Born Andrea di Pietro della Gondola and apprenticed as a stonecutter, he was renamed Palladio by his patron Gian Giorgio Trissino and rebuilt the architecture of the Veneto around a reading of Vitruvius and of the Roman ruins he measured on four trips south. Roughly thirty villas, the Basilica Palladiana at Vicenza, the churches of San Giorgio Maggiore and the Redentore in Venice and the Teatro Olimpico are his. His Quattro Libri dell’Architettura of 1570 turned that practice into a portable system and made him, through Inigo Jones and Lord Burlington, the most copied architect in history. The paradox worth stating is material: those authoritative temple fronts are brick and lime stucco, dressed to read as stone by a client class that could not afford stone.
