Andrea Palladio

Palladio is the most widely imitated architect in Western history, and the only one whose name became an adjective. Born Andrea di Pietro della Gondola in Padua in 1508, he began as a stonemason and was past thirty before the humanist Gian Giorgio Trissino took him up, renamed him Palladio and sent him to Rome to measure the ruins.

What he did with those measurements was the innovation. Roman temple fronts had been religious architecture; Palladio applied them to private country houses, and made the portico the face of the domestic villa. He also solved a practical problem elegantly: his villas were working farms, so he tied barns, granaries and dovecotes into the composition as symmetrical wings rather than hiding them. The result looked like architecture and functioned like an estate.

His buildings cluster in Vicenza and along the Veneto's rivers, with two churches in Venice — San Giorgio Maggiore and the Redentore — where he had to fit a classical front onto a basilica section, and did it by overlapping two temple fronts of different heights.

The reason his influence outran his region is that he wrote it down. The Quattro Libri dell'Architettura of 1570 published his own buildings as measured plates, which made them copyable by architects who would never see them. Inigo Jones brought the book to England, Lord Burlington built Chiswick House from it, and Thomas Jefferson designed Monticello and the University of Virginia out of the same pages. The porticoed white house of the American South descends from plates drawn for farms outside Vicenza.

He died in 1580, with the Teatro Olimpico unfinished; Vincenzo Scamozzi completed it. His villas and the centre of Vicenza were inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1994 and 1996.