Palladio’s Villa Emo: The Golden Proportion Hypothesis Rebutted

Abstract

In a most thoughtful and persuasive paper Rachel Fletcher comes close to convincing that Palladio may well have made use of the `golden section', or extreme and mean ratio, in the design of the Villa Emo at Fanzolo. What is surprising is that a visually gratifying result is so very wrong when tested by the numbers. Lionel March provides an arithmetic analysis of the dimensions provided by Palladio in the Quattro libri to reach new conclusions about Palladio's design process.