The term Palladian can be used to refer to any architectural style based on the work of Andrea Palladio|, whether it be by his Italian contemporaries or by the numerous architectural practices operating around the world today.

Three distinctive periods of Palladianism can be discerned:

• the Palladianism of Palladio's own time, chiefly seen in the work of fellow Italians who drew inspiration from his buildings
• seventeenth-century Palladianism in Britain, when the work of Inigo Jones and John Webb replaced the decorative style of Elizabethan and Jacobean buildings
• the Neo-Palladianism of eighteenth-century Britain, a style that dominated British and North American architecture from the 1720s to the 1780s