Inigo Jones: The Architect of Kings

Vaughan Hart

Yale University Press, 2011

England's Queen Elizabeth I, fond of making grand processions throughout her realm and especially through the city of London, was fond of saying “The pride of princes is for their people,” and it was no mere sop to popularism: her current successor and namesake, Queen Elizabeth II – never one for popularism, even at cost to her reputation – has made a year-long celebration of her Diamond Jubilee, because with monarchs, appearances count.

Few English rulers felt this more keenly than King James I, whose succession was a last-minute concession to mortality made by Elizabeth I as much because she had no viable alternatives as because of any faith in James' ability. He came south from Scotland to be installed over councilors who considered him a country bumpkin and a populace who could remember no monarch other than the late queen. James possessed none of Elizabeth's sophistication, and he came from a tainted line: his mother, Mary Queen of Scots, had been an English prisoner for many years until she was finally executed for treason. If ever there were a prince who knew the value of appearances, it was James.

Such appearances are matters for professionals, and they are matters of state – enter Inigo Jones, the subject of a sumptuous, oversized study from Yale University Press by Vaughan Hart, Inigo Jones: The Architect of Kings. Hart's book studies in precise detail (and fittingly lavish illustration) the political and public-relations dimensions of Jones' work, and although much his revisionist approach will be familiar to readers of Giles Worsley's 2008 study of Jones, much here is provocatively new. The end result is to give us a subtly changed Inigo Jones, more distanced from the Italian influences that have always been his main description and located more firmly in his own native England.

He was born in July 1573 to a Smithfield clothworker, and according to fellow architect Christopher Wren, he served in his youth as an apprentice to a joiner in St. Paul's churchyard. Much of his early years is a blank, but shortly after the turn of the century he was being paid a tidy little sum as a “picture maker” to the Earl of Rutland and possibly accompanying the Earl's family on a tour of Europe, including Denmark, where he may have entered the service of King Christian IV. By 1605 Jones had returned to England and was finding regular employment working on masques and court panoramas for James I's queen, Anne of Denmark, King Christian's sister – events in which the King, the Queen, and Prince Henry the heir apparent often participated. (Jones collaborated on these masques and pageants with some of the foremost poets of the Jacobean era, and the results were extremely impressive visually, the big-budget movies of their day – although virtually no Renaissance art form is more thoroughly incommunicable to the modern day)

Jones traveled extensively in the first decade of the new century, and in Italy, much impressed by the work and underpinning philosophy of Andrea Palladio, he absorbed everything he saw of the art and science of buildings ('Alto diletto che imparar non trovo' was his personal motto: “I find no other delight but to learn”). Back in England in 1615, he was made Surveyor of the King's Works at the age of forty-two when the previous occupant of that position died. There's a painting by Adrjaen van Stalbemt and Jan van Belcamp from years later (circa 1632), dutifully reproduced by Hart, showing Charles I and his queen Henrietta Maria on the grounds of the not-yet-finished Queen's House at Greenwich; the two are surrounded by courtiers in a vast open space, and off to one side is a figure leaning on a cane and wearing a skull-cap – it's usually assumed to be Jones, and the proportions of the piece neatly dramatize the sheer size of the Surveyor's responsibilities. Like Bramante working for Pope Julius II, Jones was dealing in very large-scale public characterizations of princely might and virtue.

Under the Stuarts James I (1603-1625) and Charles I (1625-1649), this man who was called by his first biographer “not only the Vitruvius of England, but likewise, in his Age, of all Christendom,” was constantly busy re-shaping the visual vocabulary of his native land. The neo-Gothic of Elizabethan style was abandoned, Hart describes, in favor of the all'antica style of the Italy: “Jones marshalled the principles of Renaissance architecture in the service of the crown, albeit adapting these principles to suit English tastes and sensibilities,” seeking to eliminate what were seen as “the decorative excesses of Catholism.” This was trickier than it might sound, since the growing strength of the Puritan movement in England was neatly counter-balanced (for dependent courtiers, anyway) by the strong sway of Catholicism within the royal court itself. As Hart neatly shows, it was a tension mirrored in the very forms of antiquity Jones was attempting to use, the so-called “Orders” of ornamentation: the 'masculine' Tuscan and Doric, and the 'feminine' Ionic, Corinthian, and 'Composite.'

