January 2009

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‘In architecture Palladio is the game!!’ wrote Edwin Lutyens in a much-quoted letter to Herbert Baker in 1903. Having made his name with romantic vernacular houses, Lutyens was then discovering the possibilities of the Classical language and revelling in the geometrical and formal discipline it could impose. As he would soon demonstrate in New Delhi and elsewhere, he would handle that language with astonishing originality – playing games and bending the rules. But in fact Palladio was not a major influence on Lutyens, and in Italy (which he visited for the first time only in 1909) he was much more impressed by the Mannerism of Sanmichele in Verona.

Sanmichele, however, never gave his name to a style. Born 500 years ago – on 30 November – in Padua, Andrea Palladio became one of the most revered and influential architects in history. Thanks to his Quattro Libri dell’Architettura, the Classical language was understood beyond Italy through Palladio’s drawings and Palladianism became a dominant, not to say ineradicable, taste in the English-speaking world in particular. Whether that legacy did justice to Palladio’s own creations, and whether, indeed, his influence was benign or pernicious, are interesting questions that may be provoked by the major quincentenary exhibition currently on show in Vicenza, where he built so much. This exhibition will travel to the Royal Academy, London, next year, before moving on to the United States (it will be reviewed in a future issue of Apollo).

The anniversary is also being celebrated this month in London by an imaginative exhibition at the Plus One Gallery, ‘Celebrating Palladio’. Organised by
the architectural artist and perspectivist Carl Laubin, this consists of personal responses to Palladio’s work and legacy by modern artists and architects. Laubin contributes two of his magnificent capriccios, one of which – Cinquecentenario – does for Palladio what he has already done for Hawksmoor, Cockerell and Ledoux; that is, gather together all of the master’s churches, palaces and villas in an ideal landscape (Fig. 2). Other artists represented include Ben Johnson and Alexander Creswell, who depict buildings by Palladio and his contemporaries in their very different styles. And then there are the architects. These, of course, belong to the traditionalist party in the tiresomely polarised situation that now exists: architects who produce modern Classical designs that are ritually derided by the modernist establishment. So John Simpson shows a design for a rumbustuous market hall (Fig. 1), part of his unexecuted scheme for Paternoster Square, next to St Paul’s Cathedral, and Julian Bicknell shows his executed design for a modern Palladian country house in Cheshire (Fig. 3).

This house, Henbury Hall, appears in pride of place in Laubin’s other tour-de-force, Palladius Britannicus, which depicts many of the Palladian bridges, garden pavilions, country houses and other buildings raised in Britain since the 17th century by Inigo Jones, Lord Burlington, Colen Campbell and more recent devotees. As for Henbury Hall, built in the 1980s, a house inspired by a painting by Felix Kelly, the uninitiated might well mistake it for Campbell’s Mereworth Castle in Kent of the 1720s, which was itself little more than a realisation of Palladio’s published design for the celebrated Villa Rotunda. Now there is absolutely nothing wrong with designing Classical buildings today. The trouble is that so many of the projects are pedantic, literal recreations of Palladian precedents, with an emphasis on correct detail, rather than attempts at an imaginative, creative reinterpretation of the Classical language in response to modern conditions – as such earlier-20th-century architects as Lutyens or McMorran & Whitby strove for.

Another quincentenary exhibition, of so-called ‘New Palladians’, held at the Prince’s Foundation in London, confirmed this sad state of affairs. Although it purported to demonstrate ‘the continuity of a Timeless, Robust and Sustainable Culture of Building and Design into the 21st century’ in the hands of the ‘World’s Leading Practitioners’, the display was dominated by derivative designs for Classical country houses, each with a grand portico. Unfortunately, there seems to be no shortage of rich men, on both sides of the Atlantic, who want to build such houses to show off their wealth. It is a craven taste that has sustained the lucrative career of that most pedantic and unimaginative of modern Classical architects, Quinlan Terry. The problem, perhaps, is the very nature of Palladianism, for not only did the superior foreign manner become snobbish by association but, in the hands of that prissy, intolerant aesthete the Earl of Burlington, who could understand architecture only by reference to Palladio’s books, it became a mere formula for producing grand houses. What, surely, is regrettable is that this taste for elegant boxes with porticoes brought to an end the glorious native phase of the English baroque, of the original and truly monumental interpretations of Classical precedent achieved by Wren, Hawksmoor and Vanbrugh.

Not all Classical architects have been in awe of Palladio, however. Notwithstanding the Classical revival of the early 20th century, one of Lutyens’s contemporaries, Reginald Blomfield, dared to criticise the ‘fetish-worship’ and the ‘Palladian superstition
of the eighteenth century’ in an essay published in 1905. Palladio, Blomfield argued, was a reactionary figure in his time, for, ‘with the touch of pedantry that suited the times and invested his writings with a fallacious air of scholarship, he was the very man to summarise and classify, and to save future generations of architects the labour of thinking for themselves’. As for Palladianism, the ‘weaker men’ who succeeded Wren, he argued, ‘had to fall back on rule and text-book, and Palladio recovered his ascendancy in England because his method adapted itself to the taste of the English virtuoso of the eighteenth century’.

Now, in truth, Blomfield was both ignorant about and unfair to Palladio’s own work. There was much more to Palladio than the Palladians singled out for admiration. They were principally interested in his country villas in the Veneto, those undeniably elegant essays in geometry, but he also designed town houses and churches of great spatial complexity and sculptural richness, while some late works, such as the Palazzo Valmarana and the Loggia del Capitaniato in Vicenza, are subtle, inventive Mannerist compositions with much to teach any modern architect who truly wants to explore the possibilities of Classicism.

But the blinkered Palladians ignored such buildings, although some more intelligent architects admired them; as David Watkin writes in the catalogue to the ‘Celebrating Palladio’ exhibition, ‘different ages find in Palladio what they want to find: for Inigo Jones and Burlington it was purity, for Cockerell richness’. It is not Palladio’s fault, but Palladianism has had – and continues to have – a stultifying effect on architects. In his book on Palladio, Bruce Boucher observed that ‘most of the buildings dubbed “Palladian” have only the vaguest connection with Palladio’s own work; columns and symmetry alone were never a passport to immortality’. In conclusion, therefore, it is worth continuing with that Lutyens letter about the ‘big game’, the ‘high game’ of Classicism: ‘To the average man it is dry bones, but under the hand of a Wren it glows and the stiff materials become as plastic clay.’ That was true as well of Andrea Palladio – whose 500th birthday is well worth celebrating – but not, alas, of most of his many English-speaking disciples.

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