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Drawing on the past: Palladio, his precursors and knowledge of ancient architecture

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David Hemsoll discusses the methods used by Palladio in the drawing and reconstruction of ancient monuments in Rome

Image courtesy of interviewee. June 19, 2024

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The article discusses the influential architect Andrea Palladio, highlighting his significant impact on architecture in Britain, Europe, and the United States during and after the 17th and 18th centuries. While Palladio is renowned for his buildings and extensive drawings, the article challenges the common belief that he solely created accurate drawings of ancient structures based on personal measurements. Instead, it argues that Palladio likely based his illustrations on the works of earlier architects, leading to inaccuracies in his representations.

The author posits that Palladio's approach involved replicating features from previous drawings, many of which were themselves flawed. The article provides examples of Palladio's misalignments, particularly in his illustration of the Temple of Bacchus, suggesting he relied on inaccurate earlier drafts. It also discusses the methods Palladio used, including adaptations of designs according to his expectations rather than strict representations of the ruins.

Moreover, the article notes the collaborative nature of architectural knowledge during the Renaissance, showing how relationships with fellow architects, such as Antonio da Sangallo and others, influenced Palladio's works. The findings emphasize that many surviving architectural drawings resulted from collective efforts, leading to improved accuracy over time. Overall, the article seeks to clarify the complexities behind Palladio's drawings and the historical context of Renaissance architecture, recognizing that much of the knowledge accumulated during this period laid the foundation for modern archaeology.

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The article I wrote is about Palladio.

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And a compelling reason to write about Palladio is

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that he was one of the most acclaimed

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and consequential architects of all time.

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And he had immense influence, as everybody probably knows on

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the 17th and 18th century architecture of Britain,

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Europe in general, the United States and elsewhere,

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and also the architecture of later times as well.

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Um, he is, he's known for his buildings,

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also his treatise, his great many surviving drawings,

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and it is the treatise

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and the drawings that I'm focusing on in my article.

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The thing is, he's, he's not only a very famous architect,

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but he's also a claim for his remarkable,

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apparently remarkable knowledge of the architecture

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of antiquity, which is seen in his treatise illustrations

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and in a good many of his drawings.

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And he's widely thought

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to have acquired all this knowledge himself, which is

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what he claims in the treatise.

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And it's been imagined that he

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measured antiquities

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and produced drawings of antiquities entirely by himself,

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the drawings of temples providing the basis

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for the illustrations in the treatise.

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So this is the point of view of the recent past,

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and it is often today repeated or implied.

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And so it's imagined that Palladio traveled around Rome

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and other places principally by himself and simply measured

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and drew the ancient buildings that he saw.

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So that's what people sort of, sort of have the back

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of their minds when they talk about his images

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of ancient buildings.

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But it's, this is all highly improbable

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and his claims in his treatise are largely untrue,

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and that's the point of the article.

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Uh, so what is being put forward instead is

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that he based his own drawings

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and treat his illustrations on the drawings

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of earlier architects with a sort

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of ulterior goal in mind.

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And this would be to amass a corpus of depictions

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of ancient architecture that would be without parallel.

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So the proposition that I've put forward to

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can then be demonstrated by exact drawings

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or illustrations

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and then identifying features that are obviously incorrect

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and looking for earlier drawings

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that have the same incorrect features.

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So the, the implication is strongly

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that he based his own images on previous drawings,

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Which turn out very often to have been inaccurate.

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Among the treatise illustrations

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that he provides are these depictions of temples.

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And one of the best examples to illustrate his practice

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is his illustration of the circular temple

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of backers in the treatise,

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which is the building we now know as the church in Rome

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of Santa cost stanza.

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Um, now what you find is that Palladio's illustration

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of this building, which is a building he says he saw has

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all sorts of inaccuracies, especially having the spaces

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between the interior columns aligning

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with the niches in the surrounding

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wall, which isn't the case.

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They simply don't align in reality.

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But the building is shed in this same way,

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this same incorrect way in certain earlier drawings,

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which implies that Palladio's illustration's illustration

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was based on some earlier drawing

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that was similarly incorrect,

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because it's difficult to understand why if he went

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to the building and he saw it, one

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of the first things you notice is that the columns

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and the spaces between them aren't in alignment

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with the niches around the exterior.

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It is absolutely obvious,

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but somehow that sort of slipped his mind.

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But he came to provide his treatise illustration

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and he drew it incorrectly.

