Andrea Palladio: The Architect in His Time [Paperback]

This comprehensive volume on the most influential architects in Western history is meant to be, in the words of its author, "user-friendly." Bruce Boucher suggests that Andrea Palladio might "fit comfortably into a suitcase or a backpack for a trip to Vicenza," the city west of Venice where the 16th-century architect Palladio lived and where most of his villas stand.

For art historians and architects, Boucher effectively synthesizes the more than 30 years of research that has been accomplished since James Ackerman's seminal 1966 work on Palladio. Boucher's style is balanced and highly readable. In discussing the architect's bridges, he paraphrases Palladio's advice that "an even number of piers should be used because nature endows every creature with an even number of legs to support its weight." "This last observation," Boucher writes, "is typically Palladian in its appeal to the natural world as a justification of what was simply an aesthetic preference."

Thanks to the extraordinary photographs of Paolo Marton, you will find yourself dreaming of an Italian vacation even before you begin reading Boucher's text. Marton's pictures make the exteriors of Palladio's villas, churches, bridges, and palaces look as if they were appearing before us, bathed in fresh spring light and set against a startlingly blue sky. His interior exposures are minutely sensitive to shadow as well as to light, and Marton precisely captures the soaring, airy volumes of Palladio's incomparable spaces.

This perfectly designed book also includes photographs of the original floor plans and elevations, as well as several helpful addenda, such as maps showing the locations of Palladio's buildings, a glossary, and a chronology. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Italian Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio (1508-1580), supremely empirical in his reformulation of classical style, built villas, palaces and churches whose influence echoes in Jefferson's Monticello and the contemporary renewal of classical forms. In this careful, comprehensive, stunningly illustrated survey, Boucher, an art history professor at the University of London, capably illuminates Palladio's stylistic evolution, though he is less successful in placing this elusive, extremely private man in the cultural milieu of the High Renaissance. Among the 300 plates are more than 100 newly commissioned photographs of building interiors and exteriors, which superbly capture Palladio's distincitve blend of simplicity and grandeur. Chapters cover Palladio's elegant wood and stone bridges, his influential treatise Four Books on Architecture and his mature fusion of the monumental and domestic.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Choosing from a field shaped by Raphael, Michelangelo, Bramante, Alberti, et al., Boucher (The Sculpture of Jacopo Sansovino, Yale Univ. Pr., 1991) focuses on Palladio as one of the earliest modern architects. Not since James Ackerman's Palladio (1967) has this Renaissance master been covered so comprehensively. Heavily laden with stunning original photographs, Boucher's work transports the reader to the reassuring symmetrical classics of an architect who clarified, codified, and influenced architectural form in his own time with his Quattro Libri, which has endured through the centuries into the postmodern era. His early commissions in Vicenza and the succeeding bridges, mature villas, basilicas, and religious works are chronicled here with an attention to detail and careful scholarship that includes an extensive bibliography and glossary; yet architects and students of architecture and Renaissance art will find it both readable and enjoyable. Highly recommended.
Ellen Bates, New York
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Andrea Palladio (1508-1580) is known as the architect who has guided Western design philosophy for half a millennium, creating forms that have been studied and reproduced from age to age and around the world. For architects and the public alike, his buildings have become enduring testaments to his architectural genius as creator of a timeless classicism. When Abbeville Press first published "Andrea Palladio: The Architect in His Time" in 1994, it was selected by "Choice" magazine as "Outstanding Academic Book 1994," while "The World of Interiors" called it "undoubtedly one of the most important architectural books to be published for some time." Now Abbeville is pleased to release the revised concise edition of this essential resource.Featuring a newly updated bibliography, this handsome volume spans the entire career of Palladio, illuminating his work in the context of his historical era and his own extraordinary life. It invites us to view Palladio's masterpieces through the lens of Paolo Marton, moving across the thresholds of myriad villas, churches, and public edifices to illustrate the elegant proportions, crisp lines, and integrated geometries that are the hallmarks of Palladio's vision. From the immortal Villa Rotonda to the Venetian churches of the Redentore and San Giorgio Maggiore, from the city halls to the bridges, each masterpiece is described using plans, maps, and contemporary drawings and etchings along with brilliant photography.