Andrea Barbaro Analysis

Man is the image of God and the proportions of his body are produced by divine will, so the proportions in architecture have to embrace and express the cosmic orders. Renaissance architects believed that a building should mirror the proportions of the human body to create order within their buildings. Andrea Palladio is an architect during this time, who furthered this idea in the design and construction of his villas. Palladio’s understanding of proportions and other scholars’ viewpoints are explained in Rudolf Wittkower’s Principles of Palladio’s Architecture. Villa Barbaro is one of Palladio’s Villas that relates to harmonic proportions in ways that Rudolf Wittkower explains in his writing.
The proportions of a building relate to harmony in music through octaves, …show more content…
This villa was meant to be viewed from the front and consists of a large mass in the middle, flanked by two side wings. Also, the villa correlate to Palladio’s thematic of unified whole due to it being fractal in a way that the proportions of the size of windows relate to the proportions of the size of rooms which relate to the proportions of the building size as a whole. According to Wittkower, “The long wings behind the main building contains three groups of three rooms each. Two of these groups are repeated at each side of the third central one. The widths of which are inscribed as 16, 12, 16; 20, 10, 20; 9, 18, 9.” Due to these units, one can tell that the rooms are set up with the ratios of 4:3:4, 2:1:2, and 1:2:1. Palladio’s intentions are further noticed by the three rooms in the front each being twelve feet wide. The twelve is the harmonic mean between 9 and 18 and divides the octave into fourth and fifth. None of the rooms throughout the villa are placed randomly, they are all designed bilaterally symmetrical and obey the proportion rules the Palladio has set