In work after work, Jones perfected the schizophrenia of Puritan-approved clean, simple, 'strong' architectural exteriors with much 'softer' and more decorative interiors, maintaining the classical virtues of proportion, symmetry, and decorum from outside to inside in one aesthetic whole. Jones navigated what Hart calls “an anomalous equilibrium” (p. 200) between external gravity and internal showiness with a great degree of skill, evident in such masterpieces as the Queen's Chapel at St. James Palace, or the solid opulence of Wilton House in Wiltshire, or the Queen's House at Greenwich (the partial building in that 1625 painting was finally completed in 1630) and the magnificent Banqueting House at Whitehall, with its austere exterior and its almost decadently glorious internal paintings by Rubens.

Banqueting House was an artistic triumph that became historically symbolic for Jones, however: it was in front of his masterpiece that King Charles I was executed in 1649, bring the Stuart monarchy to a temporary halt and Jones' career to a permanent end. Despite his attempts to accommodate the changing tenor of the times, Jones wasn't wanted by the Puritans, who attacked many of his works as expressions of Popish frippery. One of the last public works Jones undertook was the remodeling of parts of old Saint Paul's Cathedral, which Jones tried to accomplish with as much reverence for the past as could be managed. After the Great Fire of 1666, Samuel Pepys remarked, “It is pretty here, to see how the last church was but a case brought over the old church; for you may see the very old pillars standing whole within the walls of this.” Jones, writes Hart, “ thus skilfully overlaid the new upon the old, reflecting what he had aimed to do in the mixed style of his earliest designs. If Wren's record of the youthful Jones having worked as a joiner in the cathedral yard is correct, he thereby effectively ended his career where it began.”

More skillfully than any previous writer on the subject, Hart dissects Inigo Jones the political creature – an artisan, yes, but a courtier first, who sought always to fulfill the Stuart goal of laying claim to some elemental, historied Englishness and the “Protestant conceptions of a restored uncorrupted theology” that underscored it. And yet it was the Puritans who often drew the scorn of this famously vain and irascible artist – Puritans whose dour, humorless sect he characterized as “sworn enemy of poesy, music, and all ingenious arts, but a great friend to murmuring, libelling, and seeds of discord.” Against the backdrop of such discord, Jones and the other artists in the early years of the new court worked to create strong, classical ethos for a new Stuart mythology, and Hart very imaginatively follows these efforts through a variety of disciplines – like for instance the translation of Homer's Iliad made by Jones' friend George Chapman and dedicated to Jones' one-time patron, the handsome and popular young Prince Henry. “Jones,” Hart points out, “was forcefully reminded by his friend that the building of eloquent architecture was a moral imperative and could be achieved only by using pure all'antica language.”

For a time, after the execution of the king, that language fell into disuse. The Puritans smashed the ornamentation of Jones' most exquisite works, and the Great Fire of London wiped many of those works out of existence (indeed, despite its unprecedentedly extensive and detailed illustrations, Hart's book cannot disguise the fact that Jones is the Leonardo of English architecture, venerated far out of proportion to the actual number of his works that survive). But the seeds had been planted – as Hart says, “Jones … became to English Palladianism what Michelangelo had been to the Italian Baroque.” Almost in the teeth of fate and circumstance, this first great English architect managed to found a new aesthetic, a cleaner, more restrained version of the Italianate classicism even then giving way to the Baroque on the Continent. Few writers before Hart have made as forceful a case for the particularly English nature of what that new Jonesian school became; he's forthright about the debt we owe to his subject: “Without Jones there would have been no Wren, no Hawksmoor or Vanbrugh, no sophisticated English classical tradition which has left such enduring cities as Bath and Edinburgh.” Through the lavish photographs, drawings, and blueprints (and even a few computer simulations, looking eerily lifeless next to Jones' own exuberant 400-year-old sketches) of Inigo Jones: The Architect of Kings, that founding father, once nearly obliterated, returns to center stage.