Architecture, Images and Image-Making under the Stuarts

well good evening ladies and gentlemen in my lectures this year I'm looking closely at the interaction between people art and architecture and this is not only just about buildings it's not only about art or only about people it's about trying to understand how the Tudors and Stuart's thought about what we call art would it meant to them and what it can teach us about the society in which they lived in my last lecture when I was talking about the Tudors I defined art as man-made objects that weren't purely utilitarian things that were made to please the eye as well as to serve the hand nobody in 16th century England would have thought of art as we do today it was not a category of activity undertaken by artists there was no morality attached to it making things was a craft and one judged by four criteria that today we wouldn't necessarily recognize as those which we'd use to define an artwork and just very quickly to summarize from last time these four criteria that identified as being the keys to identifying art in the 16th century were costliness probably the first thing that people took into account in any sort of aesthetic appreciation a craftsmanship which at the time was described as cunning the skill with which something was made and then there was novelty a much prized characteristic then as indeed it is now and finally there was placement the relationship that one thing had with another and 16th century writers who commented on what they saw judged everything against cost cunning novelty and placement and in this world there was an appreciation of easel painting but it was one of the lesser areas of artistic production a man called Richard Haydock wrote all translated an Italian duties on painting which was called a tract containing the arts of curious painting carving and building and it was published in 1598 and in it he explained the following and I'll just quote from it here the art of painting never attained to any great perfection amongst us save in some very few years of late yet it is much decayed amongst the ordinary sort for the ancient mediocrity for these two causes first the buyer refuseth to bestow any great price on a piece or work because he thinks it not well done and the workman's answer is that he therefore neither euzeth all his skill nor taketh all the pains that he could because he knoweth beforehand the slenderness of his reward so in other words we're not going to do good paintings because people don't pay us enough for it and the reason the people don't because we know that they don't not gonna pay us enough for it we're not going to do good paintings so in fact there were very few Elizabethans who rated easel painting highly enough to attempt to commissioned or to buy paintings from abroad even if they could the best-known of these Elizabethan collectors and they were very few of them was Robert Dudley and the 1st Earl of Leicester who we know commissioned and purchased both French and Italian paintings we can't trace many of these now but we still have this wonderful sketch sketch made of him portrait of him by Federico zucchero in 1575 but if we were to compare the state of elite culture in England in 1575 and only really 50 years later in 1625 we would see a very significant difference in the circle around the monarch painting was no longer just appreciated as a craft but it was regarded as being much closer to what we now today would call art and tonight what I want to do is focus on that change I want to ask why and how it happened and whether it was important and what its long-term effects were medieval Christendom was an unbroken cultural environment a place where cultural currents flowed without interruption or schism both Henry the seventh and Henry the eighth were very welcome to welcome to their courts artists and craftsmen from all over Europe Henry the seventh of course commissioned his tomb which you see here in Westminster Abbey from Pietro to Ruggiano and Henry the eighth employed Nicholas pellon of Modena to oversee the decoration of his new house at Nonsuch even so foreign observers were scathing about the eclectic mix of medieval ancient and contemporary design motifs that defined English visual culture in the early 16th century Henry the eighth's break from Rome and the severing of cultural ties from Italy and the Roman Catholic powers of Europe increased the inward-looking tendencies of English artistic production now I'm not one of those historians who judge this and claim that England was backward or behind other European countries in its cultural outlook but the fact was and no one can deny this that England was different England also suffered periodic outbursts of iconoclasm also both in Henry the eighth's reign and also in the reign of Edward the sixth the consequence of this was that three generations of wealthy educated sophisticated Englishmen would not travel abroad they would not see firsthand the arced and architecture of the continent there was some who went the universities of Catholic Europe but they were few and arguably English travelers were more Millia with the new world than the old world of continental Europe however in 1629 peter paul rubens you see his wonderful self-portrait here in the Royal Collection arrived in London by the state he was already one of the greatest painters in Europe who was extremely well traveled and had seen all the great art collections of Italy of France and of Spain but London was new to him and there he'd heard the great aristocratic houses of the capital and of course the royal palaces in a private letter written to his friend Pierre du P he remarked upon and I quote the incredible quantity of excellent pictures statues and ancient inscriptions which are to be found in this Court the next day he wrote to another friend elaborating on this observation and I