Book review
Inigo Jones: The Theatre of the Stuart Court by Stephen Orgel and Roy Strong
published by Sotheby Parke Bernet / The University of California Press, 1973 (2 volumes, 416 pages, $134.75)
Reviewed by I.V. PORSOLT
This beautifully turned-out work may well be, for some considerable time to come, the basic book of reference on Inigo Jones's graphic work connected with stage productions.
The bulk of it is in the catalogue, which presents the whole work, from 1605 until 1640, including the texts of the masques, copious annotations and, most helpfully, explanatory samples of relevant work going back as far as Serlio, a hundred years before him. There is remarkably little, though, from Jones's hero Palladio - much nearer to him in time as well as in spirit.
Welcome in this book are the many technical drawings for theatre design and stage technology. They show Jones as a very modern set designer, who opted very clearly for parallel and receding 'flats' just as with any but the most modern productions. He went far beyond those most cumbersome 'periacti' - the revolving triangular pillars that permitted three scene changes and were much the rage in the early sixteenth century (they were based on the Roman writings of Vitruvius). Jones's more advanced flats (also practised, already, in Classical Greece) have a much more than just technical significance however. They involve an awareness of the perspective representation of nature, and with this, go to the very core of the 'make-believe' nature of Baroque theatre and architecture. It was somehow natural that a practitioner of Baroque architecture should be deeply involved in the stage.
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| INIGO JONES Hercules' Bowl-bearer and Welsh Dancers, pen drawing |
The authors point out that the picture of Jones the architect will always be incomplete unless it is rounded out with a discussion of his designs for masques and other stage productions. This is of course very true: both from the point of view of an inner kinship between architecture and theatre that was felt at the time, and on the general grounds that Inigo Jones lived still within the period of the 'Great Universal Man' of the Renaissance - a period stretching from Brunelleschi through Alberti and Leonardo and Michelangelo and Bernini right up to Christopher Wren, and including Jones as its first English representative. The two volumes under discussion have made this additional insight into Jones's character crystal clear. Never before has the wider public been able to see the universality of a man hitherto considered as hardly more than an architectural innovator.
When all this is said, contradictions, and what some of us may term imperfections in the man's character emerge. To scornfully reject the euphuistic floss of the Elizabethan era and replace it with a well-nigh puritanical orthodox Classicism was surely a revolutionary stance. Yet Inigo Jones was anything but a revolutionary, anything but a puritan. He was a true-blue Tory; he was persecuted by the Commonwealth, though later he was pardoned, his property was restored, and he was allowed to continue his interrupted career under the patronage of a Parliamentarian nobleman.
Jones was a man of principles - his paramount one being obeisance to authority. His political allegiance changed with political authority. In his architecture the authority was and remained to the end one man: Palladio. Or rather: Palladio's book Quattro libri d'Architettura, because, if we look at the great Italian master's clear, sunny, rational and orthodox theories on proportion, and set them alongside his practice, so often unorthodox, from gentle Mannerism to nearly riotous early Baroque, it becomes very plain that Inigo Jones had followed him into these more daring fields only reluctantly. Jones revolutionized English architecture by introducing rational thinking into it. But the Tory in him soon gained the upper hand, when he stiffly canonized his new-won rules.
Palladio was a forerunner of the Baroque: fifty years after him Jones was a follower of it - but only inside the building, He actually wrote (I am quoting freely): 'in the same way as we, in everyday life, often let our hair down at home, yet deport ourselves with more decorum when going abroad, a building too should present a sedate front on the outside', but may be more freely conceived inside,' Behind the sedate two-storied front of the Banqueting House in Whitehall there was the free-soaring space - with licentious Rubens's paintings on the ceiling!
The masques are Inigo Jones's indoor occasions. In them he is fully baroque - just as was the Court for which he worked. Had the Court followed his wise and very British restraint in going about in public, there may never have been a Commonwealth. . .
Originally published in Art New Zealand 5 April/May 1977