The Triumph of Minerva: From Myth to Logos. Andrea Palladio, Freemasons and Free Will

In the sixteenth century, the Italian city of Vicenza became a battleground of ideas that would shape the world for centuries to come. Michael Trevor Coughlin, in his witty and profound work, examining the architecture of Andrea Palladio, shows that it was in that atmosphere of philosophical and political opposition that the movement of Freemasonry was born, and architecture itself became a poetic language that not only expressed beauty and craftsmanship but also asserted ideas about free will, the primacy of love, and the striving for the divine — as the only guides on the path to human perfection. In the iconographic imagery, the new voice acquires the archetypal figure of Minerva Pallas, symbolizing prudence, but not a mundane Machiavellian judgment of utility, rather a Platonic prudence of eternity, requiring a person to remain steadfastly in the «Now», the only true time.