quote in this island I find none of the crudeness which one might expect from a place so remote from Italian elegance and I must admit when it comes to fine pictures by the hands of first-class masters I have never seen such a large number in one place as in the Royal Palace and in the gallery of the lake Duke of Buckingham the earl of arundel possesses a countless number of ancient statues and Greek and Latin inscriptions so what had changed Rubens saw in London something that would have been unthinkable 50 and even 30 years before well the Treaty of London signed in August 1604 ended a state of war with Spain that had dominated English politics for almost twenty years Protestant England surrounded by its Roman Catholic neighbors had been very much an island all on its own Spanish territories spread more or less across the whole of Europe including most of Italy and although France was independent travel abroad for most Englishmen was extremely dangerous and in advised many luxury goods that were common in Paris and Madrid struggled to make their way into the port of London and in many ways England was cut off from most of the cultural currents of contemporary Europe the men who you see in this painting were those who signed the peace treaty in August 1604 the painting is a bit made-up they weren't all in the room ever at the same time but the painting records the appearance of the room in Somerset House where the treaty was signed and on the left-hand side you see the Hispano delegation and on the right-hand side you see the English commissioners and having signed the treaty in London it was then ratified by King Philip the third of Spain in the presence of Charles Howard the Earl of Nottingham and around 500 English courtiers this ratification embassy that went to Spain was the most splendid and expensive appearance of the English Court on the continent for nearly a century the last time anything any anything like it had ever been seen was for the field at the cloth of gold in 15-20 Nottingham who appears second-to-last on the right hand side was the man who as Lord Howard of Effingham had 17 years before vanished the spanked Spanish Armada and then there he was in Spain ratifying the peace treaty and this trip by these 500 English courtiers was a visit to the center of the European world the capital of Europe's largest and most powerful empire and as the huge English wagon train of 800 mules made their way across the Sun scorched landscape they were exposed to an almost completely novel set of cultural influences so this treaty the Treaty of London triggered a hue huge exodus of the English aristocracy so much so that James the first became alarmed and registered his disapproval in the Privy Council instructions were issued to English ambassador's across Europe to keep tabs on English travelers but these were really completely meaningless as Italy was now teaming with the chrome creme de la creme of English society in fact when Henry Peacham wrote his book the complete gentleman in 1622 it was accepted that to be a gentleman you needed to travel and you can see here chapter 19 of travel it was a requirement for your your status as a gentleman to have traveled Europe now of course Elizabethans had traveled to the continent but as I've already said only with extreme difficulty and often actually literally in disguise one of the best travelled and most important of the first generation of Jacobean travelers was Henry Wotton you see here who through his extensive knowledge of Germany Italy and Switzerland and his command of several European languages was in 1604 appointed by James the first as the first resident ambassador in Venice since 1550 and he was one of the first Englishman to start collecting Italian paintings with any source of seriousness and as other English travelers arrived in Venice and stopped off and stayed in his Palazzo they could see his collection and they could make an appointment for them themselves to be painted by Venetian painters Sir John Feeney who you see here who was later to be Charles the First's Master of Ceremonies was one of those who went to wattens embassy in Venice and this is his portrait that he had done by Domenico Tintoretto in 1610 211 and a couple of years later fini sent from Italy to Lord Salisbury Parma Javanese painting she's slightly gloomy here Prometheus chained to the caucuses and this brought to England the richness and vibrancy of Venetian painting that had last been seen in England in the reign of Queen Mary the first and it marked the beginning of a love affair between the English and Venetian painting and architecture fini and indeed wotton were gentlemen not great aristocrats and it was England's senior peer Thomas Howard the earl of arundel who became the expert in Venetian painting and the arbiter of court taste this is his portrait after after Rubens now arendelle whose grandfather and father were arrested for treason and who were respectively executed and died in prison enjoyed a family rehabilitation in the early years of James the first reign and he was able to enter Prince Henry of Wales's court circle where he began to rub shoulders with the other young aristocrats who were becoming fascinated by Italian culture in the summer of 1612 arendelle gained permission to go abroad and it was then that he met Peter Paul Rubens then already acknowledged as the greatest painter in northern Europe and he painted this portrait he also bought from Rubens a number of other canvases which were to become the first paintings by Rubens to enter England very interestingly he insisted that Rubens sign these canvases very clearly and very obviously on the front something that Rubens didn't normally do because he was determined that people back in England knew that the painting really was by Rubens after returning to England briefly after the premiere and tragic death of