THE ARCHITECT WHO CHANGED OUR WORLD

A historical novel focuses on the Italian Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio.

Andrea di Pietro della Gondola is born in 1508 in Padua, Italy, and shows impressive signs of artistic talent at an early age—an uncommon facility for drawing, a sense of shape and proportion, and a head for numbers. His godfather, Vincenzo Grandi, a sculptor, is the first to introduce a wide-eyed Andrea to architectural drawings. The boy’s father, Pietro, believing him to be well suited to masonry, lands him an apprenticeship with Bartolomeo Cavazza da Sossano, a stone cutter. The man turns out to be a brutal tyrant, but Andrea’s precocious skill and ambition are now established—he pines to be the “best architect that Italy” has ever seen, an aspiration ably depicted by Winfrey. He moves with his father to Vicenza, the stage for the villas he designs that will ultimately bring him fame. He finds work with Giovanni da Porlezza and Girolamo Pittoni, an architect and a sculptor, and as a result meets Gian Giorgio Trissino, an influential man who eventually becomes Andrea’s benefactor and best friend. Trissino loves Andrea like a son, takes him to Rome, and introduces him to Michelangelo. Trissino even convinces Andrea, as a way to shed his inauspicious beginnings, to change his surname to Palladio, inspired by a saint of the same name. This book is part of the Mentoris Project, which examines eminent Italians and Italian Americans. The author’s reconstruction of Palladio’s life is sturdy—her research is impeccable. But the work as a whole is poetically mechanical; it often reads like a long Wikipedia entry. Given the novel’s lack of style or literary ingenuity, readers will wonder why she didn’t simply write this as a nonfiction monograph. Nevertheless, she provides a historically astute account of the work that made Palladio a giant in his field, including his seminal volume, The Four Books of Architecture, an endeavor that took him 28 years to complete.

A learned and illuminating tale about Palladio’s remarkable artistic accomplishments.