Andrea Palladio

Andrea Palladio, born Andrea di Pietro della Gondola in Padua in 1508, trained as a stonemason before establishing himself in Vicenza, where a humanist patron gave him the name Palladio and introduced him to the study of Roman antiquity. Over several visits to Rome he measured classical ruins, translating their proportions into villas, palaces, and churches across the Venetian mainland and in Venice, among them San Giorgio Maggiore and Il Redentore. In 1570 he published I Quattro Libri dell'Architettura, a treatise of designs and principles. His symmetrical, temple-fronted idiom, later termed Palladianism, shaped building in Britain, the Americas, and beyond.