Inigo unmasked
ART PAUL GRINliE
After a long perambulation round America, the Chatsworth collection of stage and costume designs by Inigo Jones has reached the Victoria and Albert Museum, where it will be on view for the next three months. It is an extraordinary collection, formed in the early eighteenth century by that great Palladian. the Earl of Burlington, for whom Jones was a figure of heroic proportions and every scrap from his pen an object of reverence. The Burlington-Devonshire col- lection is the main repository of Jones' graphic work. It has been eagerly explored since the Shakespeare Society first turned their attention to it in the 1840's, and has recently come under the fresh scrutiny of Dr Roy Strong. The collection is remark- able on several counts; for its insights into the Jacobean stage and as the only visual evidence of the actual machinery of stage production at that time; as the earliest significant collection of English costume designs apart from the marvellous American drawings of John White: and, lastly, as a very complete record of the work of a great English artist.
Jones was a brilliant provincial in that English art, at the turn of the sixteenth century, was provincial by European stan- dards. He was also the proverbial Italianate Englishman. ceaselessly profiting from his travels abroad and turning his prodigious talents to every aspect of artistic life— whether supervising the royal picture col- lection. working on his own architectural projects or, as we see him here, master- minding the court masques. His pupil and devoted assistant, John Webb, wrote of his master, 'he was architect-general unto four mighty kings. two heroick queens, and that illustrious and never to be forgotten Prince Henry; and his continual proximity to the throne gave Jones' work in this strangely sycophantic art-form an aura-:of regality which one never finds in the drawings of Webb.
The Stuart masque was a specifically royal entertainment, viewed by a privileged court circle who recognised in it immediately an allegory of the Divine Right of Kings and a hieratically defined world picture with which the audience was completely familiar. The predictable triumph of the masquers (often played by the royal family) over the elements of misrule and disorder could be seen in political terms, especially as the civil war drew near, but at heart the masque was-an .opportunity to let the royal hair down and put on an extravagant spec- tacle. Under the finery of the masquers lies the germ of those late Victorian charades intended to while away winter evenings. As an art form, the masque was a brief but glittering indulgence which necessitated the combined talents of poet, painter and archi- tect, a marriage of the arts which was yet another pointer to the benevolent patronage of an omnipotent monarchy. When the idea of monarchy itself became subject to deter- mined attack, what place could the Office of Revels hold in a restructured Puritan society? Inigo Jones was lucky to get an early civil service posting as Surveyor of Works, but he was too ardent a royalist to hold the job under the new dispensation. The Protectorate had little to spare for such baubles as masques.
Jones' entree on the English court stage was Ben Jonson's early Masque of Black- ness, commissioned by James I's Queen, Anne of Denmark. `It was her Majesty's wish,' wrote Jonson, 'to have them blackamoors'. It went over like a lead balloon, in spite of Anne's capricious desire for blackamoors and Jones' grouping of the sets on a stage at the end of the hall, but Inigo had undoubtedly arrived. By 1606 he had a complete command of the new conventions of stage design, and the Masque of Hymen included his innovation of the machina versatilis (an early version of the now familiar revolving stage) and a rudi- mentary proscenium arch. All these tenta- tive novelties can be seen in his drawings which show a feverish attempt to pile illusion on illusion without forgetting the ropes and shutters to make them work. Ten years later the partnership with Jonson was rapidly coming to an end, as the poet was forced to give ground to ever more elaborate transformation scenes from Jones' fertile pen.
But Jones' real triumph as an artist- designer comes in his costume drawings. marvellous evocations of the fantastic and mythical. Dwarfs and hags rub shoulders with fairy princesses and fiery torch-bearers while elephants make a dramatic entrance bearing castles on their backs. A sketchbook from the Italian masters, compiled on Jones' tour of Italy with the Earl of Arundel in 1613, points to some of his more .immediate sources, but he was a voracious adapter from both -the popular comntedia dell'arte and from pageants and fetes of foreign courts. Everything he did was instantly transformed by his own genius into something new and inspiring.
That these are working drawings is indicated by their occasional squaring, or by the odd splash of scene painter's colour. Artists have always been fairly cavalier about working drawings for the stage and their survival in any condition is remarkable —I was recently sh
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for backcloths by John Piper for a Britten opera which had been cheerfully subjected to the same treatment. The freedom and rapidity of execution which all these graphic instructions share makes them even more entrancing today. Probably the final tribute paid to this extraordinarily gifted man came from Van Dyck, who wrote of Jones that he was 'not to be equalled by whatsooer great masters of his time, for boldness. softness, sweetness, and sureness of his touches'.
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