Andrea Palladio was born in 1508 in Padua, one of the Veneto’s main cities and a centre of classical studies, as well as home to the oldest university in Italy.

In 1524 he moved to Vicenza, where he continued his training as a stonemason. His talent was soon recognised and he started working for one of the most important workshops in the city. His association with Giangiorgio Trissino (1478-1550), a Vicentine aristocrat who became his patron, was decisive for his career. Trissino had remodelled his own villa at Cricoli, near Vicenza, in a way that partly anticipates Palladio’s architectural language. He introduced Palladio to classical and humanist studies and took him to Rome for the first time. At the time of this first visit Palladio had already carried out a number of significant projects but the direct study and observation of the monuments of Roman antiquity, which he knew through drawings and architectural treatises such as that by Sebastiano Serlio, had a profound impact on his development as an architect.

Other architects in the Veneto were using classical architecture as a reference for their work, two of them achieving outstanding results - Jacopo Sansovino, who moved from Rome to Venice and lived and worked there for the rest of his life; and Michele Sanmicheli, who divided his time between Venice and his native Verona. They both had a considerable influence on Palladio’s early architecture.

Palladio, however, seemed to have an unrivalled understanding of the importance of proportions in classical architecture and applied this knowledge to his sober and elegant buildings. His name will always be associated with the so-called ‘Roman’ Renaissance and yet he spent his formative years in the Veneto, built virtually all his buildings in the region, and received the patronage of the local aristocracy.

He was therefore steeped in a unique and stimulating culture – that of the Veneto in the 16th century. Both in Venice and its satellite cities of Vicenza, Padua and Verona there were wealthy and educated noblemen eager to patronise new architectural work. Some of these were intellectuals who had studied, or even in some cases written, architectural treatises and pursued humanist studies. Furthermore the region, especially Venice itself, had over the centuries developed its own corpus of architectural types and these offered Palladio a profusion of exemplars to emulate and transcend.

The way Palladio responded to this environment was highly original and resulted in him redefining the image of the region’s architecture. The influence of his work eventually reached far beyond its boundaries.