Inigo Jones

The English architect and designer Inigo Jones (1573-1652) was the most talented native artist in England in the first half of the 17th century. He was responsible for introducing Italian Renaissance architecture into England.

Inigo Jones was born in London on July 15, 1573. Little is known of his early life and education, but between 1596/1597 and 1605 he traveled on the Continent and spent some years in Italy. In and around Venice and Vicenza he observed the buildings of Andrea Palladio, one of the major architects of the Late Renaissance, whose theories and designs had a profound effect on him.

During this period Jones may have worked for a time for King Christian of Denmark. In 1609 Jones traveled in France, and in 1613-1614 he toured the Continent, spending most of the time in Italy. During this Italian sojourn Jones undertook a professional study of Palladio's architecture and architectural theories.

In 1615 James I appointed Jones surveyor of the King's works, an important position, which was essentially that of chief architect to the Crown. He also held this position under Charles I until 1642, when the outbreak of the civil war disrupted court life.

Court Masques

During the reigns of both monarchs Jones designed and produced court masques, elaborate theatrical festivals which were common at courts on the Continent, especially in Italy. Ben Jonson often wrote scripts for the masques, and between 1605 and 1640 Jones worked on at least 25 of these productions. James l's queen, Anne of Denmark, was devoted to lavish entertainment and to the masques, and the tradition was continued in the reign of Charles I.

The masques, in which the sovereigns and courtiers participated, were dazzling spectacles organized around allegorical or mythological themes; they involved music, ballet, and spoken parts and required fantastic costumes, complex stage machinery, and brilliant stage settings. Hundreds of Jones's drawings for the costumes and stage designs are extant, none of which would have been possible without his knowledge of Italian art and draftsmanship. The masques allowed him to exercise an imaginative fantasy which rarely appears in the sobriety of his architectural designs.

His Architecture

Jones was the first professional architect in England in the modern sense of the term, and he turned English architecture from its essentially medieval Gothic and Tudor traditions into the mainstream of the Italian Renaissance manner. He designed many architectural projects, some of them vast in scale; but of the buildings actually executed from his designs only seven remain, most of them in an altered or restored state.

The earliest of Jones's surviving buildings is the Queen's House at Greenwich, a project he undertook for Queen Anne in 1616. The lower floor was completed at the time the Queen died in 1619. Work then stopped but was resumed in 1630 for Queen Henrietta Maria, Charles l's wife, and was completed in 1635. The building is marked by a symmetrical plan, simplicity of classical detail, harmonious proportions, and severe purity of line, all elements that reflected Italian Renaissance sources and constituted an architectural revelation to the English.

The building now most associated with Jones is the Banqueting House at Whitehall (1619-1622). Intended to serve as a setting for state functions, it is a sophisticated manipulation of Italian classical elements and owes much to Palladio. The main facade consists of seven bays and two stories gracefully unified in an elegant, rational pattern of classical columns and pilasters, lightly rusticated stone, discreetly carved ornamentation, and a delicate contrast of textures. The interior is one large double-cube room; its classical severity contrasts dramatically with the richly baroque ceiling containing paintings by Peter Paul Rubens that were installed in 1635.

The Queen's Chapel, Marlborough Gate, completed in 1627, has a coffered barrel vault derived from imperial Roman architecture; it was Jones's first design for a church and the first church structure in England in the classical style. In 1631 he became associated with a city planning project in the Covent Garden district of London and designed St. Paul's Church there. The church, which still exists in a restored condition, is in the form of an austere classical temple with a deep portico and severe Tuscan columns. Between 1634 and 1642 Jones was occupied with extensive restoration of the old St. Paul's Cathedral (now destroyed), which he fronted with a giant classical portico of 10 Corinthian columns. From about 1638 Jones was involved in preparing designs for a vast baroque palace projected by Charles I, but it was not realized.

In 1642 the conflict between Parliament and King erupted in open warfare which swept away the elegant Cavalier court of Charles I, and Jones's world disappeared with it. His last important work was undertaken in 1649, when he and John Webb, who had been his assistant for many years, provided designs for the Double-and Single-Cube Rooms at Wilton House. The architectural decoration of this splendidly proportioned suite of rooms is essentially French in character; the cream-colored walls are decorated with a rich variety of carved and gilded moldings and ornaments to create an effect both opulent and disciplined. Jones died in London on June 21, 1652, the same year that Wilton House was completed.