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So there is a sort of reason to explain this feature

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and count as other features in the treatise drawings.

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So well, there are, there are all sorts of other examples

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that bear out this proposal.

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So to take just one of these,

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he illustrates the now demolished temple of Minerva,

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which was situated not very far away from the Roman Forum,

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and he shows it as backing onto a circular structure

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directly behind it, which is

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how it also appears in certain earlier drawings.

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But in reality, it didn't have a curving wall.

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It was, sorry, it did have a curving wall behind it,

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but it was, this wall was offset

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a considerable distance to the right.

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So showing the curving wall

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or the circular structure directly behind the temple is not

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how it ever was in reality,

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but it is how earlier draftsman thought it to be,

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and that is what Palladio has in his own drawing.

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So these earlier drawings

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therefore explain the, formulation

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of the design that he himself illustrated.

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Very good. So many examples, not only whole buildings,

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but also the details of buildings which simply don't

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Correspond to the details of those buildings

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that still survive.

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So somehow something happened

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and the something that happened was

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that Palladio used other people's drawings on which

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to base his own depictions palladio's drawings

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of bath complexes.

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And they are remarkable

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and they certainly constitutes a remarkable set

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of such images, many

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of which Palladio intended him to publish himself,

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and many of which were actually

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published in the 18th century.

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And because they came into the popular sphere as it were,

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they then had some influence on the way subsequent scholars

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have conceived of these complexes.

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So that that's the sort of process that's happened.

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And they do indeed, provide his set of images do,

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do indeed provide ground plans of several complexes

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that have now almost van vanished.

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So among those, there are the bars of Nero, the bars

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of Titus, the baths of Traian

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and the baths of Constantine.

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And in sort of modern day studies, you,

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you often see Pilates drawings standing for the original

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compositions of these complexes.

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So what you can say is that the drawings are reliable

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to an extent, but only to an extent

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because they were largely based on other people's drawings

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and which were themselves defective.

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Um, and these other drawings,

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could have been defective

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or could it be thought of as being defective.

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And that was the problem that Palladio was facing.

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Um, as I've said

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before, it didn't stop the Palladio drawings gaining an

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accepted authority as reconstructions

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that can be relied upon.

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So time and time again, Palladio provides the information

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that you cannot see on site today.

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So that's where we are. So he did various things

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with these drawings of bath complexes.

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Sometimes he produced near replicas

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of other people's surveys, which would seem to be the case

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with his drawing of the plan of the bars of Traum,

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which had been meticulously surveyed by a group

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of French draftsmen perhaps just a little while previously.

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There are really very few drawings at all of this complex,

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but the ones that survive are the Palladio drawing

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and the drawing produced as the result of a survey

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very obviously by, a group

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of French draftsmen.

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So that's one thing he did.

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It's sometimes possible too to

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following the evidence of padio zone surviving drawings

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to see how some plans

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of bath complexes were based on presumably earlier surveys,

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but these were then creatively completed.

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So there's, you know, you can sort of trace a pattern

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between an earlier drawing the Palladio drawing,

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and you can see that what Palladio does is he takes the

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earlier information and he kinds of puts it together

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with a few invented ideas

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to create his own version of the complex.

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And that's the case very much with his drawings of the bars

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of Niro and the baths of Titus.

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But in the case of the baths of Constantine,

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which have entirely disappeared, he did something else

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because it's reasonable to conclude

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that he altered the likely layout so as

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to make it conform more to his expectations of

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what a bar complex ought to look like,

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because it is significantly different from drawings

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of the complex produced beforehand.

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So the, which are all consistent

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with one another, broadly speaking.

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So it's as if he sort of looked at these and said,

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or one of them and said, this doesn't look right to me,

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bar complexes ought to look different.

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And he reconstructs the plan,

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in the way in which he thinks it ought

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to have been arranged.

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Um, and that's interesting

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because you know, if you look at book books on Roman

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architecture and the bars of Constantine,

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it's usually Palladio's plan that is reproduced

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and it just cannot be right.

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In this article I mentioned three other artists,

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architects who seem to have had sort of particular resonance

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with Palladio.

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So one of these is

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the Verona architect McKayley Sam McKayley,

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who was very much Palladio's early career model,

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and Sam McKayley gained a formidable reputation

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for his drawings of antiquities.

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So that's reported at the time, even though none

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of his drawings actually survives.

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Um, but nevertheless, it is likely that many

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of Palladio's earlier drawings that is the ones he produced

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before he first went to Rome in 1541

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are copies of originals

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by someone else or other people.

