Canaletto, Capriccio palladiano. Parma, Galleria Nazionale

VICENZA.- This exhibition celebrating the 500th anniversary of Palladio’s birth tells the story of a remarkable life and attempts to solve a mystery: how did a humble miller’s son become the most renowned world architect in the last five centuries?

The story is told in unique ‘film stills’, i.e. the works brought together from over eighty European museums and libraries by an international team of scholars from Italy, France, the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, and the United States.

The exhibition features as many as 78 signed Palladio drawings. Many belong to a group which Vincenzo Scamozzi sold to the English architect Inigo Jones in 1614 and so make a welcome return to Italy. The drawings show us Palladio at work, conceiving his masterpieces. But they also document the neglected Palladio of projects never realised because of financial difficulties or simply because they were too far ahead of their time. They include the designs for the bridge of Rialto in Venice, large villas based on ancient temples and the projects for a new Doge’s Palace in Venice after the devastating fire of 1577. To help non-specialists understand the often revolutionary significance of Palladio’s designs, experts have built over 30 three-dimensional models illustrating how the drawings on paper become constructions in space.

Over forty paintings will bring visitors face to face with Palladio’s friends and patrons, portrayed by great artists such as Veronese, Titian or Tintoretto, or even his antagonists like Jacopo Sansovino, whom he succeeded as the major architect in Venice. Splendid vedute by Canaletto and Zuccarelli will show real and idealised versions of Palladian buildings painted for 18th-century admirers in a kind of ‘Palladio show’ conceived over 200 years ago. Sculptures and bronze works will present for the first time the work of artists like Vincenzo Grandi and Valerio Belli, who had a crucial influence on the development of the young Palladio.

Departing sharply from the usual Classicist black and white interpretation, here Palladio is shown in a new light, as a creator of images, an inventor of new forms or innovative solutions required to overcome the difficulties of irregular sites.

Especially in his late years, by employing colour, giant orders and façades like stage-sets, Palladio strove to design buildings that would move people.

This previously rarely seen ‘modern’ Palladio changed the face of Vicenza, the way of living in the Veneto countryside and the backdrop to the Bacino di San Marco in Venice.

The exhibition offers the opportunity to explore the innovative significance of his message and the ever relevant belief that architecture can improve the world we live in. It illustrates how it was possible for a miller’s son to change the world.

The exhibition has been organised by the Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio, the Royal Academy of Arts and the Royal Institute of British Architects, London, as part of “Andrea Palladio 500”, an event promoted by the Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali – Comitato Nazionale per il V Centenario della nascita di Andrea Palladio (1508 – 2008) and the Regione Veneto – Regione del Veneto – Comitato Regionale per le celebrazioni del cinquecentenario della nascita di Andrea Palladio, under the patronage of Il Presidente della Repubblica.

El Greco, ritratto di Palladio, conservato a Copenhagen, Statens Museum for Kunst, The Royal Collection