Italian Landscape

Giacomo Quarenghi is sometimes called the last of Italy’s great architects. He realized his most ambitious projects in Russia, working for Catherine the Great (1729–1796). In his younger days he traveled throughout Italy, making drawings of architecture wherever he went. This lovely sketch comes from that time. Buildings like these formed Quarenghi’s design sensibility until he encountered the writings of the great Italian architect Andrea Palladio (1508–1580). After that, he devoted himself to classical ideas from ancient Greek and Roman architecture, filling his work with symmetry and formal colonnades.