Such a round date - half a millennium - became an excuse for celebrating on a large scale. The exhibition includes drawings, paintings, bronze sculptures, books and tools from the collections of 80 museums, libraries and archives from around the world. The organizers of the exhibition, the Vicente Center for the Study of Architecture Andrea Palladio and the British Academy of Arts and the Institute of Architects, put the motto of the exhibition with a phrase about the son of a bricklayer, who became the most famous architect in the world, believing that architecture can change the world for the better. Despite some populism of this statement, it must be admitted that it immediately throws a bridge between the 16th century and our time - with ideas about the social responsibility of the architect and the ability to eradicate the injustice of the social order, inherited from the masters of modernism of the first half of the 20th century. And having read this slogan in the beautiful courtyard of the Palazzo Barbaran da Porto, before entering the exhibition halls, the visitor cannot help but look at the figure of Palladio anew - no longer just as a frozen image of a genius who showed his descendants a new path in architecture, but as a living master who was in the process of searching, full of passionate preferences, ideas and interests.
No less impressive is the new visual image of Andrea Palladio: thanks to the efforts of art historian Lionello Puppi, the unknown from the Copenhagen portrait by El Greco is now identified as Palladio (this theory is confirmed by sources reporting about the friendship between the artist and the architect, which began in Rome in the 1570s) … This remarkable canvas, significantly superior in its artistic qualities to the only documented portrait of the architect by his friend Jambattista Magantsa, took pride of place at the exhibition in a special hall.
Painting, in general, plays a significant role in the concept of the exposition: Palladio's customers, patrons and competitors are shown to us in portraits by Tintoretto, Veronese, Titian, and Canaletto's paintings, made for British collectors, demonstrate the architect's embodied and unrealized projects for Venice.
The master's method of work on the project, his interaction with the monuments of antiquity are shown through 80 of his drawings, most of which first returned to Italy from England in the early 17th century, when they were acquired from Vincenzo Scamozzi by Inigo Jones (whose pencil portrait by Anthony van Dyck is also included in exposition), and some of them are exhibited for the first time. The question of Palladio's "assimilation" of classical buildings and the use of their motives in his work has been well studied, but the curators of the exhibition have arranged drawings from life and sketches of projects according to a chronological principle, within the framework of the story of the life of the architect, in connection with reports of his trips to Rome or Palestrina, which, again, enlivens dry research analysis. The beauty of these sheets, independent of their meaning and significance, is not even worth mentioning.
But the most striking element of the exhibition was more than 30 wooden models of buildings by Andrea Palladio, made especially for his anniversary. These large scale models serve as points of attraction in each room, making them amazed again - thanks to a new scale and point of view - the perfection of the forms of the architect's creations.
A separate section is devoted to Palladio's daily professional activities: drawing tools of the 16th century, reconstruction of a construction crane of that time, granary books indicating the costs of building the Palazzo Chiericati, etc. are shown. masters - and we are talking not only about his "Four Books on Architecture", but also about the military history of antiquity - "Notes" of Caesar and "History" of Polybius, which Palladio provided with detailed schemes of the deployment of troops in battles; even a model of the second work with the architect's own handwritten corrections is presented.
The final hall of the exposition is dedicated to the ambiguous relationship between Palladio and Palladianism. The curators refused to combine the creativity of the master and his followers into an integral concept, but also warned against their complete differentiation; among those for whom Andrea Palladio became "an eternal contemporary", the main place was occupied by architects who worked in Britain and Russia: Inigo Jones, Lord Burlington, Giacomo Quarenghi, Charles Cameron and Nikolai Lvov. At the same time, this list could be continued up to the present day, and it would not necessarily consist exclusively of "classicists" or "traditionalists": in order to be a "contemporary" of Palladio, one must strive to re-perceive the familiar language of architectural forms and change it, according to their perception of beauty as a fundamental principle. At the same time, it is not necessary to adapt to your era - the baroque arose around the "calm greatness" of Palladio's creations - you just need to check with a certain "inner compass" of harmony. Buildings created with such aspirations will cross the boundaries of time and become eternally relevant: like Villa Rotonda or Teatro Olimpico, speaking to us in a clear language, despite the past centuries.
Exhibition “Palladio. 500 Years”will run until January 6, 2009. From January 31 to April 13, 2009 it will be shown at the Royal Academy of Arts in London.
