Works
Giacomo Leoni's principal architectural skill was to adapt Alberti's and Palladio's ideals to suit the landed classes in the English countryside, without straying too far from the principles of the great masters. He made Palladian architecture less austere, and adapted his work to suit the location and needs of his clients. The use of red brick as a building component had begun to replace dressed stone during the William and Mary era. Leoni would frequently build in both, depending on availability and what was indigenous to the area of the site.
Leoni's first commissions in England, though for high profile clients the Duke of Kent and James, Earl Stanhope, first lord of the Treasury, remained unexecuted. His first built design in England was Queensberry House, 7 Burlington Gardens, for John Bligh, Lord Clifton, in 1721. This was to be an important architectural landmark, as the first London mansion to be built in a terrace with an "antique temple front."
Throughout this career in England, Leoni was to be responsible for the design of at least twelve large country houses and at least six London mansions. He is also known to have designed church monuments and memorials.
Read more about this topic: Giacomo Leoni
Famous quotes containing the word works:
“In doing good, we are generally cold, and languid, and sluggish; and of all things afraid of being too much in the right. But the works of malice and injustice are quite in another style. They are finished with a bold, masterly hand; touched as they are with the spirit of those vehement passions that call forth all our energies, whenever we oppress and persecute..”
—Edmund Burke (1729–97)
“Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)
“That man’s best works should be such bungling imitations of Nature’s infinite perfection, matters not much; but that he should make himself an imitation, this is the fact which Nature moans over, and deprecates beseechingly. Be spontaneous, be truthful, be free, and thus be individuals! is the song she sings through warbling birds, and whispering pines, and roaring waves, and screeching winds.”
—Lydia M. Child (1802–1880)