Jones, Inigo

Jones, Inigo (1573–1652). English architect, stage designer, draughtsman, and painter. Jones was one of the greatest of English architects and certainly the most influential, introducing a pure classical style based on the work of the Italian architect Andrea Palladio to a country where Renaissance influence had previously been fairly superficial. It was not until he was in his forties, however, that he showed his genius as an architect, and the first known mention of him as an artist is as a ‘picture maker’ in 1603. No paintings certainly by him are known, but his drawings survive in large numbers (the finest collection is at Chatsworth). They are mainly costume and scenery designs for the court masques, on which he worked from 1605 to 1640, and in which he introduced movable scenery and the proscenium arch into England. Inigo's lively and fluent style as a draughtsman reflects two lengthy visits to Italy (c.1600 and 1613–14), the second of them accompanying the great collector the Earl of Arundel. He advised Arundel on the purchase of Italian antiques while developing his own knowledge of Italian and antique architecture, and his knowledge as well as his skills gave him immense prestige in England at the courts of James I and Charles I. His principal collaborator in the masques was the formidable Ben Jonson, with whom he had a running feud about the rival claims of words and spectacle. Few of Jones's buildings survive in anything like their original state. The two most important are in London: the Queen's House at Greenwich (1616–35), for which Orazio Gentileschi provided decorations, and the Banqueting House in Whitehall (1619–22), with its painted ceiling by Rubens.