Art and Magic in the Court of the Stuarts. - book reviews

Architectural Review, The, Jan, 1995 by Robert Tavernor

By Vaughan Hart. London and New York, Routledge. 1994. 50 [pounds sterling].

Inigo Jones is too often described in simple term as Britain's first great Palladian architect, where the influences he absorbed were more wide ranging, and were certainly complex. It was Palladio's heir in northern Italy, Vincenzo Scamozzi, whoJones met on his Italian travels. and he was no promoter of his master. In an, case, Jones's education in architecture was broadly based, and as well as Palladio's I quattro libri he owned books on architecture by Serlio, Alberti, and Vitruvius. These he annotated with detailed comments which reflect his own observations and the cultural preoccupations inherited from the Elizabethan age by the Stuart court. It is the potent mix of the Roman Classical building tradition, Neoplatonism, monarchy and the Protestant Church in the newly unified Great Britain, which provided Jones with his opportunities, as Vaughan Hart describes so well in his excellent book.

Palladio provided practical information on building all'antica, but it was the intellectual framework provided by the Neoplatonic writings of Pico della Mirandola, Agrippa and Giordano Bruno, which had a profound influence during the sixteenth century in England on the polymath John Dee, Henry Wotton (author of The Elements of Architecture) and William Laud (as Bishop of St Paul's in London). They, in turn, informed the ambitions of the first Stuart king of England, James I (VI of Scotland), who was determined to proclaim the ancient authority and `divine right' of kingship, through the visible arts of painting, masques, and architecture.

This fascinating web of ideas and its impact on the visual arts is communicated by Hart with elegance and considerable verve. The reader is exposed to the power of white magic, masques, heraldry and gardens as manipulated by the Stuarts, and as a forerunner for Jones's architecture which was intended to be the most permanent legacy of that regime -- a potential largely unrealised, and even lost in London's Great Fire, in that `apocalyptic' year of 1666, when the destruction of St Paul's heralded the `papist' architecture of Wren which came to dominate that city's sky-line.

Hart displays his knowledge effectively, and martials his arguments convincingly. Errors are few and slight, and this book is essential reading for those who still persist in describing the architecture of Jones as Palladian, or fail to appreciate that architecture in Britain was once concerned with more than style or pragmatism.