea Palladio' in Neri
Po'Z.za{ed),Attl

di una avven-

tura urbana (Milano: Silvana Editoriale,

1982). See also Guido Beltramini,
Palladio Private (Venice: Marsilio,
2008), p 14.

2. Colin Rowe, 'The Mathemades of the

Ideal Villa: Palladio and Le Corbusier

Ideology of Countiy Houses

di Andrea Palladio (Vicenza:

Neri Pozza, 1965), pp 167-69.

11. For an overview of the urban and political history of Venice see Franco

Humanism (London: Warburg

Institute, 1949).

Compared' in The Architectural

May 1950, pp 289-300.

Rome (New Haven, C T :

Yale University Press, 2006).

10. GuidoBeltramini, 'Andrea Palladio
1508-1580' in GuidoBeltramini and
Howard Burns (eds), Palladio (Venezia:
Marsilio, 2008), pp 2-4. See also
Giangiorgio Zorzi, Le opere pubbliciie

del convegno di studt su

Giangiorgio Trissino (Vicenza: Neri

Pozza, 1980).
7. The same promotion of Roman architecture would be embraced by Daniele
Barbaro, another patrician and diplomat, who supported Palladio after
Trissino's death in 1550.
8. See Francesco Paolo dlTeodoro,
'Andrea Palladio e il laseito teorieo
diRaffaello: aleune osservazioni' in
Franco Barbieri, op cit, pp 80-86.

12. Franco Barbieri, op cit, pp 54,68.

13. See Andrea PaUadio, TheFourBooks
onArchitecture, trans. RobertTavernor
and Richard Schofield (Cambridge,
MA: M I T Press, 1997),p82.
14. On the idea of the villa see James S
Aekerman, op cjY.
15. The one, infamous, exception being
Giuhano da Sangallo's Villa Medici
at Poggio a Caiano (1485).
15. Stefano Ray, 'Integrita e Ambiguita'
inKurtFostei:,Palladio:

Ein

Symposium

(Rome: Schweiserisches Institut in

Rom, 1980), pp 53-74.

17. For an analysis of the link between

Palladio's architecture and the reform
of the Serenissima's Terraferma see
Denis Cosgrove, ThePalladianLandscape: Geographical Change and its
Cultural Representations
in Sixteenth-

Century Italy (Philadelphia, PA: Penn

State University Press, 1993).
18. SeeGinoBenzoni (ed), Verso la Santa
Agricoltura:Ruzzante,
ilPolesine

(Rovigo: Associazione Culturale

Minelliana, 2004).
19. See Andrea Palladio, op cit, pp 18-20.
20. On the Venetian projects of Sabbadino
and Cornaro see Manfredo Tafuri,
Venice and the Renaissance
(Camhiidge,
MA: MiTPress, 1995), pp 139-60.
21. Ibid, p 146.
22. Ibid, p 58.
23. Ibid.

24. On the elevation of the Greek oikos

as a principle of city management see
Giorgio Agamben,//Potere elo Gloria
(Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 2007).
25. Andrea Palladio, op cit, pp 149-50.
25. Giorgio Agamben,'Che cosaun
Paradigma?' in Giorgio Agamben,
Signata Rerum: Sul

Metodo

(Turin: BoUati Boringhieri, 2008), p 20.

27.

VaoloVirno,Mondanita:L'ideadimondo
tra espertenza sensiblle e
sferapubblica

(Rome: Manifestolibri, 1994), p 106.

28. On Palladio's war architecture see
Guido Beltramini, 'Palladio e L'arehitettura delta battaglia: le edizioni
illustrate di Cesare Polibio' inPalladio
1508-2008,

op cit, pp 217-29.

