‘In architecture Palladio is the game!!’ wrote Edwin Lutyens in a much-quoted letter to Herbert Baker in 1903. Having made his name with romantic vernacular houses, Lutyens was then discovering the possibilities of the Classical language and revelling in the geometrical and formal discipline it could impose. As he would soon demonstrate in New Delhi and elsewhere, he would handle that language with astonishing originality – playing games and bending the rules. But in fact Palladio was not a major influence on Lutyens, and in Italy (which he visited for the first time only in 1909) he was much more impressed by the Mannerism of Sanmichele in Verona.
Sanmichele, however, never gave his name to a style. Born 500 years ago – on 30 November – in Padua, Andrea Palladio became one of the most revered and influential architects in history. Thanks to his
Quattro Libri dell’Architettura, the Classical language was understood beyond Italy through Palladio’s drawings and Palladianism became a dominant, not to say ineradicable, taste in the English-speaking world in particular. Whether that legacy did justice to Palladio’s own creations, and whether, indeed, his influence was benign or pernicious, are interesting questions that may be provoked by the major quincentenary exhibition currently on show in Vicenza, where he built so much. This exhibition will travel to the Royal Academy, London, next year, before moving on to the United States (it will be reviewed in a future issue of Apollo).
The anniversary is also being celebrated this month in London by an imaginative exhibition at the Plus One Gallery, ‘Celebrating Palladio’. Organised by
the architectural artist and perspectivist Carl Laubin, this consists of personal responses to Palladio’s work and legacy by modern artists and architects. Laubin contributes two of his magnificent capriccios, one of which –
Cinquecentenario – does for Palladio what he has already done for Hawksmoor, Cockerell and Ledoux; that is, gather together all of the master’s churches, palaces and villas in an ideal landscape (Fig. 2). Other artists represented include Ben Johnson and Alexander Creswell, who depict buildings by Palladio and his contemporaries in their very different styles. And then there are the architects. These, of course, belong to the traditionalist party in the tiresomely polarised situation that now exists: architects who produce modern Classical designs that are ritually derided by the modernist establishment. So John Simpson shows a design for a rumbustuous market hall (Fig. 1), part of his unexecuted scheme for Paternoster Square, next to St Paul’s Cathedral, and Julian Bicknell shows his executed design for a modern Palladian country house in Cheshire (Fig. 3).
This house, Henbury Hall, appears in pride of place in Laubin’s other tour-de-force,
Palladius Britannicus, which depicts many of the Palladian bridges, garden pavilions, country houses and other buildings raised in Britain since the 17th century by Inigo Jones, Lord Burlington, Colen Campbell and more recent devotees. As for Henbury Hall, built in the 1980s, a house inspired by a painting by Felix Kelly, the uninitiated might well mistake it for Campbell’s Mereworth Castle in Kent of the 1720s, which was itself little more than a realisation of Palladio’s published design for the celebrated Villa Rotunda. Now there is absolutely nothing wrong with designing Classical buildings today. The trouble is that so many of the projects are pedantic, literal recreations of Palladian precedents, with an emphasis on correct detail, rather than attempts at an imaginative, creative reinterpretation of the Classical language in response to modern conditions – as such earlier-20th-century architects as Lutyens or McMorran & Whitby strove for.
Another quincentenary exhibition, of so-called ‘New Palladians’, held at the Prince’s Foundation in London, confirmed this sad state of affairs. Although it purported to demonstrate ‘the continuity of a Timeless, Robust and Sustainable Culture of Building and Design into the 21st century’ in the hands of the ‘World’s Leading Practitioners’, the display was dominated by derivative designs for Classical country houses, each with a grand portico. Unfortunately, there seems to be no shortage of rich men, on both sides of the Atlantic, who want to build such houses to show off their wealth. It is a craven taste that has sustained the lucrative career of that most pedantic and unimaginative of modern Classical architects, Quinlan Terry. The problem, perhaps, is the very nature of Palladianism, for not only did the superior foreign manner become snobbish by association but, in the hands of that prissy, intolerant aesthete the Earl of Burlington, who could understand architecture only by reference to Palladio’s books, it became a mere formula for producing grand houses. What, surely, is regrettable is that this taste for elegant boxes with porticoes brought to an end the glorious native phase of the English baroque, of the original and truly monumental interpretations of Classical precedent achieved by Wren, Hawksmoor and Vanbrugh.
Not all Classical architects have been in awe of Palladio, however. Notwithstanding the Classical revival of the early 20th century, one of Lutyens’s contemporaries, Reginald Blomfield, dared to criticise the ‘fetish-worship’ and the ‘Palladian superstition
of the eighteenth century’ in an essay published in 1905. Palladio, Blomfield argued, was a reactionary figure in his time, for, ‘with the touch of pedantry that suited the times and invested his writings with a fallacious air of scholarship, he was the very man to summarise and classify, and to save future generations of architects the labour of thinking for themselves’. As for Palladianism, the ‘weaker men’ who succeeded Wren, he argued, ‘had to fall back on rule and text-book, and Palladio recovered his ascendancy in England because his method adapted itself to the taste of the English virtuoso of the eighteenth century’.