Prince Henry Aaron will set off again on his travels this time he traveled to Italy and became not only enamored of Venetian painting inevitably but also with the whole breadth of Italian art architecture and decorative arts from the ancient to the modern he was a wealthy man he bought for Asia Slee his collection didn't only embrace paintings but he was actually active in sponsoring the digging up of the forum in Rome to find antique sculptures for his collection now we don't fully know what arendelle returned to England with when he eventually returned to his mansion arendelle house on the Strand but we do know that he started to reconstruct his house as a setting for his collections and in particular he built this two-story gallery you see here which became a home for many of his paintings and his and his sculptures but this is not the only point to make about arendelle because there was a fundamental difference between him and the other great early Stuart collectors patrons like the Duke of Buckingham who I'll come on to in just a moment were big collectors but they were following the tide of fashion and not leading it they bought art as the accoutrement to wealth and greatness and a reflection of their magnificence arendelle on the other hand was the first to buy through scholarly interest in cultural artifacts he'd buy broken sculptures because he regarded them as important he collected preliminary sketches and rough notes by painters in fact he probably amassed the greatest collection of old master drawings ever known including 600 by Leonardo da Vinci alone he was also fascinated by inscriptions and ancient manuscripts he collected gemstones medals and amassed one of the great libraries of the age so he studied ancient and modern art with a with an academic eye and a passion to improve people's tastes and this is why he obtained marbles like this one and some of these architectural marbles are in this very museum that we're in tonight the majority of the marbles including the 100 shown here are in the Ashmolean museum and he bought these sections of ancient buildings associated with sites mentioned in classical literature because he wanted them to be used by painters and engravers in their work by scholars who perhaps wouldn't be able to travel abroad and in fact many important figures flocked to his house arendelle house to look at these collections to learn from them including Rubens and this painting here the continents of skippy Oh in Christ Church Oxford by Van Dyck you can see in the bottom here can you see there is that very piece of sculpture that van Dyck drew inspiration on from arendelle's collection and it was almost certainly arendelle who introduced Van Dyck to England and equally importantly I think brought both Wenceslas Haller and Lucas Foster Minh to London where they began to record his collection through etchings an entirely pioneering venture for its time so when arendelle died he had over 600 paintings including 40 attributed to Holbein 37 to Titian 26 to parmigianino 17 to to dura and 13 each to Raphael and Bruegel not a bad haul well sometime around 1616 arendelle commissioned daniel mittens to paint his portrait and that of his wife at arendelle house and these are really remarkable images arendelle and holds a wand he sort of sits like a sir Field Marshal with a baton about to command his army of marbles out into the garden and his wife sits in front of another gallery which is full of paintings these pictures may or may not represent exactly what the gallery look like but what it absolutely does represent is the is is the pride which they felt in this extraordinary and collection now as I've already explained arendelle was closely associated with James the first eldest son Prince Henry of Wales and it's very important to understand that this young man was seized with the same passions as arendelle especially for Venetian painting he was a based at st. James's Palace and there he created a setting for his collections this is my I just apologized for this drawing this is my sketch plan reconstruction of the plan of --scent James's Palace and which I want you to look at is this huge three-sided gallery at the top you might be able to see my scribbled handwriting st. Kraus gallery that was a hundred and twenty five feet long there was the privy gallery at the top of there and there was his other gallery there each of those were a hundred feet long and this gallery a Tudor gallery that had been painted and hung in tapestry was paneled by Henry Prince of Wales to create a picture gallery and into this gallery he started to put the first Great and collection of Italian paintings in in England the gallery was conceived in conjunction with a library the sort of lump in the top left-hand corner there that is that's where the library was is his pretty kitchen on it but above that there was a library and there was also and we don't quite know where this was there was also a cabinet into which and he put sculptures coins medals manuscripts and books the first evidence we have Prince Henry buying paintings is in January 16 11 at exactly the time his gallery was completed and soon after that it was public knowledge that the prince had set out to create a great gallery of painting same month the Venetian ambassador wrote that the prince my quote was paying special attention to the adorning of a most beautiful gallery of very fine pictures both ancient and modern a few months later with work still in progress the grand duke of tuscany x' representative in london was given a tour and was asked to send more works of art for the princes and gallery but later on that same year he was presented with two great paintings by the states-general of the dutch republic as a diplomatic gift and these were two very large canvases by Hendrick vroom and you see one of them here it's now in the Rijksmuseum depicting a