Description
The Loggia del Consiglio, also known as the Gran Guardia, is the elegant white Renaissance building on the corner of Piazza dei Signori in Padua. This is where the city's government used to meet: a grand staircase climbs straight up from the square to the loggia and the Council Hall.
The façade is entirely in Istrian stone: columns, carved capitals, cornices, friezes and the balustrade, the most imposing part. It is one of the first examples in Padua where stone no longer holds anything up but becomes pure cladding, a shell of slabs around the hall.
Take a look at the crowning, with a pattern of circles and lozenges, and at the bench of red Verona marble running alongside the steps. On the west side, along Via del Monte di Pietà, the tone changes: a plain, flat grey rustication of Euganean trachyte.
Above the loggia is the Hall of the Great Council, spacious and decorated with seventeenth-century frescoes.
A second flight, from the landing of the main staircase, led the authorities to two service rooms where officials gathered before and after the sittings. The staircase recalls the one by Mauro Codussi in the Scuola di San Giovanni Evangelista in Venice, built a few years earlier.
The Council wanted a loggia worthy of the city, "ad ornamentum et commodum", for beauty and convenience. Building it, however, turned into a small odyssey. In 1496 the Council voted on three models and chose the one by Annibale Maggi da Bassano. Whether a man of about seventy, never seen at work as an architect, was really its author remains open to doubt.
The foundations were laid out in 1498, then the War of the League of Cambrai stopped everything: in 1509 Padua sided against Venice and was retaken and sacked. The loggia went up in 1517, the hall became usable in 1526 and the building site only closed in 1536.
The name Gran Guardia comes from the nineteenth century, when the Austrians, between 1813 and 1848, kept the city's military command here. Since 1866 the building has belonged to the city again and is used for cultural events.
The façade is entirely in Istrian stone: columns, carved capitals, cornices, friezes and the balustrade, the most imposing part. It is one of the first examples in Padua where stone no longer holds anything up but becomes pure cladding, a shell of slabs around the hall.
Take a look at the crowning, with a pattern of circles and lozenges, and at the bench of red Verona marble running alongside the steps. On the west side, along Via del Monte di Pietà, the tone changes: a plain, flat grey rustication of Euganean trachyte.
Above the loggia is the Hall of the Great Council, spacious and decorated with seventeenth-century frescoes.
A second flight, from the landing of the main staircase, led the authorities to two service rooms where officials gathered before and after the sittings. The staircase recalls the one by Mauro Codussi in the Scuola di San Giovanni Evangelista in Venice, built a few years earlier.
The Council wanted a loggia worthy of the city, "ad ornamentum et commodum", for beauty and convenience. Building it, however, turned into a small odyssey. In 1496 the Council voted on three models and chose the one by Annibale Maggi da Bassano. Whether a man of about seventy, never seen at work as an architect, was really its author remains open to doubt.
The foundations were laid out in 1498, then the War of the League of Cambrai stopped everything: in 1509 Padua sided against Venice and was retaken and sacked. The loggia went up in 1517, the hall became usable in 1526 and the building site only closed in 1536.
The name Gran Guardia comes from the nineteenth century, when the Austrians, between 1813 and 1848, kept the city's military command here. Since 1866 the building has belonged to the city again and is used for cultural events.