Palladio, Andrea (1508-1580)

Basilica of San Giorgio Maggiore on the island of the same name in Venice, Italy. It was designed by the 16th-century Renaissance artist Andrea Palladio.

Italian architect who created harmonious and balanced classical structures. He designed numerous palaces and country houses in and around Vicenza, making use of Roman classical forms, symmetry, and proportion. The Villa Malcontenta and the Villa Rotonda are examples of houses designed from 1540 for patrician families of the Venetian Republic. He also designed churches in Venice and published his studies of classical form in several illustrated books.

His ideas were revived in England in the early 17th century by Inigo Jones and in the 18th century by Richard Burlington and Colen Campbell, and later by architects in Italy, Holland, Germany, Russia, and the USA, where his ideas were introduced by Thomas Jefferson and had wide influence on Federal-period architecture.

Palladio was born at Padua, and studied in Vicenza and Rome. His style was an attempt to revive the severity and dignity of Roman architecture, and was derived from Vitruvius and from a study of the Roman monuments that remained. He greatly influenced the architecture of his day by his work, I quattro libri dell'Architettura/The Four Books of Architecture (1570), which was immediately translated into most European languages. His buildings included the Palazzo della Ragione, Vicenza (commissioned 1545); and the churches of S Giorgio Maggiore (begun 1566) and Il Redentore (begun 1576) at Venice.

S Giorgio Maggiore is a Benedictine monastery whose design is an interpretation of the Basilica of Maxentius and a development from Palladio's own rebuilding of Sta Giustina in Padua, a Benedictine sister house.