Hostname: page-component-84b7d79bbc-dwq4g Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-28T10:24:17.606Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Inigo Jones in Provence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 April 2016

Extract

Inigo Jones’s tour of Italy from 1613 to 1614 in the retinue of the Earl of Arundel has long been recognized as a turning point in the architect’s career and no account of his life has failed to mention it. But despite the fairly clear picture that has been formed of Jones’s movements in Italy, by collating the evidence of dated notes in his surviving books with that of letters referring to the progress of the Earl of Arundel, one aspect of the tour still presents a puzzle.

It has been assumed that the return journey from Italy in 1614 was made through Provence. Notes by Jones in his copy of Andrea Palladio’s I Quattro Libri dell’Architettura (Venice, 1601) prove that he saw the two Roman temples at Nîmes and that he visited Arles. A sketch elevation in the Royal Institute of British Architects’ Drawings Collection shows that he went to the Pont du Gard (Pl. 7a); and a hitherto unpublished comment in his copy of Daniele Barbaro’s Commentary on Vitruvius at Chatsworth reveals that he saw the Roman theatre at Orange. But unlike many of the notes that Jones made on site in Italy, or made later recalling what he saw there, none of the Provence notes bears a date. Even the careful elevation of the Pont du Gard, which with its accompanying list of measurements would seem to be Jones’s most detailed study of an antique monument, is undated.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain 1983

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes

1 The most detailed accounts of the tour are by Gotch, J. A.: Inigojones (London, 1928), pp. 7183 Google Scholar and’Inigojones’s principal visit to Italy in 1614. The itinerary of his journeys’, RIBA Journal, rd ser., 46 (1938), 85-86.

2 Gotch, Inigo Jones, p. 77 and Gotch, ‘Inigojones’s principal visit to Italy’, p. 86. See also the entry by Harris, J., ‘Second Italian Journey: 1613-14’, in Harris, J., Orgel, S. and Strong, R., The King’s Arcadia: Inigojones and the Stuart Court (Arts Council of Great Britain, 1973), pp. 5556 Google Scholar.

3 Second edition. HisannotatedcopyisinthecareoftheProvostandFellowsofWorcesterCollege, Oxford, andhas been published in facsimile as Inigojones on Palladio, ed. Allsopp, Bruce, 2 vols (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1970)Google Scholar.

4 Jones adopted the ‘new style’ Gregorian Calendar in Italy, which was ten days in advance of the ‘old style’Julian Calendar still current in England. When he returned to England he reverted to the old style calendar. Unless otherwise stated, dates of the Continental tour are given here in the new style.

5 Mentioned in a letter by Countess Dowager ofArundel to Sir Thomas Edmondes, English ambassador in Paris, 19 August 1614 (old style), quoted in Hervey, M. F. S., The Life, Correspondence and Collections of Thomas Howard, Earlof Arundel (Cambridge, 1921), pp. 8687 Google Scholar. Chapter 7 treats Arundel’s Italianjourney with Jones.

6 Ibid., 87-88 (PRO, State Papers Savoy and Sardinia, 92, Bundle 2, fols 54 verso, 55 recto).

7 Allsopp, , Inigojones on Palladio, II, 1213 Google Scholar (notes in the lower margin of Book 1, p. 52).

8 His visit to the Veneto in August 1614 is the only occasion during the twenty-month foreign tour when Jones and Arundel can be located apart, and this probably occurred because Arundel was detained by illness at Genoa.

9 PRO, State Papers France, 78, vol. 62, fols 184 recto and verso.

10 For example, Lord Burlington, travelling with a similar retinue in 1715 (when conditions had little changed) crossed Mont Ceniš on 15 March and arrived in Paris shortly before 6 April ( Lees-Milne, J., Earls of Creation (1962), pp. 111-12Google Scholar).

11 Research by Newman, John: ‘The dating of Inigo Jones’s annotations’ in ‘Essays presented to Peter Murray’ (London University typescript, 1980)Google Scholar, and research by the author towards a doctoral thesis in preparation at London University, ‘The architectural drawings of Inigo Jones’. I am very grateful to Mr Newman for generously sharing his findings with me.