Further Reading

The most recent work on Jones is Sir John Summerson, Inigo Jones (1966). An older but still useful study is J. Alfred Gotch, Inigo Jones (1928). For an excellent analysis of Jones's place in the history of English architecture see Sir John Summerson, Architecture in Britain, 1530-1830 (1954; 5th ed. 1969). Margaret Whinney and Oliver Millar, English Art, 1625-1714 (1957), is valuable for placing Jones within the context of 17th-century English art in general. J. Lees-Milne, The Age of Inigo Jones (1953), is a useful examination of the artist against the historical background of his period. □

Jones, Inigo (1573–1652). London-born architect of Welsh origin, he was largely responsible for introducing the Classical Palladian style to Jacobean England, and indeed for begetting the first Palladian Revival. From 1605 to 1640 he staged over 50 masques, plays, etc. (often in collaboration with Ben Jonson (1572–1637) ) for the Courts of Kings James I and VI (1603–25) and Charles I (1625–49), the surviving drawings for which show that he was well acquainted with the most up-to-date Italian designs by 1609. From c.1606 he produced a number of designs for structures in which his partially digested understanding of Classicism taken from sources such as Palladio, Sangallo, and Serlio was apparent. In 1610 he was appointed Surveyor to Henry, Prince of Wales (1593/4–1612), and in 1613 was granted the reversion of the place of Surveyor of the King's Works. He had visited Italy before 1603, but his second trip to that country (1613–14) was important in forming his architectural tastes, for he met Scamozzi and visited a great number of buildings illustrated in Palladio's Quattro Libri. In 1615, armed at last with the necessary architectural expertise, he became Surveyor of the King's Works, and built the Queen's House, Greenwich (1616–35), the Banqueting House, Whitehall (1619–22), and the Queen's Chapel, St James's (1623–5), all of which survive as a testimony of his careful study of the work of the Italian masters and of his own understanding of the principles of Classical design. Nothing resembling them had ever been built in England before, and indeed in a Europe dominated at the time by the Baroque style they had no contemporary exemplars in France or Italy. Although they were not immediately influential, and were perhaps oddities when Jacobean Mannerism was de rigueur, they became exemplars for a type of astylar house that came into favour after 1660, and indeed led to the second Palladian Revival of Campbell, Burlington, and their contemporaries in C18. He also designed the Prince's Lodgings, Newmarket, Cambs. (1619–22—destroyed), which influenced the design of many red-brick houses with stone dressings and hipped roofs throughout the second half of C17.

From 1625 to 1640 Jones worked on the Classicization of the old St Paul's Cathedral, London, clothing the medieval fabric in a new garb, and adding a huge prostyle Corinthian portico, the grandest north of the Alps at that time, which showed Englishmen the power, scale, and possibilities inherent in Roman architecture, and provided an important precedent for Wren when rebuilding the Cathedral after 1666. For Francis Russell, 4th Earl of Bedford (1539–1641), he designed and laid out the Piazza, Covent Garden (1631–7), the first London Square, with unified façades consisting of arcaded ground floors over which was a Giant Order of pilasters, perhaps suggested partly by the piazza and church in Livorno (Leghorn) and partly by the Henri Quatre Place des Vosges, Paris (1605–12). It was an enormously influential development, anticipating much C18 British urban planning and domestic architecture in towns. He designed St Paul's Church, Covent Garden (1631–3), the first complete Classical church in England, with a Tuscan portico taken from Barbaro's version of Vitruvius. His design for a huge new palace at Whitehall (c.1638) reveals that he was not, however, impressive as an architect of large complexes, although his work influenced developments at Whitehall until the end of C17.

Jones seems to have acted as a consultant for the south front of Wilton House, Wilts. (c.1636), designed by Isaac de Caus, but his supposedly prolific activities as a country-house architect (a hare apparently started by Colen Campbell) are now, through modern research, largely exploded as myths. Among works attributed to him were Byfleet House, Surrey (c.1617), Coleshill House, Berkshire (from 1647), Houghton House, Houghton Conquest, Beds. (after 1615), and Stoke Park, Stoke Bruern, Northants. (c.1630), but the documentation is inadequate. He did, however, design a very handsome Classical choir-screen for Winchester Cathedral, Hants. (1637–8), during the episcopacy (1632–45) of Walter Curl (1575–1647), who made it his business to decorate and improve the interior: the screen was dismantled in 1820, but the central part is now in the Museum of Archaeology, University of Cambridge. He was an important influence on his pupil and nephew, John Webb, through whom Jones's collection of drawings were passed down to subsequent generations. Many of the drawings in Burlington's collection were published in Kent's The Designs of Inigo Jones (1727), Ware's Designs of Inigo Jones and Others (1731), and Vardy's Designs of Mr. Inigo Jones and Mr. William Kent (1744). All Jones's known drawings were listed in John Harris's and Gordon Higgott's Inigo Jones: Complete Architectural Drawings (1989). See Paesschen.