Battle of Gibraltar it's very suitable by painting I think to give to a teenage boy versed in battle and gore and blood and there it was and a great sea peace and these were taken to the gallery and in fact Henry was so taken by these paintings he was given that he commissioned a whole series more paintings of of sea battles to go with them in June 1611 another huge shipment of paintings arrived this time from the from the Florentine ambassador and as the paintings were unpacked Henry asked the ambassador and I quote about the decoration of their Highnesses galleries if there were subject pictures and what kind of statues and he confirmed his intention of using the foresaid pictures for his new gallery and then soon after a big shipment of paintings from Venice arrived for which the prince paid over 400 pounds we can identify quite a lot of the paintings that were hanging in this gallery although we don't have a comprehensive list but I think the important thing rather than concentrating on individual paintings was that quickly and decisively Prince Henry created what was at the time the largest picture gallery in England over 325 foot long and hung with perhaps as many as 50 paintings at only 18 years of age though this princely progeny architectural patron artistic connoisseur succumbed to what was probably typhoid and after pretty ghastly illness made even more ghastly by the ministrations of his doctors he died at st. James's Palace in November 1612 now while arendelle great close friend of Prince Henry was the most sophisticated and the most influential of all the great collectors of the Jacobean and Caroline age he wasn't the only one he was rivaled and not only in the sense of artistic patronage by George Villiers the Duke of Buckingham who you see here also painted by Rubens he of course was the great favorite of King James and later of King Charles Buckingham rose from virtually nothing to be the King's right-hand man and the most powerful Englishman outside the royal family and as he rose to power and wealth he began to establish a household and an establishment suitable to his power he brought into his service a Hyuga no refugee about the jogger ba who was not only multilingual but he was a painter he was an architect he was a connoisseur and gabi a the came the jukes aesthetic tutor and if you like his sort of personal shopper traveling Europe hunting out the most valuable works of art and antiquities for the Duke ultimately the Dukes picture gallery was one of the greatest in Europe the Hall of his London house was dominated by two enormous canvases by Titian his great chamber was hung with mostly paintings by Rubens and his gallery had twelve paintings by Varanasi but unlike arendelle for whom his collection expressed a sort of world picture Buckingham's extraordinary collections were really more of a social ornament an expression of his worldly glory he wasn't interested in what he called deformed or misshapen stone like the earl of arundel but he wanted pure and perfect pieces he didn't read books despite collecting them and he kept his eye on the prestige that his collection brought him that of course isn't to say that he didn't like understand or appreciate his paintings only to make the point that they were the setting of his life rather than an integral part of it Buckingham though was crucial to the development of Charles the firsts aesthetic development because it was he who encouraged and accompanied Charles the first on his madcap trip to Spain in 1623 the story I'm sure is familiar to most people here today but Buckingham and Charles essentially galloped across Europe to arrive in Madrid by surprise - rip win the hand of the infanta maria anna the sister of philip the fourth of spain charles was away on this trip for eight months and it was his only experience of the world outside england and scotland and on that trip charles visited all the may palaces of the Spanish crown and was to examine the treasures that they held in the escorial alone hung more than a thousand paintings it kept him pretty busy I suspect Charles on this trip fell for Titian whose paintings were particularly numerous as Titian had worked intensively for the Emperor Charles the fifth and later on for King Philip the second so Charles bought his first pictures independently on the open market at public sales in Madrid and amongst others he purchased partitions woman with a fur coat now in the consistory Museum and the conjugal allegory here which is now in the Louvre now as we all know the trip to Spain to managed to marry the Infanta was a failure in diplomatic terms but it was absolutely fundamental in forming Charles's taste in painting so much so that even while Prince of Wales Rubens was to say of him that he was the greatest amateur expert in painting in the world there's a wonderful insight into Charles the first connoisseurship in a description of the king receiving a consignment of paintings from the Vatican and I'm get equated to you now as soon as the king was told by the Queen that she had received the pictures he rushed so to see them calling to him Jones that his Inigo Jones the Earl of Holland and the Earl of Pembroke the very moment Jones saw the pictures he greatly approved of them and in order to study them better threw off his coat put on his eyeglass took a candle and together with the King began to examine them very closely admiring them very much the next day Charles the first took the the labels off all the paintings so that Inigo Jones couldn't see who they were by and tested him painting by paint him to see whether he could identify the artists this is a man who's really obsessed with his art collection but of course the Kings reputation as a collector and connoisseur was to be sealed forever by the stunning purchase of a huge collection of outstanding paintings from Ferdinando Gonzaga the Duke of