TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/052289/05228900.022

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 5.5 KB | 106 lines

                                                                                ART, Page 125

The Brio of a Great All-Rounder


A drawing show brings the genius of Inigo Jones to the U.S.

By Robert Hughes


    Tucked away in lower Manhattan, far off the museum track,
the nonprofit Drawing Center has been quietly at work since
1977. Along the way it has become one of the few necessary art
institutions to be born in the U.S. in the past 15 years.
Necessary because, unlike the muddle of private and semiprivate
vanity museums full of outsize contemporary art foisted on the
American public in the late '80s, the Drawing Center really does
stand for quality -- as against what is only spectacular or
"relevant." It has never done a less than interesting show. Its
new one, "Inigo Jones: Complete Architectural Drawings" (through
July 22), curated by the English art historian John Harris, is
one of its best.

    Inigo Jones, court architect and masquemaker to the
Stuarts, was undoubtedly a genius; but except by name he is not
a well-known genius in America, since he built nothing outside
England and no attempt, until now, has been made to gather a
full exhibition of his drawings. But he was the great English
all-rounder of the 17th century: designer, painter,
mathematician, engineer and antiquarian.

    His career was long. Not many Englishmen of his day lived
to push 80. Born in 1573, he grew up in Elizabethan England,
collaborated on masques with Ben Jonson and probably knew
Shakespeare. He lived on into the time of Cromwell and died in
1652. He cannot have been wholly sorry to leave a world that
had killed his King and friend, Charles I.

    Jones was the greatest royal architect England ever
produced. During his quarter-century of service as Surveyor of
the King's Works (from 1615 under James I and from 1625 to 1641
under Charles I), he acquired a Bernini-like authority. Through
the example of his most famous buildings, such as the Queen's
House in Greenwich and the Banqueting Hall in Whitehall --
which, with its ceiling paintings by Rubens, is one of the
grandest collaborations of talent in the 17th century -- Jones
guided English architecture out of its Elizabethan mannerism.
He led it into an Italian grandeur and amplitude, based on Roman
and Venetian models but with its own distinctive qualities. It
was, as he wrote himself, "sollid, proporsionable according to
the rulles, masculine and unaffected."

    Moreover, Jones was adaptable. When he was designing the
piazza of Covent Garden with its integrated church of St. Paul,
the Earl of Bedford (who was paying for it) told Jones he wanted
the church to be "not much better than a barn." "Well, then! You
shall have the handsomest barn in England," Jones answered, and
produced it. He never delegated a design or failed to transform
what he copied. He thought -- and drew -- in terms of large
volumes, generous spaces, exalted plainness relieved by lucid,
ingenious detailing. Later Georgian architects would owe him an
immense debt. He was the father of English classicism.

    Curiously enough, not much is known about his life. Jones
was a clothworker's son, and he began his career as a
journeyman painter. Quite early on, in his mid-20s, he went in
the Earl of Rutland's retinue through France and Germany, and
then to Italy, where he may have spent five years. How he
afforded that stay is a mystery; one theory holds that Jones,
who never married and may have been homosexual, was kept by one
or another of the powerful exquisites of the Elizabethan court,
the Earl of Essex or the Earl of Southampton. But whatever his
arrangements, his taste for European travel and study would
change the face of English culture. As curator Harris points
out, Jones was the first in what would be a long line of English
intellectual travelers, bringing lessons back from the
Continent.

    Everything Jones drew breathes an air of amplitude and
sophistication quite new to English art. This includes his
stage designs, for he revolutionized the English theater by
giving it, for the first time, the elaborate scenery with
backdrops, revolving screens and sliding flats that had been
developed in Italy. The confidence of his fantasies was
striking, and even a costume sketch like the "fiery spirit," a
torchbearer for one of his court masques, shakes its red plumage
with Italianate brio. And though his inventiveness is best seen
in the stone and brick of his finished buildings, one marvels
at its evidence in the drawings -- the variations he would run,
for instance, on designs for ceremonial doorways, now grave and
severe, now bursting with free uses for acquired Italian motifs.

    Drawing mattered a great deal to Jones, more, probably,
than it had to any English architect before him. He was not
content to direct work with rough perspective sketches and leave
details to the inherited skills of artisans. He had collected
some 250 sheets by his paragon, Palladio. From these he learned
the conventions of drawing to a fixed scale, combining them with
a fluent pen-and-wash technique to give a truthful, not just
impressionistic, account of the future building. One sees his
formidable skill as both a technical and a pictorial draftsman
growing right through the show. "Altro diletto che Imparar non
trouo," he scribbled in his notebook in Rome in 1614: "I find
no other pleasure than learning." That pleasure stayed with him
throughout his life and is almost palpable in the drawings he
left behind.