No provincial laggard

Inigo Jones is well-known as the first true English Classical architect, and his stature has been established by a series of books and exhibitions over the last 40 years. English historians, however, have tended to treat Jones as an isolated, even old-fashioned, disciple of Palladio, ‘catching up’ with the Italian Renaissance, at a time when mainstream Europe had moved on to the Baroque. The purpose of this book is to prove this accepted view wrong. Giles Worsley’s aim is to demonstrate that Jones was a distinguished figure in a European-wide classical architectural movement of the early 17th century.

A detailed examination of Jones’s own work is put in the continental context by individual chapters on contemporary architecture in Italy, southern Germany, France and the Netherlands. Jones’s own working career as Court Architect to James I and Charles I from 1613 to the Civil War and execution of the latter king in 1649 is discussed in parallel with the work of his European contemporaries.