No provincial laggard

Inigo Jones is well-known as the first true English Classical architect, and his stature has been established by a series of books and exhibitions over the last 40 years. English historians, however, have tended to treat Jones as an isolated, even old-fashioned, disciple of Palladio, ‘catching up’ with the Italian Renaissance, at a time when mainstream Europe had moved on to the Baroque. The purpose of this book is to prove this accepted view wrong. Giles Worsley’s aim is to demonstrate that Jones was a distinguished figure in a European-wide classical architectural movement of the early 17th century.

A detailed examination of Jones’s own work is put in the continental context by individual chapters on contemporary architecture in Italy, southern Germany, France and the Netherlands. Jones’s own working career as Court Architect to James I and Charles I from 1613 to the Civil War and execution of the latter king in 1649 is discussed in parallel with the work of his European contemporaries. Here it is proved beyond doubt that architects like Jacob van Campen in Holland, Elias Holl in Augsburg, Jacob Wolf in Nuremburg, and Italians in several northern cities, including Aurelio Trezzi in Milan, Giovanni Magenta in Bologna and Domenico Curtoni in Verona were all designing ‘pure’ buildings very similar to those of Inigo Jones in the same decades. In the context of northern Italy, and many northern European states, Jones was part of the contemporary mainstream. ‘Had he practised in Parma, Vicenza or Verona, his buildings would have passed without comment’. In northern Europe his work was seen as ‘innovative and ground breaking’ by his contemporaries.

In England itself, Jones’s work had a profound impact and in its simpler, astylar version, laid the foundations for English architecture after his death, especially the classic English house of the Restoration period.