With a view to impress

It all began at Hardwick Hall. Imagine an impressionable and imaginative young boy staying with his relations, wandering about absorbing the atmosphere of that miraculous survivor of an Elizabethan house. Mark Girouard’s intellectual curiosity about English architectural history was ignited by his childhood experience of living in those extraordinary rooms. He was on the roof or climbing the worn stone stairs up to the High Great Chamber and experiencing the passion and artifice of Elizabethan architecture at first hand.

Girouard’s major new book is the fruit of years of intensive research following on from his first book, Robert Smythson and the Architecture of the Elizabethan Era (1966). This explored the life and work of the man who lived from 1534/5 to 1614, who built Hardwick and Wollaton, and worked at Wardour and Longleat. Girouard was the first to catalogue and explore the remarkable cache of 150 architectural drawings by Robert Smythson and his sons, which are almost certainly the earliest group of technical drawings to have survived in England.

Girouard pioneered the recognition of these drawings as indicators of how masons abstracted elevations from plans and, more importantly, how they revealed the influence of Continental treatises and pattern books, like those of the Dutch engineer and designer Hans Vredeman de Vries, and the Italian Mannerist Sebastiano Serlio. Girouard has the rare skill of making his knowledge and enthusiasm infectious and accessible. He is greatly helped in this large and heavy book by the hugely seductive photographs and the pleasing design of every page.

He points out that, although Elizabeth I herself built very little, her reign was the moment when building for solidity and convenience was abandoned for a style that emphasised festivity and richness. Elizabethan building takes on a court dress that is informed and lively, influenced by abroad but ultimately very original and very English.