Bibliography

Colvin (1995);
J. Curl (2001);
E. Harris (ed.) (1990);
J. Harris & and Higgott (1989);
J. Harris,, Orgel,, & and Strong (1973);
J. Harris & and Tait (1979);
Leapman (2003);
Lees-Milne (1953);
Millar (1987);
Mowl & and Earnshaw (1995);
Placzek (ed.)(1982);
Summerson (ed.) (1966, 1993)

Jones, Inigo (1573–1652), English architect and artist, the first to be associated with scenic decoration on the English stage. Having studied in Italy and worked in Denmark, he was in 1604–5 attached to the household of Prince Henry, eldest son of James I. In addition to his work as an architect, he was given complete control of the staging of masques presented at Court, the first being Ben Jonson's The Mask of Blackness (1605). In the same year he supervised the staging of the plays seen at Christ Church Hall, Oxford, where he first used revolving screens in the Italian manner. Later he was to use as many as five changes of scenery, with backcloths, shutters, or flats painted and arranged in perspective. The flats ran in grooves and were supplemented by a turntable (machina versatilis) which presented to the audience different facets of a solid structure. Jones also introduced into England the picture-stage framed in a proscenium arch. It is now thought that a collection of plans in the British Library by Jones's pupil and successor John Webb may include those on which Christopher Beeston rebuilt the Cockpit in 1616, but the main bulk of Jones's work is preserved in the library of the Duke of Devonshire at Chatsworth.

Jones, Inigo (1573–1652). Masque designer, architect, and courtier, Jones's architectural legacy only fructified in the early 18th cent. through the neo-Palladian movement. So infectious did his derivations from the functional architecture of Andrea Palladio (1508–80) then become that until the early 19th cent. English townscapes were arguably Jonesian in their lineaments. Yet Jones personally remains frustratingly elusive, for all his arrogance and engrossing power as surveyor of the king's works (1615–44). Palladio's Four Books of Architecture were not exclusively influential, for two visits to Italy, the second with the greatest Italophile of the age, Thomas Howard, earl of Arundel, brought other influences to bear, such as Serlio and Scamozzi (architectural) and Peruzzi and Parmigianino (painters and draughtsmen). Apart from entrancing scenic and costume designs, only seven of Jones's 45 architectural works survive: the most notable are the Whitehall Banqueting House, Queen's chapel at St James's, Queen's House at Greenwich, and, by no means least because of its Carolean town-planning context, St Paul's church, Covent Garden.

David Denis Aldridge

Jones, Inigo (1573–1652), architect, stage designer, painter, mathematician, and man of letters, whose depth of knowledge of Roman and Italian art and of Renaissance theory was new in England, and whose revolutionary buildings brought the classical style to this country. He travelled abroad and developed a deep admiration for Palladio, met Scamozzi, and copied ancient Roman monuments. In 1615 he became surveyor of the King's Works; his most famous buildings are the Queen's House, Greenwich, and the Banqueting Hall, Whitehall, which mark a turning-point in English architecture. Jones's career as a designer of masques opened in 1605 and a stormy but fruitful collaboration with Jonson began with The Masque of Blacknesse, and lasted until 1630/1; their quarrel about the rival claims of the visual arts and literature was also long standing, and became notorious. Later Jones worked with other poets, producing with T. Carew, in Coelum Britannicum (1634), perhaps the most brilliant of later Caroline masques. Jones's fame in England soared between 1710 and 1760, when, with Palladio, he became one of the heroes of the Palladian movement.

Jones, Inigo (1573–1652). Masque designer, architect, and courtier, Jones's architectural legacy only fructified in the early 18th cent. through the neo‐Palladian movement. Yet Jones personally remains frustratingly elusive, for all his arrogance and engrossing power as surveyor of the king's works (1615–44). Apart from entrancing scenic and costume designs, only seven of Jones's 45 architectural works survive: the most notable are the Whitehall Banqueting House, Queen's chapel at St James's, Queen's House at Greenwich, and, by no means least because of its Carolean town‐planning context, St Paul's church, Covent Garden.

Jones, Inigo (1573–1652) English architect, stage designer, and painter. Jones introduced a pure classical style based on the work of Andrea Palladio. His knowledge of Italian architecture gained him enormous prestige in Jacobean and Carolingian England. Buildings include Queen's House, Greenwich (1616–35), and Banqueting House, Whitehall (1619–21).

http://www.riba-library.com/arinjon.html

Jones, Inigo (1573–1652), the first British classical architect. He studied the work of Andrea Palladio (d. 1580) in Italy. His significance as a designer of churches lies in his use of classical forms based on the ancient temple, in contrast to the contemporary Gothic style. His ecclesiastical work includes the Queen's Chapel at St James's Palace and St Paul's, Covent Garden.

Inigo Jones (1573–1652), English architect and stage designer. He introduced the Palladian style to England; notable buildings include the Queen's House at Greenwich (1616) and the Banqueting Hall at Whitehall (1619). He also pioneered the use of the proscenium arch and movable stage scenery in England.