Andrea Palladio

Andrea Palladio (1508-1580), born Andrea di Pietro della Gondola in Padua, was an Italian architect who began as a stonecutter. Around 1538 the Vicenza scholar Gian Giorgio Trissino employed him, gave him the name Palladio, and took him to Rome in the 1540s to study ancient buildings. His Four Books of Architecture (I quattro libri dell'architettura, 1570) published his own designs alongside measured drawings of Roman ruins.

Nearly all his buildings are in Vicenza, Venice and the surrounding Veneto countryside. For farming estates he designed villas with temple fronts, a row of columns under a triangular pediment, applied to houses. The Villa Rotonda near Vicenza (begun 1566) has a square plan with an identical portico on each of its four sides around a domed central hall. In Vicenza he wrapped the medieval town hall in two stories of arcades, now the Basilica Palladiana (begun 1546), using arches flanked by narrow square-topped openings, a pattern now called the Palladian window. In Venice he designed the churches of San Giorgio Maggiore (begun in the 1560s) and Il Redentore (1576). The Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza, begun in 1580, was completed by Vincenzo Scamozzi after his death.

Inigo Jones followed his designs in 17th-century England, and Thomas Jefferson in Virginia. In 2010 the U.S. Congress named him the "Father of American Architecture."