“It is probably fair to say that Andrea Palladio, who died in 1580, is the patron saint of every McMansion that has ever cluttered the American landscape, because it was he who brought architectural aspiration to the houses of the moderately wealthy.” And yet: “If modern developers have used his treatise ‘The Four Books of Architecture’ as a mere catalogue of columns and cupolas for the upwardly mobile, Palladio isn’t to blame.”