ARTS
Architecture
Most artful architect
Edward Chaney
Inigo Jones Architect (Royal Academy, till 25 February)
Sixteenth-century Italy, which so pro- foundly inspired Inigo Jones in his role as artist, architect, stage-designer, connois- seur and courtier, was the home of many greater artistic all-rounders than he. If not quite a Leonardo, a Raphael or Michel- angelo, nor even (arguably) a Giulio Romano, Palladio or Buontalenti, Jones Inigo Jones by Van Dyck, c. 1640 nevertheless became 17th-century Britain's pioneering nearest equivalent, recognised by contemporaries as 'our kingdom's most artfull and ingenious architect' and by succeeding generations (puritanical ones excepted) in ever more enthusiastic terms.
Florence has hosted an exhibition de- voted to Michelangelo's achievement as an architect. Rome has similarly honoured Raphael. More provincially, Palladio's home town of Vicenza (which Jones visited at least twice, annotating his copy of the master's Quattro libri), long since estab- lished a Palladian 'study centre' to house an architectural history library, host con- ferences and organise exhibitions. Arezzo does something similar for Vasari, Vinci for Leonardo, and so on. This autumn, Mantua accorded Giulio Romano — still an inadequately recognised source for Jones — a magnificent exhibition complete with full-scale models, paintings on loan from all over the world and a 600-page catalogue written by an international team of 23 scholars. While a version of this exhibition has now moved on to Vienna (it will not of course come here), we in Britain have managed, only by the skin of our teeth, after much unseemly squabbling and several near misses, to mount the first ever exhibition devoted exclusively to Jones's architectural drawings, even though it had been arranged in advance by an American institution.
You would never have guessed this last week. Resplendent in his lord-mayor-like chain of office and Steel-style shirt, sub- modernist Maxwell Hutchinson, the new- look, post-community-housing president of the RIBA, personified his institution's shameless insistence on maximising its credit when he welcomed us all to the grand opening of this exhibition at the Royal. Academy. Having greeted Stirling, Foster, Lasdun and assorted lesser-known Jonesians at the head of the great staircase beneath William Kent's 'Glorification of Inigo Jones', the mighty Max swept into the Reynolds Room (where Kent and Burlington may once have pored over these drawings), took up his position oppo- site the then still empty space reserved for Leningrad's Van Dyck of Jones and pom- pously upstaged the Royal Academy presi- dent Roger de Grey's judicious introduc- tion with a round of embarrassing chest- thumps. Thanking no one, he boasted instead of the number of RIBA drawings in the show, of the RIBA's multi-million- pound plan for creating a 'National Architecture Centre', and, most alienating of all, of Jones's quasi-RIBA status as a modernist. Hard to believe that as recently as 3 June, when this journal published a critical report on Britain's failure to date `to rescue so worthy and straightforward a cultural cause', the RIBA was still holding up attempts to show this exhibition in its entirety on its return from America. More appropriate, it seems to me, would have been a speech from Martha Beck, the dynamic director of New York's Drawing Center, who worked harder than anyone in Britain — mainly via long-distance tele- phone calls — to find a British venue for this exhibition in honour of a British artist, catalogued by British scholars. Only the bibliographically astute will notice that the Academy's beautifully produced catalogue Is a reprint of the Drawing Center's, with inserted introduction by Roger de Grey and double-page spread in honour of the four British sponsors who came to the Academy's rescue. It is of course right that these sponsors should be saluted but the prominence of their prefaces should not mislead the reader into believing that their money, rather than the far larger sums previously donated by Mrs Heinz, paid for more than the reprinting of a catalogue and the remounting of a prearranged exhibi- tion.
More appropriate also might have been a speech from Lesley Le Claire, librarian of Worcester College, Oxford, which loaned some 25 of the most important drawings, together with four annotated books from Jones's library not shown in America, including the priceless Quattro libri, and did so much to encourage a Royal Academy showing of the complete exhibition.
Having said all this — and with an increasing number of exhibitions by- passing Britain I believe it essential to emphasise how nearly even this one did (not least so as to guarantee that the Wren and St Paul's show is seen on its return from Washington) — we should rejoice that this exhibition is as fascinating as the New Yorkers and Pittsburghers said it was, and warmly congratulate the Royal Academy on hosting something our state- run museums failed to compete for. Intrin- sically beautiful though many of them are, the purpose of some of these drawings is not always self-evident, so that the accom- panying labels are more than usually use- ful, and for complete enjoyment the cata- logue by John Harris and Gordon Higgott with its photographs of completed build- ings and comparative material is essential. Fortunately this is a model of its kind. It will remain the standard work long after the drawings have disappeared back into their boxes. The introductory chapters and individual entries perfectly combine Har- ris's unrivalled range and enthusiasm with Fliggott's state-of-the-art connoisseurship (based on his recently completed Cour- tauld Institute PhD). The hundred or so drawings involved have never been so thoroughly scrutinised and new interpreta- tions, attributions and, perhaps most in- teresting of all, redatings, emerge as a result. Almost all are convincing and if, on occasions, the authors adopt a more confi- dent tone than is perhaps justified by the evidence they present, a reading of the catalogue as a whole so enhances our respect for their accumulative expertise that we are ultimately persuaded to aban- don most of our doubts.
Doubts are indeed most likely to emerge If we depend solely on our eyes, for without the contextualised connoisseurship one might argue against all these drawings being the work of a single master. In all honesty, this is because a few are of such feeble quality. I don't question, for exam- ple, that the drawing for a fountain in Henrietta Maria's garden at Somerset House (cat. 67) is by Jones, and yet, albeit representative of Jones's 'mature figurative style', compared with the exquisite 'Fiery Spirit' (cat. 10, copy or no copy) it looks like the work of a child. Any one of the Italians named above would have con- demned it as such and I doubt whether even those British colleagues condemned for their relative ignorance of Palladio would have been impressed by Jones's incompe- tent handling of single-point perspective. Much the same might be said of many of those innumerable head studies, ably dis- cussed by John Peacock, also dated to this mature period. Even some of the purely architectural drawings, where on a single sheet we can find a disconcerting range of quality, make us pause for thought. Not- withstanding the brilliance of the final solution — the largest classical portico in Northern Europe — what would Palladio, or even Alberti, have thought of the elevation for the west front of St Paul's (cat. 78), now dated to the 1630s? In the same decade Jones completed the masterly choir screen for Winchester Cathedral, magnificent classical stage designs (only a sample of which are in this exhibition), and was producing those meticulous, stripped- down presentation drawings which mislead the modernists into believing he was one of them.
The scholarly research which underpins this fascinating exhibition stimulates almost as many questions as it answers, the largest of them lying perhaps beyond its scope. For the career of Inigo Jones epitomises the early Stuart crusade to compete with European culture on its own terms. 'The Triumph of Peace' (to name the masque which provoked most Puritan hostility) proved all too short. Jones's life was an heroic artistic struggle constrained, in its beginnings as in its end, by Britain's two most traumatic revolutions, the Re- formation and the Great Rebellion. He was born just three years after Elizabeth's excommunication cut Britain off from the Catholic Continent, and died three years after his patron, Charles I, was executed on a platform attached to his Banqueting House in Whitehall.
`I thought privatisation was a great success.'
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