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And these originals,

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or many of them would most likely have been produced

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by Sammy Kaley.

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So he's a sort of early model,

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but he's also an early instance.

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He provides an early instance of pal Palladio copying

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the drawings of others.

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And that is seen, for example, in the very many drawings

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of the antiquities

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Of Verona that he produces, which are likely

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to have been copied from drawings from by someone else

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and in all likelihood drawings by Sam McKayley.

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So that would be the sort of connection.

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Then I mention in particular Antonio Daan Gallo,

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the younger, and what we need to know is

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that San Gallo was the leading architect

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and antiquarian in Rome up

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until his death in 1546,

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and Palladio would've got to know him very well

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while Palladio was in Rome during the 1540s.

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Palladio is basically a professional climber,

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so if there's a sort of good reason to get to know someone,

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Palladio will take advantage of the good reason

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and get to know the person.

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And no doubt San Gallo will be very flattered

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to have all this attention.

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Sanga was probably instrumental in acquainting Palladio

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with his own drawings and also with the drawings of others.

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And it's interesting to observe that it was San Gallo

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who had first realized that most ancient temples conformed

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to similar theoretical models

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involving peripheral columns

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and steps sometimes at the sides as well

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as the fronts.

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So just to unpack that a bit,

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if you read the ancient treatise of Vitruvius, that is

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how you can understand temples to have been organized.

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And basically San Gallo applied that lesson to the ruins

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of ancient Rome so that he was able

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to reconstruct these buildings according

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to ancient principles.

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Uh, this format, the columns around the whole building

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and steps sometimes around the whole building is the format

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that Palladio often followed for his own reconstructions

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of temples, of the kinds that you see in his treatise.

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So there, there's a sort of chain of links

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that eventually culminates in the Palladio, the drawings

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that Palladio produces himself in the treatise.

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Then thirdly, I make a particular point of Rio,

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partly because Rio features quite prominently in current

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literature on Palladio, the Rio was the contemporary

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of Palladio's, and several

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of Rio's drawings are really very like some of palladio's

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to the extent that it has been proposed exceptionally,

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because it's not, this sort

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of thing is not normally proposed.

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It's been proposed anyway that Rio's drawings

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provided Palladio with points of departure for drawings

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of his own, the same antiquities.

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But the reality of

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this relationship is probably much more complicated.

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So for example, the very similar

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Drawings by the Rio

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and Palladio of the temple complex of Hercules,

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but Tivoli are both of them probably dependent on the survey

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of this complex,

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but have been conducted by Antonio Dasan Gallo previously.

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So the similarity is not really one of, in this case,

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it's not one of Palladio copying Rio

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or even Rio copying Palladio.

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It's because they both take their, information from

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a very, respectable survey previously established.

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Um, and then this all matters,

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because explaining the connections

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between surviving drawings

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and also trying to explain the ancestry of drawings

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helps us understand better how architects

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actually interacted with one another,

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and also how knowledge of ancient architecture

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gradually began to accrue.

15:57.625 --> 16:00.965
So rather than saying lots of individual artists all went

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to Rome and they all made their own drawings of,

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of ancient buildings, you can start to see how

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one architect takes advantage of the achievements

16:11.345 --> 16:14.625
of another architect to produce, let's say, a better drawing

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or a more accurate drawing, and you can

16:17.065 --> 16:18.825
therefore have a succession

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of incremental improvements seen in drawings

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by successive architects.

16:25.685 --> 16:28.705
The research of the article, this debunks the idea

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that Palladio came up single-handedly with the drawings

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of reconstructions of buildings that he explored,

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including the ones he published in his treatise.

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Just to sort of unpack that a bit more, if you go

16:43.535 --> 16:46.215
to Rome and you see these ancient buildings, you become

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to realize, except that most scholars don't realize

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that you can't just go around, Rome with a tape measure

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and sort of measure a few things

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and then draw, make drawings of them.

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Um, measuring a building properly requires a team of

17:05.335 --> 17:09.145
dedicated people engaged on the task.

17:09.885 --> 17:11.745
It also requires a great deal of time,

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which Palladio didn't have.

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And if we think back to the 16th century, we are dealing

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with buildings which may look very nice today,

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but within, in ruin us

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and dangerous states of existence.

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So the idea that you sort of turn up at the Bath of Carala

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with a measuring rod and a tape measure

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and sort of go around the site measuring things

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to produce an accurate rendition of the layout

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is completely farfetched.