AA FILES 59

Giovanni Antonio Canal (Canaletto),

Capriccio

of Palladio's
with Buildings

Designfor
from

the Bridge

Vicenza,

c 1759

National Gallery, Parma

ofRialto,

This essaywill appear i n PierVittori o

Aureli's f o r t h c o m i n g bool<; i n the M I T
Press W r i t i n g Architecture Series, w i t h
the w o r l d n g title, The Possibility of
aji Absolute
Architecture.
1. Rudolf Wittkower, 'Principles of
Palladio's Architecture' (part one) i n
Journal of the Wa rburg and Courtauid
Institutes, v u 1944, pp 102-22; (part
two), ibid,viii 1944, pp 68-102.
Architectural Principles in the Age of
Humanism (London: W a r b u r g
Institute, 1949).
2. C o l i n Rowe, 'The Ivlathematics o f t h e
Ideal Villa: Palladio and Le Corbusier
Compared' i n The Architectural
Review,
Ivlay 1950, pp 289-300.
3. James S Ackerman, The Villa:Form and
Ideology of Country Houses (London:
Thames and Hudson , 1990), pp 10-14.
4. The name Palladio conies f r o m
Pallade, a nickname given to Pallas
A t h e n a . I n G r e e k p a l l a x m e a n s 'young'
and Palladium was the wood statue of
Pallas Athena. It became a famous
image of ancient Graeco-Roman
mythology and on w h i c h the safety o f a
city was meant to depend. The name
was probably chosen by Trissino i n reference to Angel Palladio, a character i n
his poem 'L'ltalia Liberata dai Goti'.
Trissino's choice o f this name is
absolutely explicit i n the cultural intentions he saw tlie young arciiitect as supposed to embody - i n Trissino m i l i t a n t
(and slightly delirious) classicism,
Palladio was the resurrection of an
ancient architect. On the sources of
Palladio's name see Franco Barbieri,
ArchitetturePalladiane
(Vicenza: Neri
Pozza, 1992), pp 211-12.
5. See Flavia Cantatore, 'Casa Civena e i
p r i m i studi d i Andrea Palladio per case
e palazzi' i n Franco Barbieri et al (eds),
Palladio 1508-1 s8o:IlSimposio
del
Cinquecentenario (Venezia: Marsilio,
2008), pp 245-49.
6. Pierfilippo Castelli, La vita di
Giovangiorgio Trissino,
OratoreePoeta
(Venezia: Giovanni Radici, 1753), p 75.
See also Franco Barbieri, 'Giangiorgio
Trissino e Andrea Palladio' i n Neri
Pozza (ed), ^ tti del convegno di studi su
Giangiorgio Trissino (Vicenza: Neri
Pozza, 1980).
7. The same p r o m o t i o n of Roman architecture w o u l d be embraced by Daniele
Barbaro, another patrician and diplomat, who supported Palladio after
Trissino's death i n 1550.
8. See Francesco Paolo di Teodoro,
'Andrea Palladio e 11 lascito teorico
d i Raffaello; alcune osservazioiii' i n
Franco Barbieri, op cit, pp 8o-85.

9. See Peter Vaughan Hart and Peter Hides

(eds),Pa/Zod!o'sj;ome (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 2006).
10. Guido Beltramini, 'Andrea Palladio
1508-1580' i n Guido Beltramini and
Howard Burns (eds), Palladio (Venezia:
Ivlarsilio, 2008), pp 2-4. See also
Giangiorgio Zorzi, Le opere pubbiiciie
e I palazzi di Andrea PaUadio (Vicenza:
Neri Pozza, 1965), pp 167-69.
11. For an overview of the urban and p o l i t i cal history of Venice see Franco
Barbieri, Vicenza: Storia di una avventura urbana (Milano: Silvana Editoriale,
1982). See also Guido Beltramini,
Palladio Private (Venice: Marsilio,
2008), p 14.
12. Franco Barbieri, op cit, pp 54,68.
13. See Andrea Palladio, r/ieFour5oo<:s
on Architecture, trans. Robert Tavernor
and Richard Scliofield (Cambridge,
M A : M I T Press, 1997), p 82.
14. On the idea of the villa seeJamesS
Ackerman, op cit.
15. The one, infamous, exception being
Giuliano da Sangallo's Villa M e d i c i
at Poggio a Caiano (1485).
16. Stefano Ray, 'Integrita e A m b i g u i t a '
mKurtFoster,Palladio:
Ein Symposium
(Rome: Scliweiserisches Institut i n
Rom, 1980), pp 53-74.
17. For an analysis of the l i n k between
Palladio's architecture and the r e f o r m
of tlie Serenissima's Terraferma see
Denis Cosgrove, The PaUadian Landscape: Geographical Change and its
Cultural Representations in SixteenthCentuiy Italy (Philadelphia, PA: Penn
State University Press, 1993).
18. See Gino Benzoni (ed), Verso la Santa
Agricoltura:Ruzzante,
ilPolesine
(Rovigo: Associazione Culturale
Minelliana, 2004).
i g . See Andrea Palladio, op cit, pp 18-20.
20. On the Venetian projects of Sabbadino
and Cornaro see M a n f r e d o T a f u r i ,
Venice and tiie Renaissance
(Camhndge,
M A : MiTPress, 1995), pp 139-60.
21. Ibid, p 146.
22. Ibid, p 58.
23. Ibid.
24. O n the elevation of the Greek oilcos
a s a p r i n c i p l e o f c i t y management see
Giorgio Agaiiiben,///'oe;'eeXfl Gloria
(Vicenza; Neri Pozza, 2007).
25. Andrea Palladio, op cit, pp 149-50.
26. Giorgio Agaiiiben,'Che cosa u n
Paradigma?' i n Giorgio Agamben,
Sigtmta Rerum: Sui Metodo
(Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2008), p 20.
27. Pao\QVirno,Mondanita:L'idea
dimondo
tra esperienza sensibiie e sferapubblica
(Rome: M a n i f e s t o l i b r i, 1994), p 106.
28. On Palladio's war architecture see
Guido Beltramini, 'Palladio e L'architettura della battaglia: le edizioni
illustrate di CesarePolibio' mPalladio
1508-Z008, op cit, pp 217-29.

A A F I L E S 59

Giovanni A n t o n i o Canal (Canaletto),

Capriccio

of Palladio's

Design for the Bridge of

with Buildingsfivm

Vicenza,

c 1759

N a t i o n a l Gallery, P a r m a

Rialto,