12 Information for this paragraph is taken from Tannenbaum, S. A., The Handwriting of the Renaissance (London and New York, 1931), pp. 1215 Google Scholar, and Dawson, G. and Skipton, L. Kennedy, Elizabethan Handwriting, 1500-1686 (London, 1968), pp. 810 Google Scholar. See also Petti, A. G., English Literary Hands from Chaucer to Dryden (London, 1977), pp. 825 Google Scholar.

13 The second phase ends about 1620 when the upward flourish on the final ‘s’ (see Pl. 7b) disappears from his writing. A final phase begins in the mid-1630s, when the italic ‘e’ reappears. (Newman, ‘Inigo Jones’s annotations’, 9-10).

14 See Orgel, S. and Strong, R., Inigo Jones. The Theatre of the Stuart Court (London and Berkeley, 1973), 1, no. 13, 126-27Google Scholar.

15 See, for example, Book 1, p. 11, where on-site comments at Baia near Naples, dated I7january 1614, are forced into the text by marginal comments in the early style.

16 Many examples of this earliest style are in I Quattro Libri, Book 1, e.g. pp. 10, 11, 17, 18, 20, 53, 60, 61.

17 PRO Rolls of the Treasurer of the Chamber to the King. E 351/543, p. 214.

18 McMillin, Scott, ‘Jonson’s early entertainments: new information from Hatfield House’, Renaissance Drama, new series 1 (1968), 154-58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 Barbaro, Daniele, I Dieci Libri dell’Architettura di M. Vitruvio (Venice, 1567)Google Scholar, annotated copy by Inigo Jones at Chatsworth, p. 462.

20 Rye, W. B., England as seen by Foreigners (London, 1885), p. 61 Google Scholar and note 84.

21 Julien Mauclerc, Premier Livre d’Architecture (1600), frontispiece. I am most grateful to Dr David Thomson of the University of East Anglia for communicating information on perpetual motion machines to me.

22 Compare the style and content of the note with those of three on-site comments made about spiral staircases in Italy between 1613 and 1614, I Quattro Libri, Book 11, pp. 19 and 30 and Book iv, p. 75.

23 Harris, J., Catalogue of the Drawings Collection of’the RIBA. Inigo Jones & John Webb (Farnborough, 1972), no. 102, p. 19 Google Scholar.

24 Given as 6 (Parisian) feet high by 5½ feet wide on the woodcut, they average 4½ (English) feet high (including cornice) by 6¾ feet wide on the monument. Author’s measurements.

25 The passage remained on the west side until its replacement by the present road on the east in 1747. Espérandieu, Emile, Le Pont du Gard et L’Aqueduc de Nîmes, 3rd edn (Paris, 1968), pp. 3645 Google Scholar.

26 Orgel, and Strong, , Theatre of the Stuart Court, 1, nos 60, 61 and 63, pp. 210-13, 216-17Google Scholar.

27 See Spielman, H., ‘Andrea Palladio und die Antike, Untersuchung und Katalog der Zeichnungen aus seinem Nachlass’, Kunstwissen shafiliche Studien, 37 (Berlin, 1966), 48 Google Scholar. The temples are illustrated between pp. 80-81 and 84-85 in the Discours Historial.

28 I Quattro Libri, Book IV, p. 120.

29 I Quattro Libri, Worcester College, Book iv, p. 118.

30 Discours Historial, pp. 81-84. Like Palladio, Poldo d’Albenas rejects the view that it was a temple of Vesta.

31 Deyron, J., Des Antiquities de la Ville de Nismes, 2nd edn (Grenoble, 1663), p. 15 Google Scholar.

32 Ménard, M., Histoire Civile, Ecclésiastique, et Littéraire de la Ville de Nismes (8 vols, Paris, 1758), VII, 4151 Google Scholar.

