Gardening manuals that gave instruction had existed since the 16th century, but the use of template illustrations gathered pace as the spread of prints grew. There was a division between gardens and architecture, and the latter often concentrated on garden features as relatively cheap and simple to construct from drawings. The first book for our purposes, which was of trans-European importance, was Andrea Palladio's I Quattri Libri dell’Architettura, published in Venice in 1570. The book covers the orders of architecture, houses, streets, bridges, piazzas, basilicas, Roman temples and the internal features of a building. Examples given include both actual Roman buildings and Palladio's designs based on the classical. Palladianism swept Britain in the early 18th century, the Augustan age, and although this primarily affected the style of houses, nonetheless some garden buildings and a significant number of bridges owe their origin to Palladio's opus. All four books were first translated into English by the Venetian architect Giacomo Leoni in 1715, who himself designed houses and garden buildings in England. The translation ran through two further editions, though Isaac Ware's closer translation and more accurate reproduction of Palladio's original plates in The Four Books of Architecture (1738) is accepted as the more definitive today. The list of subscribers includes the important cultural figures, patrons and practitioners of the day, such as Lord Burlington.

One of the bridges (Fig 3.1) is illustrated in Plate 3 of the Third Book and served as the model for the bridge at Painshill (see Fig 9.10): Charles Hamilton was a subscriber to the Ware edition. Other bridges, usually a single curved span of wood, had a criss-cross design that led to its being frequently and mistakenly described as Chinese. Stone bridges in the book (for example Fig 3.2) were imitated at Stourhead and elsewhere. Henry Hoare, owner of Stourhead, claimed that he took the design from Palladio's design for a bridge at Vicenza, but the two there have only three arches. Henry Flitcroft's five-arch design is actually a composite of Plate 7 (Fig 3.2, at Rimini) and Plate 12.