Palladio and Palladianism (review)

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l^g Reviews would be required and we know most about the workshops attached to royal households, which were under the supervision of the armourers. As an organised craft embroidery existed in London and Paris from the thirteenth century and statutes survive for the Paris guild showing the unusually long apprenticeship and something of the organisation of the labour. Since the materials were expensive (linen, silk, silver and silver-gdt, gold thread and jewels), and by analysis of the contracts for work which survive, it would seem that most work was done to order. The material was provided by the patron and the design, on whose artistry depended the impact of thefinalwork, was usually done by artists, individuals with a mastery of spatial harmony. Examination of surviving work shows how it was done. For quick effects the court used painting on silk. The patterns on which the embroiderers worked were often also white silk, which was embroidered over, or parchment, until in the fifteenth century, thin paper made the paper pattern possible. The embroiderers skills and practices remain very much untouched to this day. Patterns were pricked and transfened from patterns, or tailors chalk was used. Embroidery frames were common and applique work, drawn thread work, and quilting widely popular. The stitches used (split stitch, laid and couched work, cross and plait stitch, running and double running stitch, back stitch and stem stitch) are all still used by modem embroiderers. Sybil M . Jack Department of History University of Sydney Tavernor, Robert, Palladio and Palladianism, London, Thames and Hudson, 1991; paper; pp. 216; 163 plates; R.R.P. AUS$22.50. It would be a brave author who would write a book which in audience, cost and scope duplicates James Ackerman's Palladio, published by Penguin in 1966 and many times reprinted. Tavernor's book avoids such direct confrontation only by devoting half its space to Palladianism in England and America. Even so, the author has been remarkably successful in presenting a view of Palladio which complements, rather than duplicates, Ackerman's account. As one might expect from one whose 'master and guide' is Joseph Rykwert, the unifying thread of Tavernor's book is architectural theory. Not that theory was absent from Ackerman's book, but the account of Palladio's use of harmonic theory there was based largely on Wittkower's seminal Architectural principles in the age of humanism. Tavernor presents a revised view which takes into account more recent qualifications of Wittkower's ideas, and sets it more firmly within the tradition of Vitruvius and Alberti. Indeed, he speaks more often of 'VitravioPalladianism ' than Palladianism. The book opens with Poggio Bracciolini's discovery of the Vitruvius manuscript at St Gallen, and ends with Jefferson's Reviews 159 accomplishments which make 'a fitting epitaph ... to the Vitravio-Palladianism of the English-speaking world'. Alberti, too, appears more frequendy than is usual in books on Palladio, perhaps not surprisingly from an author responsible for the most recent translation of his Ten books on Architecture. A reflection of developments in the architectural history of the period since Wittkower is the thoroughness of the treatment of the historical context. O n one occasion this tempts the author to uncharacteristic speculation, when he suggests that the facades of Palladio's churches,firstanalysed in terms of superimposed temple fronts by Wittkower: 'may be taken as a visual conflation of the "house of man" and the "house of God": the lower pediment spans the breadth of the church occupied by man and his memorials, while the other, more "heavenly" pediment appears to thrust upwards on tall elegant columns. Did Palladio intend this combination of motifs to be read as a symbol of the reconciliation between man and the supreme authority of God which the Council of Trent also sought to achieve?' (pp. 62-63). While the section on Palladio lies at the core of the book, the Vitruvian and theoretical themes (especially proportion) enable the sections on English and American Palladianism to avoid being merely extended chapters on 'Palladio's influence'. Movements are judged according to whether they sustain the high theoretical position. The chapter on later English Palladianism is entided 'From Vitruvian integrity to Patiadian...