Palladian architecture
Burlington sponsored the career of the artist, architect and landscaper William Kent, and their joint creation, Holkham Hall in Norfolk, has been described as "the most splendid Palladian house in England".
Later in the century, when the style was losing favour in Europe, Palladianism had a surge in popularity throughout the British colonies in North America.
By the middle of that century, both were challenged and then superseded by the Gothic Revival in the English-speaking world, whose champions such as Augustus Pugin, remembering the origins of Palladianism in ancient temples, deemed the style too pagan for true Christian worship.
In the 20th and 21st centuries, Palladianism has continued to evolve as an architectural style; its pediments, symmetry and proportions are evident in the design of many modern buildings, while its inspirer is regularly cited as having been among the world's most influential architects.
This is most simply described as a recessed portico, or an internal single storey room with pierced walls that are open to the elements.
This was introduced in the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice by Jacopo Sansovino (1537), and heavily adopted by Palladio in the Basilica Palladiana in Vicenza,[28] where it is used on both storeys; this feature was less often copied.
Sir John Summerson suggests that the omission of the doubled columns may be allowed, but the term "Palladian motif" should be confined to cases where the larger order is present.
[32][n 6] According to James Lees-Milne, its first appearance in Britain was in the remodelled wings of Burlington House, London, where the immediate source was in the English court architect Inigo Jones's designs for Whitehall Palace rather than drawn from Palladio himself.
[30] During the 17th century, many architects studying in Italy learned of Palladio's work, and on returning home adopted his style, leading to its widespread use across Europe and North America.
[n 10] Their biographer, Tommaso Temanza, proved to be the movement's most able proponent; in his writings, Palladio's visual inheritance became increasingly codified and moved towards neoclassicism.
[45][n 11][n 12] The "Palladianism" of Jones and his contemporaries and later followers was a style largely of façades, with the mathematical formulae dictating layout not strictly applied.
[56][57] The Baroque style proved highly popular in continental Europe, but was often viewed with suspicion in England, where it was considered "theatrical, exuberant and Catholic.
Campbell had placed his 1715 designs for the colossal Wanstead House near to the front of Vitruvius Britannicus, immediately following the engravings of buildings by Jones and Webb, "as an exemplar of what new architecture should be".
[1] The main block of the house followed Palladio's dictates, but his low, often detached, wings of farm buildings were elevated in significance.
When in 1746 the Duke of Bedford decided to rebuild Woburn Abbey, he chose the fashionable Palladian style, and selected the architect Henry Flitcroft, a protégé of Burlington.
[85][86] Flitcroft's designs, while Palladian in nature, had to comply with the Duke's determination that the plan and footprint of the earlier house, originally a Cistercian monastery, be retained.
They had become "power houses", in Sir John Summerson's words, the symbolic centres of the triumph and dominance of the Whig Oligarchy who ruled Britain unchallenged for some fifty years after the death of Queen Anne.
[95][96] Summerson thought Kent's Horse Guards on Whitehall epitomised "the establishment of Palladianism as the official style of Great Britain".
Hammond-Harwood was designed by the architect William Buckland in 1773–1774 for the wealthy farmer Matthias Hammond of Anne Arundel County, Maryland.
[138] Westover's north and south entrances, made of imported English Portland stone, were patterned after a plate in William Salmon's Palladio Londinensis (1734).
[139][n 25] The distinctive feature of Drayton Hall, its two-storey portico, was derived from Palladio,[141] as was Mount Airy, in Richmond County, Virginia, built in 1758–1762.
[107] Its architect James Hoban, who built the executive mansion between 1792 and 1800, was born in Callan, County Kilkenny, in 1762, the son of tenant farmers on the estate of Desart Court, a Palladian House designed by Pearce.
The architectural historian Gervase Jackson-Stops describes Castle Coole as "a culmination of the Palladian traditions, yet strictly neoclassical in its chaste ornament and noble austerity",[145] while Alistair Rowan, in his 1979 volume, North West Ulster, of the Buildings of Ireland series, suggests that, at Coole, Wyatt designed a building, "more massy, more masculine and more totally liberated from Palladian practice than anything he had done before.
Examples can be seen in the Indian subcontinent; the Raj Bhavan, Kolkata (formerly Government House) was modelled on Kedleston Hall,[152] while the architectural historian Pilar Maria Guerrieri identifies its influences in Lutyens' Delhi.
[153] In South Africa, Federico Freschi notes the "Tuscan colonnades and Palladian windows" of Herbert Baker's Union Buildings.
[154] By the 1770s, British architects such as Robert Adam and William Chambers were in high demand, but were now drawing on a wide variety of classical sources, including from ancient Greece, so much so that their forms of architecture became defined as neoclassical rather than Palladian.
In the 19th century, proponents of the Gothic Revival such as Augustus Pugin, remembering the origins of Palladianism in ancient temples, considered it pagan, and unsuited to Anglican and Anglo-Catholic worship.
[158][159][n 26] In North America, Palladianism lingered a little longer; Thomas Jefferson's floor plans and elevations owe a great deal to Palladio's I quattro libri dell'architettura.
[168][169][170] In England, Raymond Erith (1904–1973) drew on Palladian inspirations, and was followed in this by his pupil, subsequently partner, Quinlan Terry.
[171] Their work, and that of others,[155] led the architectural historian John Martin Robinson to suggest that "the Quattro Libri continues as the fountainhead of at least one strand in the English country house tradition.
