Review: Palladian Design: The Good, the Bad and the Unexpected

This exhibition, as its title indicates, was intended to challenge its audience. The challenge was elaborated further in the initial wall panel, which, after explaining that the exhibits were chosen to “provoke debate,” went on to pose such questions as whether the repetition and adaptation of Andrea Palladio's works undermines their original meaning and “uniqueness” and whether a “Renaissance design approach” can still be valid today. The seventy-two exhibits were then laid out in a broadly chronological sequence, beginning with schemes by Palladio himself and ending—emphatically—with a wide range of works dating from very recent times. These various items were clustered under such headings as “Reinventing Antiquity,” “Spreading...