33 Graser, J. J., De Antiquitatibus NemausensibusDissertatio (Geneva, 1607), p. 14 Google Scholar.

34 Vitruvius, , The Ten Books on Architecture, trans. Morgan, M. H., 2nd edn (New York, 1960), pp. 1415, 103-04, 198Google Scholar and Palladio, , I Quattro Libri, Book I, p. 28 Google Scholar.

35 For the antiquities of Aries, and especially Les Aliscamps, see Constans, L. A., Arles Antiques (Paris, 1921)Google Scholar.

36 Ibid., pp. 369-70.

37 Its setting is shown in plate XXVI of de Noble Lalauzière’s, J. F. Abrégé Chronologique de L’histoire d’Arles (Arles, 1808)Google Scholar.

38 The Arles sarcophagi are collectively catalogued in Espérandieu, Emile, Receuil Général des Bas-reliefs de la Gaule Romaine (10 vols, Paris, 1907 Google Scholar, republished in facsimile, Farnborough, 1965), vols 1 and III. The Marseilles tomb is in vol. 1, no. 173. Other examples which Jones may have seen are nos 166, 189 and 214.

39 Compare the figure drawing in costume designs for Queens, performed on 2 February 1608/9, with that of similar designs for Banters, performed 11 months later. Orgel, and Strong, , Theatre of the Stuart Court, vol. 1, nos 16-20, 38, 40, 42; pp. 140-44, 166, 170, 172Google Scholar.

40 See Newman, J., ‘An early drawing by Inigo Jones and a monument in Shropshire’, Burlington Magazine, 115 (1973), 360-67Google Scholar.

41 Espérandieu, , Receuil General, 1, no. 166 Google Scholar. Other examples are vol. mos 167, 170, 171, 174 and vol. III, no. 2539.

42 A source, through a woodcut or engraving, could have been the late-fifteenth-century tomb to Francesco Tornabuoni in S. Maria sopra Minerva, Rome, which has a curved-sided sarcophagus with harpies holding swags at the angles. I am grateful to Mr Adam White for this observation.

43 Barbaro, I Dieci Libri, Chatsworth, p. 261. See Vitruvius, , The TenBooks, trans. Morgan, , Book v, ch. ix, 154-56Google Scholar.

44 He calls a drawing that he had made of a marble in Arundel’s collection ‘my dessigne of the Antike freese . . .’ (Barbaro, I Dieci Libri, Chatsworth, note on p. 163) and uses the same word for two of Palladio’s drawings (notes in I Quattro Libri, 10th flyleaf verso and Book II, p. 15).

45 Barbaro, I Dieci Libri, Chatsworth, notes on pp. 225-62. Except for three notes on p. 225 the annotations do not have the type of final ‘s’ described in note 13.

46 For the known and probable appearance of late Elizabethan playhouses see Yates, F., Theatre of the World (London, 1969), p. 93 ffGoogle Scholar, and Rowan, D. F., ‘The Elizabethan Theatre, 1576-1642’, Renaissance Drama, new series, 4 (1971)Google Scholar. I am very grateful to Dr Rowan for his advice on this subject.

47 Scholarship on these drawings is summarized in Harris, J. and Tait, A. A., Catalogue of the Drawings by Inigo Jones, John Webb and Isaac de Caus at Worcester College Oxford (Oxford, 1979), pp. 1415 Google Scholar. To this should be added the most comprehensive study of the drawings, by Orrell, J., ‘Inigo Jones at the Cockpit’, Shakespeare Survey, 30 (1977), 157-68Google Scholar.

48 I Quattro Libri, Worcester College, Book iv, p. 81 (top right-hand margin). The other examples are on pp. 77 and 79.

49 Ibid., Book iv, pp. 90 and 98.

50 Ibid., Book n, pp. 59, 64, and 78. Discussed by Tait, A. A., ‘InigoJones — architectural historian’, Burlington Magazine, 112 (1970), 235 Google Scholar.

51 See Orgel, S., ‘To make boards to speak: Inigo Jones’s stage and thejonsonian masque’, Renaissance Drama, new ser., 1 (1968), 121-52CrossRefGoogle Scholar.