Despite attracting such powerful patrons, Vignola was himself modestly born in 1507 in the village of Vignola, hence the name he acquired. He was raised in nearby Bologna where he was trained as a painter, but turned to architecture, probably in early the 1520s under the influence of the great painter-architects, Baldassare Peruzzi (1481–1536) and Sebastiano Serlio (1475–1554), both of whom were then active in Bologna. Serlio was preparing his life work, L’Architettura, a treatise codifying the five classical orders of architecture that profoundly influenced Vignola’s own Regola delli cinque ordini of 1562.

In 1538 Vignola moved with his wife and children to Rome where, working as a painter and designer, he became involved with the Accademia della Virtù.¹ Led by the humanist Claudio Tolomei, this academy of antiquarians, humanists, architects, men of letters, noblemen, and clerics, formed a plan to publish a multi-volume illustrated study of Vitruvius and ancient architecture, to which Vignola contributed measured drawings, now lost. There were many such academies in Renaissance Italy to which talented young men of humble birth were admitted on equal terms with noblemen who might become their patrons. One such academy was that of Count Giangiorgio Trissino in Vicenza of which Palladio’s membership established his career. It is likely that Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, to whom Vignola was to dedicate his Regola, may have met Vignola through the Accademia del Virtù, where the Cardinal’s secretary was a member.

Vignola now went to Fontainebleau to cast bronze replicas of classical statues in the Vatican for King François Premier. Here in 1541–3 he had further contact with Serlio, but returned to Bologna where he had been appointed architect of S. Petronio by Pope Paul III in 1541. Here, he was confronted by the task of how to complete this Gothic basilica but all attempts proved abortive. An early work by Vignola, far removed from the rigid system of his later Regola, is Palazzo Bocchi, Bologna, begun in 1545 in a bizarre and Mannerist language, but not completed to his design.² It was commissioned by a learned patron who chose the emblematic sculptural programme and inscriptions that appear on its façade.

In 1559 Vignola settled permanently in Rome, continuing in the service of the Farnese family as well as becoming architect to Pope Julius III (reigned 1550–5), a post that Vasari claimed to have obtained for him.³ For Pope Julius he built the Villa Giulia (1550–5), with Vasari and Ammanati,⁴ and the nearby Sant’Andrea, Via Flaminia (1550–3), with an interior featuring a revolutionary oval cornice and dome. This spatial experiment, for which nothing in his Regola prepares us, was developed more fully in his S. Anna dei Palafreniere in the Vatican (1565–76), where the whole nave was an oval, though in a rectangular shell. As the first Italian architect to build a church with an oval ground plan, he exercised a considerable influence on Baroque architecture. There is a further freedom at S. Anna in that the interior is unrelated to the exterior and the entrance façade is organised quite differently from the side façades.

Before his elevation to the papacy as Paul III in 1534, Cardinal Alessandro Farnese had begun a moated, pentagonal fortress at Caprarola, north of Rome, from designs by Antonio da San Gallo and Peruzzi in the early 1520s. This gigantic powerhouse was probably only one storey high when Paul III’s grandson, Alessandro Farnese, commissioned Vignola to complete it to a totally different design of his own in 1555. He changed the central pentagonal court to the more harmonious circular form inspired by Raphael’s incomplete Villa Madama, Rome (c.1518–30). Built from 1559 to 1573, Vignola’s Palazzo Farnese at Caprarola shows his genius as an architect, engineer, urban planner, and painter, for it was conceived in scenic and symbolic terms, dramatically approached from a specially created axial road, sixteen metres long, terminating in a composition of ramps, staircases, and a drawbridge.

The astonishing circular staircase inside the Palazzo, with superimposed columns of the Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, and Composite, orders, was combined “with a wealth of balusters, niches, and other fanciful ornaments,” as Vasari put it. The Palazzo was crowned by giant cornice, a highly original blend of Doric and Corinthian over Composite pilasters, which Vignola chose to illustrate in his Regola. Vasari praised the “rich and regal villa of Caprarola,” explaining that the client’s ambition was that “the whole work should spring from the fanciful design and invention of Vignola.”⁵ It shows us the other side of Vignola’s aesth...