Mantua these started to arrive in London in the late 1620s transforming the size and the quality of the King's collection and here you see one of the triumphs of Caesar by Mantinea hanging at Hampton Court and indeed it was to Hampton Court that Charles the first sent them when they arrived in England so they're and although this they're put in an orange renow and they were originally hanging in the state apartments now under James the first the collecting activities of English erekt aristocracy was barely noticeable in the European art market but in the 1620s and in the 1630s the English were amongst the first division of collectors in Europe they weren't alone they were competing the French the Dutch Spanish and of course the Italians themselves and prices as a consequence spiraled and this meant that collecting art was a sport that was confined to a very small number of super-rich sort of millionaires and it really meant that in England Charles the first and Henrietta Maria the Earl of Arundel the Duke of Buckingham and after the Duke of Buckingham assassination James Duke of Hamilton really were the the the very small number of people very tightly knit who were engaged in this collecting activity this circle of collectors were very slightly widened in the 1630s after Charles the first successfully enticed some foreign painters sculptors and designers to come and work for him in England people like Hubert lesser the sculptor Rubens and Van Dyck mittens haunt Horst and Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi and these court painters of course didn't only paint Charles the first Henrietta Maria and their family but also painted other courtiers - and of these Van Dyck of course stands out for special mention here and I think it's partially because of the brilliance of Van Dyke's painting of Charles the first his family and his courtiers that we feel that we somehow know the Caroline court we get a feeling of its elegance its sophistication its cultural enlightenment and you only have to look at these two tremendous paintings of Henrietta Maria and and the King to almost feel that you're sucked into his court you feel as if you're almost there you almost can hear that the rustle of the silk of the Queen's dress as as Geum stands there and although Van Dyck powerfully conveys this sort of image of the caroline court there was no such chronicler of the court of james the first and i think what this does is it gives us a distorted view both of the sophistication of charles the first its court and of the perhaps the lack of it in sin King James's court but I think unquestionably James's court was far more open-minded and intellectually vibrant than the court of Charles the first we mustn't forget that it was at James's court that Shakespeare played where Ben Johnson and Beaumont and Fletcher worked Francis Bacon an accession exceptional philosopher and historian brilliant theologians like John Donne and Lord Lancelot Andrews and of course there was Inigo Jones the all-round architect designer and connoisseur of the visual arts and at the center all of all this was James the first himself an intensely bookish man fascinated by philosophy by theology and history a man so much more at home with his books than with the chlorine and fawning court that he had inherited from Elizabeth the first so James's court was really I think we have to look at it as a center of new thought and of innovation Charles's court was won or became one of conformity and cultivation Charles wasn't his father he didn't share his open-minded intellectual curiosity and the Charles caught culture became much more inward-looking in fact it became very self-centered and I shall go and explain this in a few minutes it was that his court was ordered it was dignified it was restrained at Charles the first caught manners and etiquette counted for everything and as you know at James the first court it counted for very little this very important observation that the difference between these two courts leads us on to the big question that I wanted to pose this evening and that is one that we can ask only being blessed with hindsight throughout this period with the king and the small group of his friends spending huge sums of money and a lot of time and collecting art what did everybody else think what do they think was going on well you know I suspect the answer is that people didn't think at all they didn't even know what was going on the works of art parshas purchased by Charles the first and his close friends were extremely expensive and well out of reach of almost everyone else all the best paintings were produced by foreigners there was hardly a native market for painting at all most of the most sought-after works of art were imported and you could only import such things if they were guaranteed not to be for sale because the craft guild the painters stainless guild had a stranglehold over the sale of paintings there were no auctions unless they were authorized and so private sales were the only way forward in terms of consuming contemporary or antique continental art but surely you will say those great galleries at some Jameses and even more so at white all were so full of paintings of the highest quality surely the English and foreigners alike was shown around by the king and his courtiers are noticed and commented on these great collections well the answer is they didn't very much when people did comment on the Royal Collection it was the tapestries that they were enthusiastic about the rich hangings that covered the walls of the outer rooms the paintings if you go through the primary sources barely get a mention and there's a very important reason why this is so now I'm showing you here and I'm afraid I've deliberately put it on the side because I wanted to be big as possible this is my reconstruction of the first floor privy gallery range