Architecture · Classical & Renaissance

Inigo Jones

1573–1652 · English

English Renaissance; Palladianism

Inigo Jones introduced Italian Renaissance classicism to England. A Smithfield clothworker's son, he began as a designer of court masques for James I and Charles I, travelled in Italy with the Earl of Arundel studying Palladio at first hand, and as Surveyor of the King's Works built the first fully classical buildings in Britain. His Banqueting House in Whitehall, from a window of which Charles I stepped to his execution, set the pattern for two centuries of English architecture.

How to spot them

▸The first correct classical buildings in England: a double-cube room, a rusticated basement, a balustraded roofline
▸Designer of Stuart court masques with Ben Jonson, and the man who brought perspective scenery to the English stage
▸He owned Palladio's own drawings and an annotated copy of the Four Books
▸Surveyor of the King's Works from 1615; his pupil and kinsman was John Webb

Key buildings

A double-cube hall in Whitehall with a Rubens ceiling glorifying a king, and a window through which that king's son stepped to the scaffold (1619–1622)

Whitehall, London

The Banqueting House; Rubens's ceiling of 1636 celebrates James I, and Charles I was beheaded outside in January 1649.

A white villa at Greenwich that once straddled the old Dover road, famous for a cube hall and a cantilevered Tulip staircase (1616–1635)

Greenwich, London

The Queen's House, begun for Anne of Denmark and finished for Henrietta Maria — usually called the first strictly classical building in England.

A church of the utmost plainness under a huge overhanging Tuscan portico, the patron having asked for little better than a barn (1631–1633)

Covent Garden, London

St Paul's Covent Garden, the actors' church; the portico doors are false, since the altar stands at that end.

London's first formal square, an arcaded Italian piazza laid out for the Earl of Bedford on the site of a convent's garden (1630s)

London, England

The Covent Garden piazza — the model for the English residential square.

A royal chapel begun for a Spanish infanta who never came and completed for the French princess who did (1623–1625)

St James's Palace, London

The Queen's Chapel, started for the proposed Spanish match and finished for Henrietta Maria.

A Wiltshire house whose state room measures 60 by 30 by 30 feet and was hung with Van Dycks for the Earl of Pembroke (1630s–1640s)

Wilton, Wiltshire

Wilton House and its Double Cube Room, executed with Isaac de Caus and John Webb.

Key ideas

Outward ornament should be 'solid, proportionable according to the rules, masculine and unaffected'
Design by proportion: the cube and the double cube, and rooms set out in simple whole-number ratios
The stage is a machine — perspective scenery, sliding shutters and flying machines, all introduced to England in the masques

Quick-fire facts

•Son of a Smithfield clothworker; his first recorded career was designing court masques, many of them written by Ben Jonson
•He quarrelled famously with Jonson, who lampooned him as 'Iniquo Vitruvius' and as the character In-and-In Medlay
•He travelled to Italy in 1613–14 with Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, studying Palladio's buildings at first hand
•Appointed Surveyor of the King's Works in 1615, in effect royal architect to James I and Charles I
•He encased the medieval Old St Paul's Cathedral in classical dress and added a giant Corinthian portico; it burned in the Great Fire of 1666
•He surveyed Stonehenge for James I; the book published after his death argued it was a Roman temple
•His drawings and his annotated Quattro Libri passed through John Webb to Lord Burlington, and are now at Worcester College, Oxford, and in the RIBA collection
•Colen Campbell and Lord Burlington revived him in the 1710s as the founding father of the English Palladian school

Drill it — 7 cards

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Sources

Royal Museums Greenwich — The Queen's House, Greenwich
John Summerson — Architecture in Britain 1530–1830