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So that's what the article was intended

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to do, but it also points to other things too, so

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That this sort of research draws our attention to the fact

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that the realities of studying ancient architecture

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during the Renaissance period to what we, it draws attention

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to what we know and what we don't know.

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So in particular, it helps us realize that for every drawing

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of an ancient building that happens to survive today,

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there were hundreds, even thousands of drawings of it

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that were produced originally.

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So, you know, we have the tiniest traction surviving today

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of what was originally produced, of the ones that today

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any connections that can be recognized

18:31.465 --> 18:35.055
or inferred are only recognizable

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through chance survivals.

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So it, it sort of brings you to realize

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just how, or almost how seemingly impossible it is

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to create a, a, a sort of sense of contextualization

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of these individual drawings.

18:54.395 --> 18:58.215
But going beyond that, we can still say that

18:58.975 --> 19:00.815
hypothesized co connections

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and discernible patterns can still provide insights

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into the much larger world

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of Renaissance drawings after the antique.

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And so exploring these connections and patterns can

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and will increase our knowledge very considerably

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of this critically important subject, which was an area

19:24.275 --> 19:27.735
of endeavor that led to the foundations

19:28.195 --> 19:29.855
for modern archeology.

19:30.675 --> 19:32.255
So they produced all these,

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these drawings in the 16th century

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and gained fantastic knowledge of

19:36.845 --> 19:38.575
what individual buildings were like,

19:38.955 --> 19:41.495
and it was this accruing of knowledge,

19:42.345 --> 19:46.735
which then carried forward into even more exacting studies,

19:47.385 --> 19:51.415
which starts to become what we call archeology.

00:00 - The article I wrote is about Palladio. And a compelling reason to write about Palladio is that he was one of the most acclaimed and consequential architects of all time. And he had immense influence, as everybody probably knows on the 17th and 18th century architecture of Britain,

00:20 - Europe in general, the United States and elsewhere, and also the architecture of later times as well. he is, he's known for his buildings, also his treatise, his great many surviving drawings, and it is the treatise and the drawings that I'm focusing on in my article. The thing is, he's, he's not only a very famous architect, but he's also a claim for his remarkable, apparently remarkable knowledge of the architecture of antiquity, which is seen in his treatise illustrations

00:58 - and in a good many of his drawings. And he's widely thought to have acquired all this knowledge himself, which is what he claims in the treatise. And it's been imagined that he measured antiquities and produced drawings of antiquities entirely by himself, the drawings of temples providing the basis for the illustrations in the treatise. So this is the point of view of the recent past,

01:30 - and it is often today repeated or implied. And so it's imagined that Palladio traveled around Rome and other places principally by himself and simply measured and drew the ancient buildings that he saw. So that's what people sort of, sort of have the back of their minds when they talk about his images of ancient buildings. But it's, this is all highly improbable and his claims in his treatise are largely untrue, and that's the point of the article.

02:08 - so what is being put forward instead is that he based his own drawings and treat his illustrations on the drawings of earlier architects with a sort of ulterior goal in mind. And this would be to amass a corpus of depictions of ancient architecture that would be without parallel. So the proposition that I've put forward to can then be demonstrated by exact drawings or illustrations

02:43 - and then identifying features that are obviously incorrect and looking for earlier drawings that have the same incorrect features. So the, the implication is strongly that he based his own images on previous drawings, Which turn out very often to have been inaccurate. Among the treatise illustrations that he provides are these depictions of temples. And one of the best examples to illustrate his practice is his illustration of the circular temple

03:18 - of backers in the treatise, which is the building we now know as the church in Rome of Santa cost stanza. now what you find is that Palladio's illustration of this building, which is a building he says he saw has all sorts of inaccuracies, especially having the spaces between the interior columns aligning with the niches in the surrounding wall, which isn't the case. They simply don't align in reality.

03:53 - But the building is shed in this same way, this same incorrect way in certain earlier drawings, which implies that Palladio's illustration's illustration was based on some earlier drawing that was similarly incorrect, because it's difficult to understand why if he went to the building and he saw it, one of the first things you notice is that the columns and the spaces between them aren't in alignment with the niches around the exterior.