at Whitehall palace as it was in around 1635 in 1639 the King's surveyor of pictures Abraham Van de dort made a detailed inventory of all the paintings hanging in this range and putting the inventory and the plan together we can get a unique unique insight into the way that the King showed his collections and from this we get a crucial insight and I'm going to try and manage this without them without the laser beam so over here is James's Park this is King Street and this is the gatehouse here that carried this gallery over the public highway this is a banqueting house this is the privet gallery range for the garden on one side and here are the outer rooms of the Royal Palace now court etiquette very carefully restricted the number of people who were allowed into the Kings Privy lodgings so if you are an ordinary courtier you might be able to ascend the staircase that you can see there on the far right instant James's Park and walk along the bear gallery over the gatehouse along the privy gallery and enter the outer rooms but you wouldn't have access to these rooms you can see on the garden side those rooms in the gardens side were the Kings Privy lodgings and they were absolutely restricted to members of the royal family and gentlemen of the Privy chamber in other words an extremely small number of people now that privy gallery the sort of public thoroughfare through this range was hung according to abraham van der doors ended inventory with Tudor and Jacobean portraits 73 of them in all and in the inventory he describes them as White Hall pieces in other words works of art that Charles the first had inherited they were already hanging at Whitehall when he came to the throne so if you were a court here walking through the privy gallery what you would see every day is the sort of classic Tudor and Elizabethan array of dynastic portraits along that gallery however if you wanted to see some of the King's personal collection you would need to get access to the matted gallery or the privy lodgings now the matted gallery is this thing sticking up here a long gallery which is the King's private gallery to which he controls access and the Privy lodgings are all those little rooms that you see I've identified at the top of the slide and there so in the mattad gallery you would see for instance Van Dyke's great piece that monumental family portrait of the king and his family actually set at Whitehall itself and it was hung in the company of Italian and northern paint paintings you wouldn't have seen this if you were a normal ordinary courtier you just wouldn't have got access to it so the Privy lodgings those rooms along the top there were restricted to an extremely small number of people invited in by the sovereign and in here was the King's Own collection the first privy lodging that's the room first room there next door to the staircase contained a large number of canvases by Titian including this one the allocution of Alfonso de Evolis now in the prado and the following two rooms which you see beyond that the second privy lodging room the third privy lodging room were full of paintings by Raphael Carrillo and others the paintings in the Kings bedchamber right on the far left here and by the the gallery here were much more personal so very much the ones that he wanted to wake up to there was a painting from the circle of Raphael Virgin child absolutely beautiful thing and perhaps not surprisingly Van Dyke's absolutely gorgeous painting of the Kings five eldest children hanging in his bedroom the largest room in the privy gallery that was the was the cabinet can you see it there right in the middle that was the King's cabinet room and this was not only full of paintings but it contained his bronzes it contains and books medals drawings other works of art 80 paintings in all including works by Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci and into the ceiling of the Cabinet Room he set Rubens's own sketch for the ceiling of the banqueting house so the facts ladies and gentlemen are these very very few people got to see the great works of art collected by the King Buckingham and arendelle access was granted to a tiny tiny select circle and so appreciation of these sorts of paintings were was confined to a tiny minority no wonder they were hardly mentioned by visitors to the English Court because quite simply they were invisible to everyone in fact the only exposure that people at white all had to any great contemporary painting was in the banqueting house now those of you who are regular tenders of my lectures will know that I've recently spoken about Rubens and you can look up my Rubens lecture on the Gresham College website but I'm very briefly going to return to the banqueting house because I want to make some very slightly different points banqueting house of course built designed by Inigo Jones the man who perfectly bridged the courts of James the first and Charles the first his work covered a huge span of activity he was a theatrical impresario a designer of court masks but in the context of this evening I want to consider him as an architect because as Charles the first brought contemporary painting to the fore so James the force for a first brought architecture the architecture of northern Italy to London in the form of the banqueting house now of course Inigo Jones you see painted by Van Dyck here was a European he travelled more extensively across Europe than perhaps any other Englishman of his age and his tours across Europe weren't just idle tourism they were study tours and when he visited places he examined as many buildings and paintings and sculptures as he could he made notes he made sketches he bought books he bought prints and he became in Floyd by James the first wife the Danish Queen Anna as a stage designer and a decorator in 1604 and in 1610 he was appointed as severe to Henry Prince of Wales and