Earlier this year I put out a video about
fun shenanigans in Italian art and architecture, during which I said the following: “I had
written up this whole side-tangent about how Andrea Palladio essentially codified the genre
of Neoclassicism, buuuut I cut it because it was long and probably only interesting
to me.” I said this partly in jest but also partly
to not obliterate the finely-tuned pacing of these videos with a 12-minute mega-tangent
about Neoclassicism. But as it turns out, Neoclassical architecture
is not “only interesting to me”, because a lot of the comments were asking to hear
more. And that brings us to today, where I’ve
sequestered the full runtime of a video to gush about How Goddamn Cool Neoclassicism
is, and the straight-up genius of Andrea Palladio for solidifying this style. Now Let’s Do Some Architecture. One key difference between studying narrative
history and studying culture is that states and people and events are fundamentally dynamic
— there’s a constant forward progression from one thing to the next, and no matter
how hard I shut my eyes and focus I can’t just open them 600 years in the past. That all happened, it’s gone now, no matter
how much I cry about it. But the way we interact with cultural artistry
and especially Architecture is fundamentally different, because those creations continue
to exist for centuries after the fact, sometimes surviving just as they were originally designed. And this results in something approximating
an architectural fossil record, which lets us peer vividly into the past by simply existing
in that space. All this isn’t just to say “wow, old stuff
is old, splendid insight, give the man a prize”, but the point is that even when historical
moments are displaced by, say, over a millennium, the survival of that architectural fossil
allows a later observer to look backward into time and take some notes that might have been
lost in the intervening years.
And that takes us to Italy at the turn
of the 1400s, where Gothic architecture had been the standard style for centuries. The main features of Gothic were pointed arches,
high vaults, and schmancy windows, but as with all movements in architecture, precise
styles varied by time and place. French Gothic, for instance, loved their flying
buttresses and had a generally spikey appearance, while Italian Gothic was drenched in patterned
marble. In these early 1400s, Florence and Venice
were picture-perfect gothic cities, but Rome was… out of shape. Sure it was the height of ancient imperial
glory way back in the day, but those days were way back, and after having just spent
a century Popeless (long story), lots of Rome was old and busted. To the Romans, that was just kinda How It
Was, because why overanalyze a perfectly usable structure somebody else already did the work
for hundreds of lifetimes ago? Well, in 1401 a diva by the name of Brunelleschi
stormed out of Florence after losing a sculpting competition and went to Rome to brood about
it, and the otherwise unremarkable Roman ruins astonished Brunelleschi’s Florentine-Gothic
sensibilities. Of course, the Roman Empire was a known quantity,
and it wasn’t like everyone collectively forgot that it happened, but it was distant
and vague, and it had been a hot millennium since anyone last took a good look at the
architecture to study the design philosophy and figure out how these structures worked. Little surprise that Brunelleschi’s grand
return to Florence saw him wielding his rediscoveries of linear perspective and classical architecture
like they were secret ancient magic, from classic proportions to columns to arches to,
and you knew this was coming, THE DOME. Brunelleschi stayed firmly within his hometown
Gothic aesthetic throughout his career (and the place looks like a dream, so, job well
done), but his spectacular reintroduction of ancient methods kicked off a ferocious
study of classical ruins and treatises that would soon overhaul the architectural landscape
of Europe. If Florence rediscovered the engineering of
classical Rome, its aesthetics were rediscovered in Venice. While various cities like Florence, Rome,
and Mantua got increasingly daring with their classical compositions, they still struggled
to break away from their gothic tendencies. Venice, however, was uniquely well-positioned
to go big on Neoclassical. It was a gothic city through and through,
to the point that their local flavor of Venetian-Gothic is its own entire sub-style, but in the early
1500s that bothersome roadblock of “pre-existing stuff” would be overcome with terrifying
speed. Firstly, in 1514 the city center burned to
the ground, and the century-long rebuilding effort let architects play around with those
shiny new designs they had been reading so much about. As part of this Urban Renewal project, the
Doge commissioned Jacopo Sansovino to build a grand library in Saint Mark’s square. Starting in 1537 it took… a good long while,
suffering budget constraints, partial structural collapses, and Sansovino’s subsequent imprisonment
for the failure, but by 1588 it was finally done and people loved it. Sansovino had essentially taken the round
outer wall of the Roman colosseum and smushed it into a flat façade. This was just one part of Piazza San Marco’s
conversion from a medieval market-square to a re-imagined Roman Forum, and the 1500s saw
all kinds of neoclassicizing projects like this. Of course, by this point in time, the Venetian
Republic stretched far beyond just Venice. During the 1400s the republic pushed deep
into the Italian mainland and brought several new cities under its wing. And this is where our second rapid disassembly
comes into play, because 1509 saw the War of the League of Cambrai, where a rotating
cast of France, Germany, Venice and the Pope took their turns beating the pants off each
other, mostly to the detriment of mainland Venice, where constant fighting, sackings,
and occupations left the cities a mess. So while Venetians across the republic had
a miserable start to the century with plenty to rebuild, the architects were smelling cash
and glory. And it’s these mainland renovations that
had by far the biggest effect on the architecture of the republic as a whole. Even after the fire, Venice itself spent decades
tiptoeing towards neoclassicism, but cities like Padova Verona Vicenza and others may
as well have been clean slates, so they were zooming. No Venetian glowup was quite as impressive
as Vicenza. It was already one of the poorest cities in
the Republic, and after a partial building collapse in the 1490s, the city hall was in
desperate need of some help. By the 1540s, the commission went to a young
