The reaction of Daniel Engelhardt, a leading German architect, writing in 1850, was characteristic of many others: "I sought out Palladio's palaces with his book in my hand and found the majority with effort because so little of them had been built." Engelhardt explained this by suggesting that Palladio's designs were too extravagant to be finished, adding that his ornamentation was poor and generally repetitive. Others, like the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt, attributed Palladio's relative failure to the fact that he worked in the decades between 1540-1580, a period of relative decline after the brilliance of the High Renaissance.

As architectural historicism gradually overthrew the hegemony of Renaissance architecture, Palladio began to be derided as a hidebound teacher of petty rules. By 1905, the English architect and writer, Reginald Blomfield, could accuse Palladio's followers of "fetish worship" and condemned the architect for "the touch of pedantry that suited the times and invested his writings with a fallacious air of scholarship...He was the very man to summarise and classify, and to save future generations of architects the labour of thinking for themselves". Eventually, it took the upheavals of the 20th century and the revolution of the Modern Movement to give Palladio's reputation the kiss of life. One strand in Palladio's rediscovery lay in the publication of his original drawings for his palaces and villas as well as his studies after the antique. These drew attention to the sometimes untidy, but invariably compelling, design process behind the finished compositions in the Quattro Libri. Such drawings showed Palladio, much like any other professional architect, ringing variations on a given theme, a theme usually tied to a specific site, and this provided an obvious link with the problems faced by contemporary architects.