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.


From Publishers Weekly
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.


From Library Journal
Andrea Palladio has been one of the most admired, the most influential, and the most copied architects in history. His pedimented images of classical architecture, carefully proportioned, hierarchically disposed, and emphatically domed, have governed institutional design around the world, and the bibliography on him is enormous. A professor of fine arts in England, Boucher is an authority on his subject, and he has written a fine work, gracefully summarizing many decades of scholarship. The book is greatly enriched by over 40 valuable color photographs of the original works in situ. This is the best recent survey of Palladio's career, updating and in some ways eclipsing James Ackerman's standard Palladio (Penguin, 1996).?Peter S. Kaufman, Boston Architectural Ctr.Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Andrea Palladio (1508-1589) was one of the most creative architects the world has ever known; many consider his villas, palaces, and churches the epitome of Renaissance ideals. Though his buildings have often been photographed and numerous specialized studies have been written about his career, never before have Palladio's life and times been brought together in a narrative as incisive as this one. Richly illustrated with specially commissioned photographs as well as period plans and drawings, this volume defines Palladio's remarkable career against the backdrop of the dramatic events and personalities of the age, while the buildings are discussed in terms of their importance in art history.

FROM THE CRITICS

Library Journal