04:24 - It is absolutely obvious, but somehow that sort of slipped his mind. But he came to provide his treatise illustration and he drew it incorrectly. So there is a sort of reason to explain this feature and count as other features in the treatise drawings. So well, there are, there are all sorts of other examples that bear out this proposal. So to take just one of these, he illustrates the now demolished temple of Minerva,

04:54 - which was situated not very far away from the Roman Forum, and he shows it as backing onto a circular structure directly behind it, which is how it also appears in certain earlier drawings. But in reality, it didn't have a curving wall. It was, sorry, it did have a curving wall behind it, but it was, this wall was offset a considerable distance to the right. So showing the curving wall or the circular structure directly behind the temple is not

05:27 - how it ever was in reality, but it is how earlier draftsman thought it to be, and that is what Palladio has in his own drawing. So these earlier drawings therefore explain the, formulation of the design that he himself illustrated. Very good. So many examples, not only whole buildings, but also the details of buildings which simply don't Correspond to the details of those buildings that still survive.

06:02 - So somehow something happened and the something that happened was that Palladio used other people's drawings on which to base his own depictions palladio's drawings of bath complexes. And they are remarkable and they certainly constitutes a remarkable set of such images, many of which Palladio intended him to publish himself, and many of which were actually

06:31 - published in the 18th century. And because they came into the popular sphere as it were, they then had some influence on the way subsequent scholars have conceived of these complexes. So that that's the sort of process that's happened. And they do indeed, provide his set of images do, do indeed provide ground plans of several complexes that have now almost van vanished. So among those, there are the bars of Nero, the bars of Titus, the baths of Traian

07:04 - and the baths of Constantine. And in sort of modern day studies, you, you often see Pilates drawings standing for the original compositions of these complexes. So what you can say is that the drawings are reliable to an extent, but only to an extent because they were largely based on other people's drawings and which were themselves defective. and these other drawings, could have been defective

07:42 - or could it be thought of as being defective. And that was the problem that Palladio was facing. as I've said before, it didn't stop the Palladio drawings gaining an accepted authority as reconstructions that can be relied upon. So time and time again, Palladio provides the information that you cannot see on site today. So that's where we are. So he did various things with these drawings of bath complexes.

08:15 - Sometimes he produced near replicas of other people's surveys, which would seem to be the case with his drawing of the plan of the bars of Traum, which had been meticulously surveyed by a group of French draftsmen perhaps just a little while previously. There are really very few drawings at all of this complex, but the ones that survive are the Palladio drawing and the drawing produced as the result of a survey very obviously by, a group of French draftsmen.

08:52 - So that's one thing he did. It's sometimes possible too to following the evidence of padio zone surviving drawings to see how some plans of bath complexes were based on presumably earlier surveys, but these were then creatively completed. So there's, you know, you can sort of trace a pattern between an earlier drawing the Palladio drawing, and you can see that what Palladio does is he takes the earlier information and he kinds of puts it together

09:23 - with a few invented ideas to create his own version of the complex. And that's the case very much with his drawings of the bars of Niro and the baths of Titus. But in the case of the baths of Constantine, which have entirely disappeared, he did something else because it's reasonable to conclude that he altered the likely layout so as to make it conform more to his expectations of what a bar complex ought to look like,

09:56 - because it is significantly different from drawings of the complex produced beforehand. So the, which are all consistent with one another, broadly speaking. So it's as if he sort of looked at these and said, or one of them and said, this doesn't look right to me, bar complexes ought to look different. And he reconstructs the plan, in the way in which he thinks it ought to have been arranged.

10:25 - and that's interesting because you know, if you look at book books on Roman architecture and the bars of Constantine, it's usually Palladio's plan that is reproduced and it just cannot be right. In this article I mentioned three other artists, architects who seem to have had sort of particular resonance with Palladio. So one of these is the Verona architect McKayley Sam McKayley,

10:53 - who was very much Palladio's early career model, and Sam McKayley gained a formidable reputation for his drawings of antiquities. So that's reported at the time, even though none of his drawings actually survives. but nevertheless, it is likely that many of Palladio's earlier drawings that is the ones he produced before he first went to Rome in 1541 are copies of originals by someone else or other people.

11:29 - And these originals, or many of them would most likely have been produced by Sammy Kaley. So he's a sort of early model, but he's also an early instance. He provides an early instance of pal Palladio copying the drawings of others. And that is seen, for example, in the very many drawings of the antiquities Of Verona that he produces, which are likely

11:56 - to have been copied from drawings from by someone else and in all likelihood drawings by Sam McKayley. So that would be the sort of connection. Then I mention in particular Antonio Daan Gallo, the younger, and what we need to know is that San Gallo was the leading architect and antiquarian in Rome up until his death in 1546, and Palladio would've got to know him very well while Palladio was in Rome during the 1540s.

