The Thin White Line: Palladio, White Cities and the Adriatic Imagination

Andrea Palladio's illustrations of the temple at Pola in Capodistria, in his Quattro Libri (Venice, 1570) like a number of other images depicting temple sites in the same treatise, exhibit a somewhat bizarre presentation that has not been addressed thus far. In fact, Palladio's single, compact image of the temple of Pola emerges as an interpenetration of several images, views, details and sections, connected by cutouts, raking angles, superimpositions, and overlaps. In his compact images of ruins, Palladio alludes to both geometries that exist in tension: the geometry of hard connections and the free flow. In the end, this is the message that Palladio's compressed archaeological sites on white paper send out with his book across Europe and across time as portable sites and portable architecture, the Fata Morgana of the thin white line on the horizon. Keywords: Andrea Palladio; Capodistria; Fata Morgana; Pola; thin white line