Andrea Palladio

Andrea Palladio was a sixteenth century Italian architect whose work in and around Vicenza and Venice made him one of the most influential figures in the entire history of Western architecture. Drawing on the ruins and treatises of ancient Rome, he developed a system of proportion, symmetry and classical ornament, applied most famously to a series of country villas for the Venetian nobility, among them the Villa Rotonda, whose four identical porticoed facades became an enduring model imitated for centuries afterward. His treatise The Four Books of Architecture set out his principles in text and illustration and was studied and copied across Europe and later in Britain and colonial America, giving rise to what became known as Palladian architecture. Buildings from Thomas Jefferson's Monticello to countless English country houses trace their proportions and classical vocabulary directly back to Palladio's example.