When Thomas Jefferson failed to find an architect who could build his planned home, Monticello, to his satisfaction, he studied architecture himself. Jefferson was drawn to the works of Andrea Palladio, an architect during the High Renaissance of sixteenth-century Italy. Thus began an American revival of Palladianism, an architectural style named for Palladio and based on his theory that architecture should be grounded in reason and the principles of antiquity. Before the eighteenth century concluded, Palladianism had spread around the world, making Palladio perhaps the most imitated architect in history.

Palladianism expresses its reliance on rationality through symmetry, balance, and harmony of proportion. Palladio paid homage to Greek and Roman antiquity, meanwhile, through the use of decorative motifs, temple fronts, and colonnades; his most copied feature may have been a roofed porch supported by columns. Palladio derived his style primarily from his own reasoning, based on his direct study of Roman ruins.

Palladio applied his principles in more than 140 commissions. The majority of his works have been destroyed or survive only in fragments or drawings; Palladio’s ideas nonetheless have been preserved by his famed treatise, The Four Books of Architecture, which he prepared over the course of more than twenty years.

PostScript: Though less daring than his famed contemporary Michaelangelo, Palladio is considered by many to have been a better architect and has had more widespread influence in that field. As a tribute to his greatness, he is the only architect to have an architectural style named for him.