Composition:5.4 kilograms of gold (5400 grams = 173.6 pennyweight)0.6 kilograms of silver0.5 kilogram of rock crystal100 grams lapis lazuli1 kilogram opalDiamonds totaling over 9 carats5000 man-hours (over two years) of labor.Andrea Palladio (1508-1580) born Andrea di Pietro dalla Gondola in 1508. He was trained as a stonemason and was given the name Palladio when he joined the academy of the Italian poet Giangiorgio Trissino who oversaw his architectural studies. The nickname Palladio probably comes from the Greek goddess Pallas Athena whose Roman equivalent is Minerva.He became one of the foremost architects and builders of his day. He showed a special talent at adopting elements of antique architecture during theenaissance. For centuries after him, his style remained the supreme reference in matters of neoclassical architecture. Palladio was the first architect to develop a stractured planning of the rooms in his palaces and villas and secured his place in history writing in 1572 The Four Books of Architecture.In chapter XIII we read: In all my villas, and in some town houses, I have mounted the gable onto the front facade, where the main doors are, so that these gables may indicate the entrances of the house and serve the greatness and splendour of the work by raising the front part of a building above the remaining parts.'His palaces, churches and villas reflect, sometimes in different ways, Palladio's unique sense of esthetics and proportions. One of his achievements that earned him admiration for centuries and became a subject of countless copies is the villa La Rotonda near Vicenza, in northeastern Italy. It is said that Palladio himself considered it the ultimate of his esthetic visualization. No wonder that Vacheron & Constantine took it as a model for their unique masterpiece.Villa La Rotonda is one of the most famous and most imitated buildings in the world. Its style has served as an illustration and the summation of the stylistic features of the Italian Renaissance architecture. Palladio designed it between 1566 and 1571, commissioned by the intellectual canon, Paolo Almerico, and included it in his Quattro Libri. The original structure consists of a central block, topped by a dome, and with a pronaos on each of the four sides. These four Ionic hexastyle forepartsare completed by flights of steps which seem to anchor the villa to the hill on which it stands. The construction work was carried on, with a few modifications, by Vincenzo Scamozzi and was completely finished only in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with the interior frescos by Alessandro Maganza and Louis Dorigny.