But the great boost to Palladio's reputation came from two scholars working in the 1940s, Rudolf Wittkower and Colin Rowe. Wittkower's studies were stimulated in part by his research at the Warburg Institute in London during the Second World War. By focusing on the ground plans for Palladio's villas, Wittkower was able to show recurrent patterns in the architect's system of composition. He simultaneously freed Palladio's design process from its original context by stressing the rules and precepts that he believed to be behind them. His studies not only revitalised Palladio as an architectural theoretician, but they also contributed directly to Rowe's influential essay, The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa (1947). Rowe had been Wittkower's student at the Warburg Institute during the period of his Palladian research, and he applied a similar analysis to a comparison between Palladio and one of the beacons of modernism, Le Corbusier. Rowe drew attention to the similarities between the ground plan of Palladio's Villa Malcontenta and Le Corbusier's Villa de Monzie at Garches, suggesting underlying principles of harmonic proportions linking the working methods of the two architects. Ironically, Le Corbusier does not appear to have seriously studied Palladio's works, but Rowe's visual comparisons were compelling enough to reinforce Palladio's role as a pioneer of modern architectural design, thereby ensuring that decades of students would be exposed to Palladio's use of mathematical proportions.

Both Wittkower and Rowe achieved iconic status among recent interpreters of Palladio, but postmodernism has spun Palladio's wheel of fortune once again, shaking up his image in the process. Now professionals and students seem more concerned with the end product rather than the process, the ornamentation rather than any underlying principles. Julian Bicknell's Henbury Rotonda may be a close replica of Palladio's Villa Rotonda, but it also illustrates the old adage that lightning never strikes twice in the same place. By the same token, Quinlan Terry's country houses are very handsome but unmemorable. In short, it is not enough to follow the letter of Palladio's works, one must also strive to capture the spirit behind them. This was the problem with which the Notre Dame students were grappling, and it is still a worthwhile one for aspiring architects today. Palladio - like Brunelleschi, Michelangelo or Borromini - remains a great teacher and visionary, but his value for us lies in our capacity to read between his lines.