Palladian Architecture

Palladian architecture is a European style descended from the work of the Venetian architect Andrea Palladio, who lived from 1508 to 1580 and built his reputation chiefly on the country houses and villas he designed in the Veneto region of Italy. Palladio's approach was grounded in the principles of symmetry, proportion and perspective he drew from ancient Greek and Roman architecture, transmitted above all through the Roman writer Vitruvius, and he set out his ideas in the influential treatise The Four Books of Architecture. A signature Palladian device is the use of a Greco Roman temple front, a pedimented portico carried on columns, applied to the entrance of an otherwise domestic building, along with the Palladian window, a three part window with a tall arched central section flanked by two shorter, square topped side sections. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries his approach was revived and developed into the broader style known as Palladianism, which spread through Britain and its American colonies.