Inigo Jones

Inigo Jones (1573-1652) is regarded as the first great modern English architect. It was he who brought to England the classical architecture of the Italian Renaissance, inspired by Andrea Palladio, in a country that until then was still building in the Gothic style or in a fanciful Tudor style. He was also a brilliant designer of sets and costumes for court entertainments. His main works, the Queen's House at Greenwich and the Banqueting House in Whitehall, can still be admired in London.

From the workshop to Italy

Jones was born in London in 1573, the son of a Welsh cloth worker, and his first name, Inigo, is of Basque origin. Little is known of his youth: he probably worked as an apprentice joiner. Around 1600 he made a first journey to Italy, where he studied painting and drawing and discovered ancient architecture. On his return he worked briefly at the Danish court and was then called into the service of Queen Anne of Denmark, wife of King James I.

The master of masques

For more than thirty years Jones designed the court masques, sumptuous entertainments combining poetry, music, dance and political allegory, in which members of the royal family themselves performed. Working with the playwright Ben Jonson, with whom he had a stormy relationship, he introduced Italian-style stage design to England, with the stage framed by a proscenium arch, movable wings and scene changes in full view. Many of his designs for sets and costumes are kept at Chatsworth House.

The journey of 1613 and Palladio

The decisive journey was that of 1613-1614, when he accompanied the Earl of Arundel, a great collector, to Italy. Jones visited Venice, Vicenza, Rome and Naples, studied ancient buildings and those of Andrea Palladio, and met Vincenzo Scamozzi, the master's pupil. He carried a copy of Palladio's Four Books of Architecture, which he filled with notes: it is now kept at Worcester College, Oxford. From Palladio he took the idea of an architecture founded on harmonious proportion, symmetry and the classical orders.

Surveyor of the King's Works

In 1615 Jones became Surveyor of the King's Works, responsible for the royal buildings, a post he held until the Civil War. In 1616 he began the Queen's House at Greenwich for Queen Anne, completed in 1635 for Queen Henrietta Maria: it is regarded as the first fully classical building in England, a simple white villa that must have looked revolutionary beside the brick palaces of the time. Inside is the famous Tulip Stairs, the first self-supporting spiral staircase in the country. The building is now part of the Maritime Greenwich UNESCO site and displays the Maritime Museum's art collection.

Between 1619 and 1622 he built the Banqueting House in Whitehall, the only surviving part of the great royal palace destroyed by fire in 1698. The ceiling was decorated in 1636 with Rubens's great canvases celebrating James I. It was from a window of this very building that, on 30 January 1649, King Charles I stepped out to the scaffold to be beheaded.

In the 1630s Jones designed for the Earl of Bedford the piazza of Covent Garden, London's first regular square, inspired by Italian piazzas, with the church of St Paul and its plain Tuscan portico: the Earl supposedly asked for something cheap, "not much better than a barn", and Jones replied that he would have "the handsomest barn in England". He also restored old St Paul's Cathedral, adding a monumental classical portico, lost in the Great Fire of 1666. He and his pupil John Webb are also credited with the celebrated Double Cube Room at Wilton House in Wiltshire.

Last years and legacy

Loyal to the crown, during the Civil War Jones was captured in 1645 at the siege of Basing House and lost his property, later partly returned. He died in London in 1652. He had few immediate successors, but in the 18th century Lord Burlington's Palladian movement rediscovered him as a model, and his style, through the great country houses and Georgian squares, shaped the look of entire British cities, from Bath to Edinburgh, and even of the United States.

See also London, the history of the United Kingdom and UNESCO sites in the United Kingdom.