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
Choosing from a field shaped by Raphael, Michelangelo, Bramante, Alberti, et al., Boucher (The Sculpture of Jacopo Sansovino, Yale Univ. Pr., 1991) focuses on Palladio as one of the earliest modern architects. Not since James Ackerman's Palladio (1967) has this Renaissance master been covered so comprehensively. Heavily laden with stunning original photographs, Boucher's work transports the reader to the reassuring symmetrical classics of an architect who clarified, codified, and influenced architectural form in his own time with his Quattro Libri, which has endured through the centuries into the postmodern era. His early commissions in Vicenza and the succeeding bridges, mature villas, basilicas, and religious works are chronicled here with an attention to detail and careful scholarship that includes an extensive bibliography and glossary; yet architects and students of architecture and Renaissance art will find it both readable and enjoyable. Highly recommended.
Ellen Bates, New York
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From the Back Cover
More than any other architect in history, Andrea Palladio transformed the built landscape of the Western world. Elegant and powerful, his buildings won him acclaim in his lifetime and enduring fame in the four centuries since his death in 1589. His profound influence has crossed boundaries of both space and time; indeed, there are few major cities in the world without buildings that echo the crisp lines and impeccable design of his villas, palaces, and churches, and even the post-modernism of recent years can be seen as a reworking of themes first explored by Palladio. Though the great Renaissance architect's buildings have often been photographed and numerous specialized monographs have been written about his career, never before have his life and times been brought together in such a lively and comprehensive narrative as this volume. Richly illustrated with newly-commissioned photography as well as period plans and drawings, this book traces Palladio's rise from apprentice stonemason to a young intellectual engaged in a vivid debate about the importance of buildings in civic life. The book follows him through his first private residential commissions and the triumph of his Basilica in Vicenza, from the grand churches of San Giorgio Maggiore and the Redentore in Venice to the publication of his seminal Quattro Libri, or Four Books On Architecture, and culminates in the peerless villas that are associated with his name: the imposing Malcontenta and the aristocratic Rotonda. While the buildings are discussed in terms of their importance in art history, Palladio's remarkable career is also defined against the backdrop of the dramatic events and personalities of the age. Studying the pastwith an archaeologist's zeal, Palladio created an extraordinary series of buildings that deftly adapted the language of classical architecture to the requirements of sixteenth-century life. This handsome volume about Andrea Palladio, who has been revered and imitated for four hundred years, is indispensable not only for architects but for anyone with an interest in history and art.
