The Drawings of Andrea Palladio Hardcover - 2000

From the publisher

The short monograph that Douglas Lewis wrote to accompany an exhibition of the drawings of Andrea Palladio (on a tour of six North American museums in 1981 and 1982) has been out of print for almost twenty years, but it is still the only work on its subject in English. This updated and expanded reissue now makes its completely revised text (and more than twice the number of illustrations) available to a much wider international audience. Its potential readership has also diversified and expanded over the last two decades: Palladio is a subject now widely taught in liberal arts curricula as well as in professional schools. Architects, too -- both in training and in practice -- have found Lewis's display of the successive steps in Palladio's design process to be a visual and historical narrative that can illuminate and even inspire their own conceptual evolutions. But, above all, students and scholars of Renaissance art and architectural history will most appreciate the author's wealth of contextual detail, the vibrant sketches of Palladio's negotiations with mentors and collaborators, and material on the lives of his patrons, with revised identifications and datings of their projects (including the first comprehensive chronology for Palladio's drawings). This book has also pioneered in bringing together the documentary and visual evidence for Palladio as the primary designer of elaborately painted and decorated interiors, a revelation that should fundamentally affect our understanding of Palladian architecture.