Andrea Palladio was born Andrea di Pietro della Gondola in Padua in 1508, the son of a miller. At 13 he was bound to a six-year stonecutting apprenticeship under the harsh sculptor Bartolomeo Cavazza, ran away to Vicenza in April 1523, was dragged back under the guild contract, and returned to Vicenza for good in 1524. Around 1538, while working on a villa for the humanist poet Gian Giorgio Trissino, the 30-year-old mason found a patron who took him to Rome to measure the Pantheon and the Colosseum and renamed him Palladio, after Pallas Athena. His breakthrough came in 1546, when he wrapped Vicenza’s crumbling town hall in two stories of classical arcades and called it the Basilica Palladiana, reviving the Roman meaning of a basilica as a civic hall.

With the Venetian aristocrat Daniele Barbaro as his next patron, Palladio set the template for elite living: the raised piano nobile, the Palladian window, and country villas such as Villa Barbaro and La Rotonda that pulled scattered farm buildings into one symmetrical composition, often in cheap brick dressed with stucco. He sized rooms using musical ratios like 2:3 and 3:4, and his Venetian churches, San Giorgio Maggiore and Il Redentore, overlapped two temple fronts to join the earthly and divine. After losing two sons in 1572, he began the Teatro Olimpico in 1580, the year he died. His Four Books of Architecture, published in 1570, carried his rules to Inigo Jones, Lord Burlington, and Thomas Jefferson.

• How years of hauling and chiseling stone gave Palladio an engineering edge over aristocratic theorists
• Why the name Palladio, a nod to the goddess of wisdom, helped a miller’s son cross class lines
• The forced perspective of the Teatro Olimpico, where sloped floors and shrinking buildings fake distant streets in a few feet
• Why publishing floor plans and proportions in 1570 broke the guild habit of guarding trade secrets
• Jefferson’s Monticello and the 2010 Congressional resolution naming Palladio the father of American architecture