Palladianism
architectural style
Holkham Hall
Palladianism, style of architecture based on the writings and buildings of the humanist and theorist from Vicenza, Andrea Palladio (1508–80), perhaps the greatest architect of the latter 16th century and certainly the most influential. Palladio felt that architecture should be governed by reason and by the principles of classical antiquity as it was known in surviving buildings and in the writings of the 1st-century-BC architect and theorist Vitruvius. Palladianism bespeaks rationality in its clarity, order, and symmetry, while it also pays homage to antiquity in its use of classical forms and decorative motifs. Few architects beyond Palladio’s immediate disciple Vincenzo Scamozzi (1552–1616) were interested in pursuing the most erudite aspect of Palladio’s work—his investigation of harmonic proportions—and in the hands of all too many followers of the next two centuries, Palladianism tended to become a sterile academic formula devoid of Palladio’s own forcefulness and poetry.
It was Inigo Jones who introduced Palladian architecture into England. Upon his return from a trip to Italy (1613–14), Jones created a Palladian style in London; this style was based upon the knowledge he had acquired from his study of Palladio’s writings and from his own first-hand examination of ancient and Renaissance architecture. Outstanding among the preserved examples are the Queen’s House at Greenwich (completed 1635), the Banqueting House at Whitehall (1619–22), and the Queen’s Chapel at St. James Palace (1623).
The Royal Crescent (1767–75; executed by the younger John Wood from his father’s design).(more)
At the beginning of the Georgian period (1714–1830), a second and more consuming interest in Palladio developed. Partly as a reaction to the grandiose architecture of the later Stuarts, the newly powerful Whigs expressed a desire to return to a more rational and less complicated style. Their wish coincided with the publication of an English translation of Palladio’s treatise I quattro libri dell’architettura (1570; Four Books of Architecture) and the first volume of Colen Campbell’s Vitruvius Britannicus (1715), a folio of 100 engravings of contemporary “classical” buildings in Britain (two more volumes followed in 1717 and 1725), the designs of which had enormous influence in England. William Benson, a Whig member of Parliament, had already built the first English Palladian house of the 18th century at Wilbury House, Wiltshire, in 1710. Campbell, the first important practitioner of the new and more literal English Palladianism, built Houghton Hall in Norfolk (begun 1722) and Mereworth Castle in Kent (c. 1722). The wealthy amateur architect Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington, and his protégé William Kent complete the triumvirate responsible for the second phase of the style. Burlington’s home, Chiswick House (begun 1725), was designed by him as a reinterpretation of Palladio’s Villa Rotonda. Holkham Hall, Norfolk (begun 1734), was built by Kent, who is also credited with having invented the English landscape garden. The other notable English Palladian architects were Henry Flitcroft, Isaac Ware, James Paine, Roger Morris, and John Wood the Elder.
Belle Mont Mansion in Tuscumbia, Alabama, typifying Jeffersonian Palladian architecture.(more)
In the 18th century a revival of Palladianism in England spread to Italy and thence throughout most of Europe and the American colonies. Among the notable architects of this movement were Francesco Maria Preti in Italy, Thomas Jefferson in America, and Georg Knobelsdorff in Germany. The style spread to Russia through the work of the Scottish-born Charles Cameron and the Italian Giacomo Quarenghi, and it also reached Sweden and Poland. By shortly after 1800 the style had succumbed everywhere to the ascendant movement of Neoclassicism, in which classical forms and details were derived directly from antiquity instead of seen through Palladio’s Renaissance eyes.
English garden
garden
Buckingham: Stowe Landscape Gardens
English garden, type of garden that developed in 18th-century England, originating as a revolt against the architectural garden, which relied on rectilinear patterns, sculpture, and the unnatural shaping of trees. The revolutionary character of the English garden lay in the fact that, whereas gardens had formerly asserted man’s control over nature, in the new style, man’s work was regarded as most successful when it was indistinguishable from nature’s. In the architectural garden the eye had been directed along artificial, linear vistas that implied man’s continued control of the surrounding countryside, but in the English garden a more natural, irregular formality was achieved in landscapes consisting of expanses of grass, clumps of trees, and irregularly shaped bodies of water.
In the 16th century the English philosopher Francis Bacon was outspokenly critical of the artificiality of “knot gardens.” He was supported in the early 18th century by Joseph Addison and Alexander Pope, who argued that trees should be allowed to grow into natural shapes; by the artist William Hogarth, who pointed out the beauty of a wavy line; and by a new attitude that nature was good. As the factotum of the Whig aristocracy, William Kent (q.v.) was responsible for beginning the wholesale transformation of the old formal parterres into the new fashion. The classic example of the transformation was at Stowe in Buckinghamshire, where the greatest of England’s formal gardens was by stages turned into a landscaped park under the influence of Kent and then of Lancelot Brown.
This article was most recently revised and updated by Amy Tikkanen.
Holkham Hall
house, Norfolk, England, United Kingdom
Holkham Hall in Norfolk, England.
Holkham Hall, country house located in Wells-next-the-Sea, Norfolk, England, that was built by Thomas Coke, 1st earl of Leicester. It was designed by architects William Kent, Lord Burlington (Richard Boyle), and Matthew Brettingham. Construction of the house began in 1734 and was completed in 1764.
Among the grandest of all English country houses, Holkham is a masterpiece of the Palladian style. From the outside, the house is imposing, elegant, but rather forbidding. A massive central block with a classical pediment and a pair of end towers is flanked by four smaller corner pavilions. The whole enormous building, 344 feet (105 meters) in length, is constructed in an austere local yellow brick, designed to imitate Roman Renaissance brickwork. The main rooms are on the upper floor, and from the outside this is expressed by the row of large windows sitting on top of the rusticated masonry of the lower floor. All these features have their origins in the buildings of Renaissance Italy.
None of the exterior grandeur, however, can compare with the interior, which survives largely as its creators left it. Whereas outside everything is restrained and austere, inside there is richness, color, and pattern. In the central block there is a series of staterooms housing the earl of Leicester’s outstanding collection of furniture and works of art. There is also a vast, triple-height entrance hall with a Derbyshire alabaster Ionic colonnade that was modeled on the Temple of Fortuna Virilis in Rome. The saloon has a gilded ceiling and walls covered in deep-red Genoa velvet, and the Statue Gallery contains the most complete collection of classical statuary in an English private house. The libraries house books and paintings collected by the earl on his six-year grand tour of Europe, which he embarked on at age 15.
The tour inspired Holkham’s design. Impressed by the temples and villas of Italy, the earl originally conceived the hall as a place to store the artworks and manuscripts he had collected on his travels. He met and befriended Kent while traveling and commissioned his expertise in realizing his vision. The earl died in 1759 before the hall was finished, leaving his widow, Lady Margaret Tufton, to oversee its completion. Today the hall sits on an estate comprising 25,000 acres (10,117 hectares) of parkland, farmland, woods, salt marsh, and beaches.
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