User:Miam1026/Basilica Palladiana

History
note to reviewer: added all the sentences in bold.

The building was originally constructed in the 15th century and was known as the Palazzo della Ragione, having been designed by Domenico da Venezia to include two pre-existing public palazzi. Located in Vincenza’s major square, the wooden roofed Gothic style building served as the seat of government and also housed a number of shops on the ground floor. The 82-metre (269 ft)-tall Torre Bissara precedes this structure, as it is known from as early as 1172; however, its height was increased on this occasion, and its pinnacle was finished in 1444. It has five bells in the chord of E. The 15th-century edifice had an upside-down cover, partly supported by large archivolts, inspired by the one built in 1306 for the eponymous building of Padua. The Gothic façade was in red and gialletto marble of Verona, and is still visible behind the Palladio addition.

A double order of columns was built by Tommaso Formenton in 1481–1494 to surround the palace. However, two years after its completion, the south-western corner collapsed. The following year’s Italian Wars stalled the building's reconstruction, but in the following decades, the Vicentine government called in architects such as Antonio Rizzo, Giorgio Spavento, Antonio Scarpagnino, Jacopo Sansovino, Sebastiano Serlio, Michele Sanmicheli and Giulio Romano to propose a reconstruction plan. Romano recommended in 1542 that the old form be kept but reinforced– but his opinion was rejected by a council. In 1546, the Council of One Hundred chose a 40-year-old local architect, Andrea Palladio, to reconstruct the building. '''Upon selecting Palladio as the main architect, the council requested wooden samples of the project be submitted to them for review. The council deferred their decision after receiving their first sample, and then new drawings had to be created and resubmitted in 1548. These new drawings were accepted, and the new building was to be reconstructed''' starting from April 1549. Palladio added a new outer shell of marble classical forms, a loggia and a portico that now obscure the original Gothic architecture. He also dubbed the building a "basilica", after the ancient Roman civil structures of that name. The Basilica was an expensive project (some 60,000 ducats once finished) and took a long time to complete. Palladio received for the work an income of five ducats a month for most of his life. In 1616—more than thirty years after his death—the building was completed, with the finishing of the main façade on Piazza delle Erbe.

Andrea Palladio
The designer of the Basilica Palladiana, Andrea Palladio, is one of the most influential figures in Renaissance architecture. '''Palladio was best known for his fusion of both classic Roman and Greek antiquity with influences from Italian designers that encapsulated the Renaissance. Palladio was born in Padua, Italy in 1508 by the name Andrea di Pietro della Gondola. He began his career as an apprentice to a stone carver in Padua, but fled to the nearby city Vincenza in an attempt to escape. For fourteen years Palladio worked as an apprentice to the carvers responsible for most of the sculptures in Vicenza. When Palladio was thirty, he was commissioned to work on an addition to a loggia on the villa designed by Count Giangiorgio Trissino, a distinguished humanist in Vincenza. Palladio’s talent was recognized by Trissino, and Trissino decided to house and educate him him in classical architecture, and take him on the path to become an architect. Trissino was the one who gave Palladio his name, symbolic of his new higher status. Following his career as an architect, Palladio’s treatise on architecture published in 1570 is what made him internationally famous. His book, the I quattro libri dell'architettura, or Quattro Libri, is a guide for the construction of buildings. Palladio translates how Classical Antiquity, or the Greco-Roman era of architecture, should be used as the guideline for constructing buildings. The book includes hundreds of woodcut illustrations and figures and scales to provide clear instructions for the readers. Palladio also discusses many of his own works in the book and uses them as examples.'''

Architecture
'''Though the building took about 3 years to be designed and approved, its construction was not complete until 1616. Palladio’s final model was approved in 1549, but it was not entirely a building. It started out as a screen around the existing Palazzo della Regione. The screen was meant to provide structural support while also hiding the flaws from the original design of Palazzo. Palladio’s design encompassed the necessary measures to adapt his''' addition to the pre-existing structure. '''Elements such as the building's height, the width of bays, and the angled piers were all adapted from the original building. Palladio’s newly constructed piers cover up the majority of the surviving supports of the building’s arches, however the majority of the ceiling’s vaulting was kept from the original building. Part of his solution was''' based on the so-called serliana: a repetitive structure in which round arches are flanked by rectangular openings; the latter were of different size, in order to match the variable size of the internal bay. In the angular arcades, these arch-lintel, or architrave openings become very narrow.The serliana had been already used in the Veneto some years before by Jacopo Sansovino for his Biblioteca Marciana (1537), as well as in the reconstruction of the Polirone Abbey by Giulio Romano (1540). The loggias in the lower floor were in the Doric order; the associated entablature has a frieze which alternates metope (decorated by dishes and bucrania) and triglyphs. The upper-floor loggias, by contrast, are in the Ionic order, with a continuous frieze entablature. The Basilica was constructed entirely out of stone, which is one of the reasons that its construction took so long.

The parapet has statues by Giovanni Battista Albanese, Grazioli and Lorenzo Rubini. The clocktower has five bells in the chord of E major.

Changes by Palladio
'''Many of the Palazzo della Ragione’s elements had to be changed or adapted by Palladio in order to enhance the appearance as well as the structural integrity of the new Basilica. The most obvious adjustment to the new structure was the narrowing of the end bays, which was done both for structural security– to support the heaviness of the supporting angled piers– and optical refinement– to hide the crooked and uneven aisles behind them. Palladio also changed the alignment of the columns in the upper gallery to be so that they appear to lean outward, which contrasts the opposite wall that leans inward for structural reasons.'''