Andrea Palladio

Born Andrea di Pietro della Gondola, he trained as a stonemason in Padua before patron Giangiorgio Trissino renamed him Palladio. His Venetian-Republic villas (Villa Rotonda, Villa Barbaro, Villa Foscari) and Vicenza palazzi distilled classical orders into a portable, replicable system.

Palladio's symmetrical plans, temple-front porticoes, and cool harmonic proportions read as classical but were always subtly inventive — he treated antique sources as a vocabulary, not a script.

*I Quattro Libri dell'Architettura* (1570) became the most influential architecture book ever published. Inigo Jones brought Palladianism to Britain; Thomas Jefferson built Monticello straight from its plates. The US Capitol, the White House, and countless courthouses descend from his Villa Rotonda template.