Andrea Palladio and the pediment: how a Venetian villa shaped the British doorway

The triangular shape above a classical doorway is so familiar that we rarely stop to ask where it came from. The answer leads back to sixteenth-century Italy and one architect in particular: Andrea Palladio.

Who was Palladio?

Andrea Palladio (1508–1580) trained as a stonemason in Padua and Vicenza before becoming the most influential architect of the Venetian Republic. His villas in the countryside around Vicenza, such as the Villa Rotonda, combined the temple fronts of ancient Rome with practical farmhouse plans. In 1570 he published I quattro libri dell'architettura (The Four Books of Architecture), which carried his ideas far beyond Italy.

Palladio comes to Britain

The architect Inigo Jones studied Palladio's buildings and books in Italy, and brought the style to England in the early seventeenth century. His Queen's House at Greenwich and the Banqueting House on Whitehall, completed in 1622, looked startlingly modern next to the Tudor buildings around them. A century later Lord Burlington led a Palladian revival, and his Chiswick House in west London became a model for a generation of country houses, town houses and, eventually, ordinary terraces.

The pediment turns a plain doorway into an entrance. It says: this is where the house begins.

A quick guide to pediments

• Triangular. The classic temple front: two sloping sides meeting at a peak, usually with a moulded cornice.
• Segmental. A shallow curve instead of a point, softer and often used over windows.
• Broken. The sloping sides stop short of the peak, leaving a gap that is often filled with an urn, a shell or a cartouche.
• Swan-neck. A broken pediment whose sides curl into S-shaped scrolls, popular in the eighteenth century.

Using pediments indoors

Inside the house, a small pediment above an internal door adds the same sense of arrival as a grand front entrance. It works particularly well in hallways and landings, where several plain doors open off one space. Paint it to match the door frame for a subtle, built-in look, or pick it out in a contrasting colour to make a feature. Browse our door toppers and overdoors for pieces inspired by the classical tradition.