12:33 - Palladio is basically a professional climber, so if there's a sort of good reason to get to know someone, Palladio will take advantage of the good reason and get to know the person. And no doubt San Gallo will be very flattered to have all this attention. Sanga was probably instrumental in acquainting Palladio with his own drawings and also with the drawings of others. And it's interesting to observe that it was San Gallo who had first realized that most ancient temples conformed

13:05 - to similar theoretical models involving peripheral columns and steps sometimes at the sides as well as the fronts. So just to unpack that a bit, if you read the ancient treatise of Vitruvius, that is how you can understand temples to have been organized. And basically San Gallo applied that lesson to the ruins of ancient Rome so that he was able to reconstruct these buildings according

13:35 - to ancient principles. this format, the columns around the whole building and steps sometimes around the whole building is the format that Palladio often followed for his own reconstructions of temples, of the kinds that you see in his treatise. So there, there's a sort of chain of links that eventually culminates in the Palladio, the drawings that Palladio produces himself in the treatise. Then thirdly, I make a particular point of Rio, partly because Rio features quite prominently in current

14:14 - literature on Palladio, the Rio was the contemporary of Palladio's, and several of Rio's drawings are really very like some of palladio's to the extent that it has been proposed exceptionally, because it's not, this sort of thing is not normally proposed. It's been proposed anyway that Rio's drawings provided Palladio with points of departure for drawings of his own, the same antiquities. But the reality of

14:44 - this relationship is probably much more complicated. So for example, the very similar Drawings by the Rio and Palladio of the temple complex of Hercules, but Tivoli are both of them probably dependent on the survey of this complex, but have been conducted by Antonio Dasan Gallo previously. So the similarity is not really one of, in this case, it's not one of Palladio copying Rio or even Rio copying Palladio.

15:17 - It's because they both take their, information from a very, respectable survey previously established. and then this all matters, because explaining the connections between surviving drawings and also trying to explain the ancestry of drawings helps us understand better how architects actually interacted with one another, and also how knowledge of ancient architecture gradually began to accrue.

15:57 - So rather than saying lots of individual artists all went to Rome and they all made their own drawings of, of ancient buildings, you can start to see how one architect takes advantage of the achievements of another architect to produce, let's say, a better drawing or a more accurate drawing, and you can therefore have a succession of incremental improvements seen in drawings by successive architects. The research of the article, this debunks the idea

16:28 - that Palladio came up single-handedly with the drawings of reconstructions of buildings that he explored, including the ones he published in his treatise. Just to sort of unpack that a bit more, if you go to Rome and you see these ancient buildings, you become to realize, except that most scholars don't realize that you can't just go around, Rome with a tape measure and sort of measure a few things and then draw, make drawings of them. measuring a building properly requires a team of

17:05 - dedicated people engaged on the task. It also requires a great deal of time, which Palladio didn't have. And if we think back to the 16th century, we are dealing with buildings which may look very nice today, but within, in ruin us and dangerous states of existence. So the idea that you sort of turn up at the Bath of Carala with a measuring rod and a tape measure and sort of go around the site measuring things

17:32 - to produce an accurate rendition of the layout is completely farfetched. So that's what the article was intended to do, but it also points to other things too, so That this sort of research draws our attention to the fact that the realities of studying ancient architecture during the Renaissance period to what we, it draws attention to what we know and what we don't know. So in particular, it helps us realize that for every drawing of an ancient building that happens to survive today,

18:12 - there were hundreds, even thousands of drawings of it that were produced originally. So, you know, we have the tiniest traction surviving today of what was originally produced, of the ones that today any connections that can be recognized or inferred are only recognizable through chance survivals. So it, it sort of brings you to realize just how, or almost how seemingly impossible it is to create a, a, a sort of sense of contextualization

18:51 - of these individual drawings. But going beyond that, we can still say that hypothesized co connections and discernible patterns can still provide insights into the much larger world of Renaissance drawings after the antique. And so exploring these connections and patterns can and will increase our knowledge very considerably of this critically important subject, which was an area of endeavor that led to the foundations

19:28 - for modern archeology. So they produced all these, these drawings in the 16th century and gained fantastic knowledge of what individual buildings were like, and it was this accruing of knowledge, which then carried forward into even more exacting studies, which starts to become what we call archeology.

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