Powered By Blogger

Welcome to Villa Speranza.

Welcome to Villa Speranza.

Search This Blog

Translate

Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Palladio: La loggia superiore della Basilica di Vicenza, dal lato di piazza dei Signori

Speranza




The Palazzo della Ragione, Vicenza, is an enormous hall covered with a wooden waggon-vault originally built in 1222, and reconstructed in 1444.

Palladio was asked to restore the building in 1545.

Of the four designs submitted, one was approved in 1549, and the work was started at once, although it was not finished until sixty-five years later, thirty-four years after the architect's death.

Palladio has encased the Gothic interior of the Palazzo with two-storeyed arcades, the uppter of the Ionic, the lower of the Doric order.

The architect was proud of this building, because as he says in his great work, "I quattro libri dell'architettura", it may be compared to the works of antiquity.

But the noble design shows features for which Palladio could have found no precedent either in the writings of Vitruvius, upon which he based his work, or nin any of the Roman buildings he had so closely studied.

One of these features is the side openings of the arches wich give lightness and variety to the arcades.

This device is not merely decorative: the breadth of the opening is determined by that in the main building behind the colonnade and is uncomfortably wide in proportion to its height.

Palladio has overcome the awkwardness of this height by setting the double columns that carry the arch slightly back from the main pier, bridging the space between them by a continuation of its moulding from which the arch springs.

So there is constructional significance as well as an artist's imagination of this feature.

No comments:

Post a Comment