Padovan named Andrea Palladio, who had spent the past decade studying roman architecture
and building classically-themed villas around Vicenza. This town hall was a pretty big job, but his
design amazed his fellow Venetians, even when it was just on paper. Long before the building’s completion in
1614, Italians were positively stoked by Palladio’s reimagining of the Gothic Palazzo Della Ragione
into a Roman Basilica. Palladio did this by using roman-style arches,
a statuary balcony, an ancient frieze running along the façade, plus nestled colonnades
in the classical order of ascending Doric to Ionic up to Corinthian, and all of this
outer façade was unified in a white marble aesthetic. Put those pieces together and the effect is
just stunning. From there, Palladio was Vicenza’s number
one boy, and their civic buildings and villas became his architectural playground. Of course, Vicenza was still small, and these
buildings took time to throw together, but Palladio’s reputation and architectural
vision proceeded him because of his extensive publications. In 1565 he published a survey of ancient Roman
architecture that remained one of the city’s most popular guidebooks for another two centuries,
and 1570 saw his Quattro Libri Dell’Architectura, a four-part study that examined building materials
and design techniques, country villas, civic design and urban planning, and ended with
deep dives into ancient roman temples. To help show his points, the book was packed
with Palladio’s reconstructed illustrations of ancient buildings as well as examples from
his own original designs. Palladio did the same thing when he illustrated
a new edition of Vitruvius’ De Architectura, using his artwork to demonstrate Vitruvian
principles. His buildings in and around Vicenza made Palladio
a local hero, but these publications gave his ideas far broader reach. Had Palladio only designed his buildings or
only published his analyses, he still would have been a huge influence in the evolution
of architecture, much as Brunelleschi was, but in doing both the practical and the theoretical
he turned his particular interpretation of classical architecture into the definitive
vision of the genre. Naturally, time passed and tastes changed,
so later architects continued embellishing the neoclassical style with so many frills
it became Baroque and eventually the indecipherable mess that is Rococo, but that original Palladian
neoclassicism remained a prevalent style in the centuries after, in part because of how
thematically useful it was for channeling distinctly-classical ideas. Washington DC is a prime example: It’s not
covered in white marble just for funsies, that emulation of the Roman Republican style
was a political statement about what the American Republic should strive toward, and that’s
expressed through Palladian visual language. No surprise that most European parliaments
later repeat that idea in their choices of architecture. But I’m getting ahead of myself, because
our boy Andrea was a true Renaissance workaholic who still had plenty more to do. Through the 1550s he had been making civic
buildings and villas in mainland Venetian towns, but from the 1560s he was in the big
leagues: designing churches, in Venice. His first project was the façade of San Francesco
Della Vigna, and we should not be surprised that even his very first attempt at church
design was an absolute swish. It was, however, quite hard to make it actually
work. Palladian architecture borrowed heavily from
ancient ideas of proportion and ratio that are… frankly, way too much math for me to
get into — but the core problem was how to consolidate church proportions with ancient
pagan temple proportions, to say nothing of the delicate theological quandary that results
from smushing the two together. Palladio’s solution, as ever, was deceptively
simple: to accommodate a high nave and short aisles, you set a triangular pediment across
the whole structure, then you rip it in half, yank out the middle, and slap a higher pediment
on top of that. And just like that problemo solved. He did the same trick on the church of San
Giorgio Maggiore, which began construction in 1565. This time the stakes were considerably higher,
as San Giorgio Maggiore looked out to Saint Mark’s Square and the Doge’s Palace. Being a rather severe departure from traditional
Venetian Gothic, citizens were shocked, but they absolutely loved it — and of course
they did, look at it! It’s pretty! — so by 1570 Palladio was
appointed Chief Architect of the Republic, whereupon he designed the votive church of
Il Redentore on Giudecca island. However, amid these towering accomplishments
of white marble fance, there is one design that got away. Venice, being a city on water, relied on bridges,
and by 1551 the wooden Ponte Rialto clearly needed a replacement, so the city hosted a
design contest that got submissions from Michelangelo, Sansovino, and Palladio, among many others
giants of the day. The quality of the entries was so high that
the judges simply could not choose, for decades. They eventually just gave up and handed the
project to the architect in charge of tidying up the Doge’s palace after a fire. Antonio Da Ponte was certainly no slouch,
and the main feature of his bridge is the ease of crossing it during large processions,
but as a pure piece of design, it’s… it looks really top-heavy, it’s weird! Proportion is one of the most important facets
of neoclassical architecture! How does this look So Unbalanced! Now, Palladio’s design (as recorded in his
books) had asked the fascinating question of what if a bridge was also an ancient temple,
AND a Roman Forum? And sure it wasn’t ideal for parades, but
it’s gorgeous. If Venice ever goes for a 5th bridge across
the Grand Canal, they really oughtta do this one. So, that’s the two-century story of how
Italians rediscovered the beauty of ancient architecture and subsequently codified Neoclassicism
as more than just a bank of engineering tricks, but as an entire genre of design. As with many developments in culture in general
and architecture in particular, it came from a creative solution to both unique constraints
and new opportunities. And, in this specific instance, that solution
was “drench it in marble”. What can I say, I’m a man of simple taste. Thank you for watching! This is a new flavor of historical deep-dive
for me, not a History-Maker, not really a Hijinks, but nonetheless very fun! If you Do actually want to hear more of these
kinds of things, please do let me know in the comments — because the longer I do this
job the more I realize just how many thoughts I have about buildings. In any case, I’ll see you all next time.
