Palladio's Quattro libri, or how Palladio succeeded in making himself famous

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History of Art Research Seminar

Andrea Palladio’s Four Books of Architecture is perhaps the most influential architectural treatise ever published. It has been characterised as a ‘lucid and compact guide’ to what would become known as ‘classical’ architecture, but such a description is highly misleading. It belies how cunningly the treatise was written and assembled, and what it was intended to achieve. As this paper will be explaining, it was artfully composed as a patchwork of topics, practices and theoretical stances relating both to Palladio’s architecture and, potentially, to architecture more broadly. Along the way, it often wilfully misrepresented Palladio’s own activities, and disingenuously manipulated other theoretical positions, particularly those encapsulated in Vitruvius’s ancient architectural treatise. Its overriding aim was, of course, to contrive a credible and compelling agenda for subsequent architecture, but it was also for Palladio to secure for himself his own future fame.

Image: Andrea Palladio, I quattro libri di architettura (Venice, 1570); copy belonging to the Library of Congress in Washington.

About the speaker

David Hemsoll is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham and a former lead editor of the journal Architectural History. His publications include Michele Sanmiicheli (2004) and the catalogue Renaissance and Later Architecture and Ornament (2013) of Cassiano Dal Pozzo’s Paper Museum drawings (both co-authored with Paul Davies), and Emulating Antiquity: Renaissance Architects from Brunelleschi to Michelangelo (Yale University Press, 2019). He is currently completing a monograph on Palladio which will examine in detail, among other matters, how the architect has been written about, and how he conceived all his principal buildings and deliberately crafted his career.