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147 p., numerous fig. and fotos, Good condition. -- In forty years of architectural production Andrea Palladio left perhaps the greatest legacy of any architect. Through his treatise, I Quattro Libri dell'Architettura, as well as by his built example, he irrevocably modified western architectural thought. During his lifetime he transformed his adopted city -- of Vicenza and the surrounding countryside. Despite the attention given to Palladio's work by historians in recent years, the circumstances -- his life and practice remain largely conjectural (figure 1). -- Palladio was active in the Veneto region of northern Italy during the mid-sixteenth century, a period of unusual economic growth and cultural advancement. The political stability that resulted from Venice's control of the terra fiirma, -- couupled with the challenge to her domination of the seas by the League of Cambrai, prompted a shift in the region's economic base from commerce to agriculture. Land reclamation projects, resulting in an extensive canal system, m ilitated this economic shift, which, in turn, prompted opportunities for architectural commissions from the rising land-based aristocracy. Because Pal-ladio was the only notable sixteenth-century architect trained in the region, he -as the first to absorb the particular economic, social, and geographic conditions of the Veneto, and incorporate them into an architecture both fundamental and innovative. -- Palladio was born Andrea di Pietro in 1508, the son of a Paduan miller, Appremticit iced to a stonemason at thirteen, Andrea broke his contract by 1524 and moved to Vicenza, where he joined the guild of masons and stone carvers. From 1524 to the 1540s he was associated with the Pedemuro workshop of Giacomo da Porlezza, responsible for most of the monumental, decorative sculpture in Vicenza. -- It was probably around 1537 that Andrea met Giangiorgio Trissino, the Vicentine intellectual and humanist who redirected the course of his life. Trissino was rebuilding a villa at Cricoli, just outside Vicenza, where he established a learned academy to enable young aristocrats of the city to receive a classical education. According to an eighteenth-century source, Andrea was involved in the villa's renovation, undertaken by the Pedemuro workshop. Trissino took the stonemason into his academy, directed his first formal architectural education, and gave him the name Palladio.1 -- Palladio's training was unusual for the time in being specifically directed toward architecture, rather than toward more general humanist subjects. Trissino was himself a humanist architect; he was responsible for the layout of his villa at Cricoli, the first building in Vicenza to evoke the classical spirit of antiquity (figures 2, 3). The Villa Trissino was an important precursor to Palladio's own work. Its symmetrical layout, major central room, and loggia with flanking towers became regular components of Palladio's villas. The loggia, completed by 1538, is based on a design of Sebastiano Serlio, a variation on Raphael's Villa Madama in Rome, which Serlio published in 1540 (figure 4). -- Serlio was an important figure in Palladio's training, although whether this resulted from the influence of his publications or from direct contact with the theoretician himself remains unclear. Palladio may have encountered Serlio when he was in Vicenza working on the Rasilica in 1539. Palladio's earliest architectural drawings, dating from this period, are indebted to Serlio's example. Serlio's five books on architecture, published individually between 1537 and 1547, comprise the first treatise to deal with architectural theory in a primarily visual, rather than verbal, manner. Palladio used illustrations from Serlio as sources for his designs, and he adopted a similar format for his own publication. -- Trissino introduced Palladio to other architectural treatises available at the time. His interest in antiquity was influenced by his study of Vitruvius's fir.
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