Andrea di Pietro della Gondola was born into a modest family in Padua in 1508.  He grew up, and lived most of his life, in Vicenza. 

As a young man, he began as an illiterate mason's apprentice.  At 34, he was still listed on the guild rolls as "stonecutter"; however, by that time his career was already taking off.

In the late 1530s, while he was working on the construction of Villa Cricoli near Vicenza, its wealthy owner, Gian Giorgio Trissino (1478-1550), took him under his wing.  Trissino, a humanist, poet, dramatist, diplomat, and grammarian with a special interest in architecture, renamed his protege Palladio, after an Angel of Architecture who appeared in one of Trissino's own poems.  He took young Palladio on several journeys to Rome beginning in 1541. 

It was in Rome, awed by the half-burned ruins, that Palladio began the measurement, analysis and drawing that would turn him into the leading architctural theorist of his age.  It was from Rome that Palladio got his most typical device, the temple-like portico in front of his buildings supporting a triangular pediment, from temples like the Pantheon. 

The network of ratios between height and width, void and solid, expressed in the facades of Villa Cornaro and Villa Malcontenta, subtly prepares the visitor for the less consciously felt proportions of the rooms within.  Palladio's plans - always axial, with lesser rooms grouped symmetically around a high hall - obey stringent rules of harmony, not only in the three dimensions of each room, but in the relation of chambers one to another. 

When arguing that the ideal church plan should be circular - "the most proper figure to show the unity, infinite essence, uniformity and justice of God" - Palladio echoed a longstanding Renaissance fascination with absolute geometric shapes as metaphor. 

Palladio objected to murals in churches - "Among all colors none is more suitable to temples than white; be reason that the purity of this color...is highly grateful to God."  The protagonist in his Venetian churches, San Giorgio Maggiore and the Redentore, no less than in his villas, is light - the rich, fugitive, unstable light of the lagoon and the inland plain.  Reflected from the creamy Istrian stone, absored by brick work and stucco, or washing solemnly across the pure vaults and domes, light gave substance a dreamlike sensuousness.  No 

Indebted to the work of the Roman architect Vitruvius (80/70 BC - 25 BC, The Ten Books on Architecture) and Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472, De Re Aedificatoria), his planning is mathematics made concrete, a triumph of that certezza that was the goal of high Renaissance planning.  His buildings, less restrained and emotional than Michelangelo's or Vignola's, and more atmosphereic than Bramante's, met the mood of a culture that tended increasingly to think of antiquity as a golden age.  His buildings, strict as they are, remain both exquisite and ideal.  And he remains the most imitated architect in history.  

Using the new technology of movable type, Palladio published the first scholarly guide book to classical Rome in 1554.  In 1570, ten years before his death, he published his masterwork: I Quattro Libri dell' Architettura, or The Four Books of Architecture.  A second edition followed in 1581, a year after his death, and then continued in remarkable succession.  This widely translated book spread Palladio's ideas across Europe and into the New World.    

The name Palladio evokes pedimented villas on the bank of the foggy Brenta, white porticos glimpsed through Deep South veils of Spanish moss, and the stately Barbaro at Maser. 

Palladio built churches, town and country houses, public buildings and bridges in Venice and on the Venetian mainland and in and around Vicenza.  Although he built nothing outside northern Italy, and several of his greatest houses stand in tracts of Venetian countryside that are out of the way today and must have been almost inaccessible to travelers in the 17th and 18th centuries, his flawless precision and proportion was imitated as fervently in Stockholm and Leningrad as they were by the elite of English Palladian architects like Inigo Jones (1573-1652), William Kent (1685-1748), and Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington (1694-1753) and Scottish architect Colen Campbell (1676-1729).  By 1850, the entire Western World was sprinkled with Palladian-inspired structures. 

One of Palladian's most famous structures is Villa Almerico-Capra near Vicenza (1565), also known as the Rotunda.  Although Villa Capra itself, with its four porches, was inspired by the Roman Pantheon, it may have inspired a thousand subsequent buildings.  Thomas Jefferson's (1743-1826) design for the President's Mansion was a copy of the Villa Rotonda; although that structure was never built, today's White House is recognizably Palladian in spirit.