Inigo Jones: The First English Architect

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Inigo Jones (15 July 1573 – 21 June 1652) often called the first English Architect. He was one of the most important English Renaissance architects. Jones appears in the architectural landscape to change the British style and design becoming therefore, the architect responsible for introducing the classical architecture of Rome and the Italian Renaissance to Britain. Broadly conceived, it can be said that this self-taught son of a Smithfield (a cloth maker), had an enormous impact on British art and architecture. His approach to the architectural profession was not in the traditional way, there is not much known about his early life or education. However, there is an important event that changes his life. This is the moment when he visits Italy at the end of the century. It is believed that he visited Italy twice. His first travel to Italy was in 1596, it was after this when he was selected to design stage settings, decoration for masques and costumes at the court of James I. This was something that he continued to do even after he…show more content…
“For Inigo Jones, this project was a crucial opportunity to demonstrate ‘his concept’, totally new in England, of a monumental and ordered architecture based on antiquity and the Italian Renaissance, in the most sensitive context, and harness them to the expression of the grandeur of his monarch” (J.Newman “John Summerson has observed, for example, that the Banqueting House interior owes much to Palladio’s interpretation of a Vitruvian basilica, which had classical associations with the administration of justice (one of the functions of the king) as well as obvious later associations with Christianity; whilst the exterior is partly based on a Palladio study for a town
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