Now, in truth, Blomfield was both ignorant about and unfair to Palladio’s own work. There was much more to Palladio than the Palladians singled out for admiration. They were principally interested in his country villas in the Veneto, those undeniably elegant essays in geometry, but he also designed town houses and churches of great spatial complexity and sculptural richness, while some late works, such as the Palazzo Valmarana and the Loggia del Capitaniato in Vicenza, are subtle, inventive Mannerist compositions with much to teach any modern architect who truly wants to explore the possibilities of Classicism.
But the blinkered Palladians ignored such buildings, although some more intelligent architects admired them; as David Watkin writes in the catalogue to the ‘Celebrating Palladio’ exhibition, ‘different ages find in Palladio what they want to find: for Inigo Jones and Burlington it was purity, for Cockerell richness’. It is not Palladio’s fault, but Palladianism has had – and continues to have – a stultifying effect on architects. In his book on Palladio, Bruce Boucher observed that ‘most of the buildings dubbed “Palladian” have only the vaguest connection with Palladio’s own work; columns and symmetry alone were never a passport to immortality’. In conclusion, therefore, it is worth continuing with that Lutyens letter about the ‘big game’, the ‘high game’ of Classicism: ‘To the average man it is dry bones, but under the hand of a Wren it glows and the stiff materials become as plastic clay.’ That was true as well of Andrea Palladio – whose 500th birthday is well worth celebrating – but not, alas, of most of his many English-speaking disciples.
The exhibition was also reviewed by Tony McIntyre, in Building Design, 14th November 2008:
In a recent essay Guido Beltramini conjured the idea of Palladio arriving at a client's villa, 'dismounting from his horse amid lean-to sheds, threshing floor, chickens; finding himself in front of a broken-down house, out of fashion and asymmetrical, where the latrines are still nestled in the corner of habitable rooms....', and by force of will and with the help of antiquity, reordering everything for the better: better function, better health, and delivering something 'more than a habitation, assuming the character of a temple, a monument to patron and architect alike.'
'The purpose is to present work rich in meaning, and two great pieces by Laubin prove the point'
It is a neat summary of the architect's achievement, for in the general worship of Palladio the facts are often forgotten. He was not the first to build a villa, nor did he invent the working farm. His triuumph was giving order, and hence expressive force, to an existing way of life. To seal it for posterity he wrote it all down in a book, the imaginative influence of which was to lead far from the 'polli e la casa malandata', the world of the working farm.
The latest stop on this long path is Celebrating Palladio at Pimlico's Plus One Gallery. Organised over the past year by painter Carl Laubin to mark the 500th anniversary of Palladio's birth, the show gathers the work of artists, architects, sculptors, modelmakers and poets, all of whom are in one way or another working the seam of Palladianism. It is a labour of love, and also a brave move by the gallery in a cultural climate that sees architecture in commercial galleries as a non-starter. Almost all the works are for sale, and the attractive catalogue has a useful scene-setting introduction by David Watkin.
The purpose, according to Laubin, is to present work that is 'rich in thought and meaning, while so much of our environment is full of one-liners'. Two great canvases by Laubin himself prove the point. Cinquecentenario assembles many of the master's buildings in a fictional landscape, and Palladius Britannicus does the same, with Palladio-influenced English buildings from Inigo Jones to Julian Bicknell. The chronology of the buildings moves from right to left; the foreground meadow is perhaps the Campagna Romana or the Forum, but in the middle distance it becomes an English meadow, the perfected and idealised landscape of Claude and Poussin, shifting into the landscaped park. This isn't the place to cover the whole narrative structure of the painting (there is a detailed guide at the exhibition), but the layering is deep, intelligent and rich.
Paul Day, of St Pancras Meeting Place notoriety, has a fabulous high-relief frieze reminiscent of the stage set at Vicenza's Teatro Olimpico, where the distortions of space occupy a strange territory between sculpture and drawing. There are plenty of paintings by artists you wouldn't normally put in the same room: glacially still interiors by Ben Johnson, a portrait by James Hart Dyke, oils by Jane Corsellis and watercolours by Andrew Creswell. But it works because of the underlying sensibilities and thoughtfulness. An additional unifying element is the presence of models - perhaps as many as 30, made by Timothy Richards - of Palladian and classical buildings. These little works, cast in plaster with eye-watering levels of detail, leave the world of craft and enter the realm of art. From Bramante's Tempietto to the Villa Capra and the Temple of the Winds at Castle Howard, the presence of these miniatures gives an extra vitality to the show. They are astonishing, brilliant, and in themselves deserve a visit.
Then there are the architects. Laubin has managed to get three generations of English classicists from one office: Raymond Erith, represented in a lovely linocut plan and elevation for Wivenhoe New Park; Quinlan Terry, with various villas; Terry's son Francis; and Erith's grandson, George Saumarez Smith, plus projects by Julian Bicknell and Liam O'Connor. I confess to finding it hard to love this work. For all that this show demonstrates the continuing validity of classicism's humanist values, this kind of literalism sounds like a conversation in a dead language. It's hard to imagine a dead language doing other than repeating old tales, and to imagine it as a tool of creation. More forceful is Leon Krier, unfortunately represented here only by three Osbert Lancaster-like sketches. Bitter classicism: he has always used it as a club with which to beat the heads of modernism. Long may it last!
So not a single path, but many, radiating out from the great 16th century architect who stands at the centre of things. I was pleased to see this borne out by the label attached to a Timothy Richards' model of Greenwich Hospital: 'Royal Navel Hospital', it reads, thus confirming Palladianism as the omphalos of architecture.
www.carllaubin.com
