Culture

Adrea Palladio, his life and legacy

February 02, 2009
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The final item in the Royal Academy's new exhibition is a smallish painting by Canaletto. Almost inevitably it is a view of Venice, but this is an unfamiliar Venice: an imaginary city presented as if conceived and constructed entirely by Palladio. A metaphysical composition of perfect harmony in the best of all possible worlds.

There is a problem in mounting an exhibition devoted to the work of an architect. Architects design buildings and, however many ancillary artefacts are displayed, the buildings themselves are invariably absent. In Palladio's case this hardly matters, his is a conceptual world, as concerned with ideas and aesthetics as with stones and mortar. Though rooted in a close study of classical forms his vision is essentially modern, with man rather than god at the centre of his universe. Unsurprisingly, after his death that vision gave architectural form to the enlightenment's pursuit of universal symmetry. And it is his legacy, intellectual and theoretical as well as practical, that gives this exhibition such currency.

Alongside Palladio's original books and drawings—works of art in their own right—large scale models, paintings and computer animations are employed to demonstrate the breadth of his extraordinary output. His architectural heritage is so familiar to us that we can become blind to its brilliance and originality. This exhibition revivifies that heritage by illuminating its origins within the context of the late renaissance: the intellectual and cultural hothouse that gave birth to the modern world.