The Four Books on Architecture. - book reviews

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 1997 by Alfred Mayor

Andrea Palladio's Quattro libri dell'architettura was first published in 1570. Since then more than forty editions in many languages have appeared. The present translation by two professors at the universities of Bath and Nottingham in England is the forty-third edition and the first English translation since Isaac Ware's in 1738. If there is any doubt as to the meaning of a word, the Italian is inserted in brackets after the English and in most cases may be pursued in the very extensive and useful glossary. Whereas Ware illustrated his translation with engravings of Palladio's woodcuts, reversing the images in so doing, the present edition is illustrated with facsimiles of Palladio's originals.

The discursive introduction begins, quite properly, with the discovery in the early fifteenth century of Palladio's source and inspiration, Vitruvius's De architectura. It continues with Palladio's training first as a stonemason, then as a protege of the influential statesman Gian Giorgio Trissino (who conferred on Andrea della Gondola the name Andrea Palladio), then as an architect and author of two best-selling guidebooks to the architecture of Rome, and finally to the production of the Quattro libri, which, indeed, may have been the beginning of a longer work, cut short by the author's death in 1580.

In the foreword to the first of his four books on architecture Palladio sets forth his plain-spoken and practical approach to his subject and promises more than he finally was able to deliver, "since I must publish the results of those labors which, since my youth, I have devoted to studying and measuring the ancient buildings that I knew about with as much care as I was capable of, and take this occasion to discuss architecture as briefly, methodically, and clearly as I could, I thought it would be most appropriate to begin with private houses; for it is plausible that they supplied the models [ragione] for public buildings, since it is very likely that man previously lived by himself, and then, seeing that he needed the help of other men in providing those things which would make him happy (if any happiness is to be found down here), he quite naturally longed for and loved the company of other men: so they formed settlements from a number of houses and from settlements cities in which there were public places and buildings.... I shall discuss, therefore, private houses, and will then proceed to public buildings. I shall deal briefly with roads, bridges, squares, prisons, basilicas (that is, places of judgment), xysti, palaestrae, which were places where men took exercise, temples, theatres and amphitheaters, arches, baths, aqueducts, and finally I shall deal with the fortification of cities, and with harbors. In all these books I shall avoid being long-winded and will simply provide the advice [avertenza] that seems essential to me, and will make use of those terms widely used nowadays by craftsmen."

Would that this remarkably conscientious man had managed to finish his proposed agenda. Nonetheless, this excerpt is useful both for its insight into Palladio's lucid mind and as an example of this wonderfully limpid translation, which at last makes this influential book fully accessible to the English reader.