Palazzo Chiericati


  • Caption
    View of Exterior
Related person
Andrea Palladio (was created by)
Date
ca. 1547-ca. 1680 (creation)
Location
Europe->Italy->Veneto->Vicenza
Description
In November 1550, Girolamo Chiericati recorded a payment to Palladio in his own "account book" for the designs of his palace in the city, sketched out at the beginning of the year. In the same month, Girolamo was appointed to supervise the administration of the building works on the Loggias of the Basilica, inaugurated in May 1549. This coincidence was not remotely casual: along with Trissino, Chiericati was among those who sponsored entrusting this prestigious public commission to the young architect, for whose interests he had personally fought in the Council, and to whom he would turn for the design of his own home. Moreover, a few years later his brother Giovanni would also commission from Palladio the villa at Vancimuglio. To endow the building with magnificence, but also to protect it from the frequent floods (and from the cattle sold in front of the palace on market days), Palladio raised the palace on a podium, whose central section displays a stairway clearly adapted from an antique temple.
"The Palazzo Chiericati is a rectangular building enfronting a piazza. Designed as a house for an important Vincenza citizen, it makes a very public front to the square with open loggias on both the ground floor and the piano nobile. The first floor loggia, raised five feet above the piazza, runs the entire length of the facade in eleven bays. The central five bays project slightly and are separated from the side bays by columns. Clusters of four columns at each corner of this projection support the main room of the piano nobile, which projects to the facade, making two loggias, one on each of its sides, at this level. In contrast to the front, the ends of the loggias at the sides of the palazzo are walled, with arched openings flanked by pilasters. Doric and ionic capitals, entablatures with metopes of disks alternating with bulls' heads, and deep coffered ceilings richly ornament the loggias. The figures and urns above the cornice were added in the seventeenth century.
The main entrance is centered in the ground floor and leads to a rectangular room which links to minor rooms symmetrically arranged at each side. These rooms shift in proportion from rectangle to square to rectangle and diminish in size. Directly behind the central entrance room, a vestibule, off of which stairs on each side lead to the piano nobile, opens to the rectangular courtyard in the back." - Reference
Style/Period
Renaissance (AAT)
Material
stone