Inigo Jones, ‘Vitruvius Britannicus’

Abstract

In July 1650 the Puritans tore down the statues of the two Stuart kings, James I and Charles I, which crowned the portico on the west front of St Paul’s Cathedral in London (Fig. 1). According to one contemporary report, under the new Republican authorities the portico’s Corinthian columns, which had been erected only a few years earlier by Inigo Jones (1573-1652), were ‘shamefully hewed and defaced’. Clearly his architecture, or certain forms of it, did not enjoy immunity from the Puritan animosity directed at royalist and religious iconography during the Civil War and its aftermath. This conflict had brought to a head the underlying religious tensions and related aesthetic sensitivities that Jones had had to respect throughout his career popularizing the antique (or all’antica) style of building. The Orders had run the obvious risk of being interpreted as foreign, pagan or — worst of all — Popish, at least by Puritans, and as such they required reconciling to English sensitivities and national identity.