Vincenzo Scamozzi - Biography

Biography

Scamozzi was born in Vicenza. His father was the surveyor and building contractor Gian Domenico Scamozzi; he was Scamozzi's first teacher, imbuing him with the principles of Sebastiano Serlio, laid out in Serlio's book. Vincenzo visited Rome in 1579-1580, and then moved to Venice in 1581, where he had been invited to design the Procuratie Nuove on the Piazza San Marco itself. In 1600 he visited France and left a sketchbook record of his impressions of French architecture, which first saw the light of day in 1959.

The Procuratie Nuove were a row of official housing for the Procuratorate of San Marco, presented as a unified palace front that continues the end facade of the Sansovino Library, with its arcaded ground floor and arch-headed windows of the first floor, but adding an upper floor to provide the necessary accommodation, for which Scamozzi adapted a rejected project of Palladio's for a re-faced Doge's Palace, with colonnettes that flank the windows to support alternating triangular and arched pediments, upon which Scamozzi added reclining figures, to balance the richness of the Sansovinian decoration of the two lower floors. Eleven bays of this project were completed, and later were extended by Baldassare Longhena to fill the whole south flank of the piazza.

Read more about this topic:  Vincenzo Scamozzi

Famous quotes containing the word biography:

    A biography is like a handshake down the years, that can become an arm-wrestle.
    Richard Holmes (b. 1945)

    Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.
    Rebecca West [Cicily Isabel Fairfield] (1892–1983)

    The death of Irving, which at any other time would have attracted universal attention, having occurred while these things were transpiring, went almost unobserved. I shall have to read of it in the biography of authors.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)