Jones, Inigo

Jones, Inigo (1573-1652), English architect, who introduced to Britain the classical architecture of the late Italian Renaissance. Much of his work was based on that of Andrea Palladio, from whom he learnt a classical sense of proportion and the controlled use of detail, and after the brief flowering of English Baroque, Jones’s work was of central importance to the establishment of Palladianism, which became the natural style of English architecture from the first decades of the 18th century into the 1820s.

Jones was born in London on July 15, 1573, the son of a cloth-maker. Sometime between 1600 and 1603, he is known to have visited Italy while on a tour of Europe, when he also worked at the Danish court. By 1605 he had returned to England, where, in deference to the knowledge that he had acquired abroad, he was termed “the Great Traveller”. The same year, he began work as a theatrical designer at the court of James I.

Between 1605 and 1640 he planned over 50 court masques, or theatrical entertainments, often in collaboration with Ben Jonson. Jonson wrote the verse, and Jones was responsible for all other aspects, including costume and set design. Over 450 drawings in Jones’s hand, ranging from working sketches to small masterpieces of Renaissance draughtsmanship, survive at Chatsworth House, Derbyshire.

Jones was highly innovative, and through his use of sophisticated mechanics, moving sets, fantastic costuming, and modern theories of perspective created a spectacularly visual theatre.

In 1611 Jones became Surveyor to Prince Henry; in 1615 he took up the post of Surveyor to the King’s Works, in which capacity he began to design royal houses. Jones’s first surviving work of architecture is the Queen’s House in Greenwich, which he designed in 1615, after a second visit to Italy. Jones had travelled to Italy as the tutor and guide of Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, and they had returned to England with a large number of drawings by Andrea Palladio, various books on art and architecture, including Palladio’s Four Books of Architecture, and also paintings, models, and all manner of objects that in a very direct way brought the spirit of the Renaissance to England.

With the Queen’s House (completed in 1635) Jones introduced a strict Palladian classicism into an England whose architecture had up until that time been a heady mixture of Flemish and French influences. The strongly romantic nature of Elizabethan and Jacobean architecture up until this point was the result of the diffuse way in which Renaissance theories from Catholic Italy had reached Protestant England, and it was Jones who brought an uncompromising vision of classical purity directly to the English Court.

Between 1619 and 1622, Jones worked on the Banqueting House, in Whitehall, probably his best-known building. The proportions of the Banqueting House are those of a double cube, a simple rectangle in cool, white Portland stone. The external decoration, crisply detailed and controlled, is strictly classical. The simple interior, one large room rising through two storeys from basement level, is sumptuously decorated with ceiling paintings by Rubens that celebrate the triumph of the Stuart dynasty. Jones provided plans for the total rebuilding of Whitehall Palace under Charles I. The motley of Tudor buildings were to be swept away and in their place was to rise a vast classical palace whose size and magnificence would equal the Escorial, the Louvre, and the palaces of the Habsburg and Bourbon monarchs, whose absolute authority Charles wished to emulate. In the event, the Banqueting House was the only part of the plan ever realized, and Charles walked to his death through the centre window in 1649. Jones’s other projects for the court included the Queen’s Chapel (1623-1625) at St James’ Palace, a very simple building, and Wilton House, Wiltshire, where again he used the proportions of a double cube to create one of the most classically imposing rooms in England.

In 1631, Jones introduced town planning to London when he designed and constructed the area just north of the Strand known as Covent Garden. It was the first planned extension to the crowded city, and took as its model the Place des Vosges, in Paris. From the first it was conceived of as a complete urban unit. Brick-built houses and arcades bounded an open piazza on the north and the east. For the west side of the piazza, Jones designed St Paul’s, Covent Garden (1630-1631), fronted by a vast Tuscan portico. It was the first new church in London since the Reformation and the first entirely classical church in Britain.

Also in the 1630s Jones worked on remodelling old St Paul’s Cathedral. Although his work was lost when the cathedral was destroyed and subsequently rebuilt after the Great Fire of London, it caused a sensation at the time and is known today through contemporary drawings and descriptions. At the west front Jones provided a huge portico with giant Corinthian orders, personally paid for by Charles I. It was the largest of its kind north of the Alps and, in the sense of magnificence that it created, it rivalled the best works of ancient and modern Rome.

At the outbreak of the Civil War in 1642, Jones was forced to flee London because of his associations with the Royalists. Although his career had ended, his influence was to be felt into and beyond the following century. He returned to London and died there on June 21, 1652.