only five years later hi in royal favour he won the top architectural job becoming surveyor of the works to James the first as we all know Inigo Jones was a great admirer of Venetian architects in particular Andrea Palladio and Vincenzo scamozzi in 1570 Palladio had of course published his four books of architecture a mixture of studies of ancient Roman buildings and some designs of his own and Jones's copy of this book is full of notes shown he was determined to master the system of the orders and not just their use as cladding now actually most of Inigo Jones's work for the crown was the repair of existing medieval and Tudor structures but there were three new Commission's the banqueting house Whitehall some Paul's Cathedral and the Covent Garden Piazza the only one of course that survives in any meaningful sense is the banqueting house which you see here in the background of a painting of James the first a great presence chamber to celebrate the Stuart dynasty completed in 1621 on the principal thoroughfare between at the city and Westminster and in this building he skillfully uses and classic classical precedent to create a building the likes of which hadn't been seen in England before but I think equally important arguably I mean even more important was his remodelling of old st. Paul's Cathedral in 1632 242 10 years of work and here he was responsible for our ek Singh ceps and the knave in Portland stone wreath penetrating them with his round-headed in these circular windows and using the Romanesque buttresses to create a sort of mad Tuscan order and you can see all that this bit he doesn't touch but you can see that here this modification that the window heads and everything the classs ization of this ancient building and of course at the West End he constructs this gigantic and Corinthian portico based on Palladio's reconstruction of the Temple of Venus and Rome and this is a sort of great Royal vestibule to the - to the Cathedral had Inigo Jones gone on as he had intended to to wreak a s-- the crossing Tower and had the cathedral been spared the great fire and the Blitz it would have been a remarkable and very influential building but history as we know was not kind to this work and everything there was really obscured and destroyed within a relatively few number of years but despite their prominence neither aunts and Paul's nor the banqueting house became widely imitated models and Jones's other architectural commissions were either in the private precincts of royal palaces like the Queen's House of Greenwich completed in 1635 or at quite a distance from London like the Prince of Wales's house in a new market which was completed in 1621 and as and has been demolished most contemporaries just didn't understand the subtleties of Jones's work and certainly didn't perceive his buildings as inherently superior to others being built at the time and as a result in his lifetime his influence was extremely limited much more typical of the interest shown in classical precedent was the book written by Sir Henry Wotton and the former and to Venice who I started this lecture I'm talking about the elements of architecture which he published in 1624 was a small practical and uh Nilla strated manual of architectural design quite unlike Jones Wotton was almost deliberately non-technical anti-intellectual just providing simple rules for using the classical orders correctly perhaps an expression of just how remote and intellectual the architecture of Jones was is the occasion when Simmons dues had to rise in Parliament and ask precisely who was English in ego Jones and in 1641 when Inigo Jones who was condemned by Parliament it wasn't for his architecture it wasn't for his masks it wasn't even for building Roman Catholic chapels but he was condemned for illegally pulling down Sant Gregory's Church near San Paul's Cathedral and for bullying the parishioners as he did so Jones's architecture like the Kings taste in paintings was an obscure curiosity nurtured by an introverted and out of touch moniker nor can we see I think the Kings collecting mania as one of the activities that lent led to the financial crises that set the scene for the civil war if you look at all the disbursements of jury calculate you can add them all up in the National Archives made by the royal household between 1625 and 1630 you can work out exactly how much he spent on works of art so the King spent twenty three thousand and thirty pounds on tapestry 7063 pounds on new paintings three thousand pounds for the banqueting house ceiling and four thousand five hundred and thirty pounds for statues this is really not very much when you consider the total annual household budget the king of quarter of a million pounds or if you consider that this fabulous ship taking the wonderful painting in the National Maritime Museum the sovereign of the Seas the most expensive warship built to that date cost sixty five thousand pounds more than all the works of art built bought by the king in his entire reign and in fact James the first was more extravagant at court than his son I mean James spent a hundred thousand pounds alone just on the wedding of Princess Elizabeth so let's see if we can tie this up and fathom out some conclusions in 1603 a genuinely new era opened in the history of British taste and patronage the opening up of Europe after the end of prolonged war with Spain re-established artistic links with Italy a small group of English aristocrats became obsessed with the art and architecture of Venice in particular and began to amass collections of paintings and sculpture and other works of art to be in the club you had to be a millionaire and so the club was very small it was also very introverted eronel Buckingham Sutherland the King and Queen and their advisors like James and Wotton looked in words to the cabinets to the closets to the galleries full of art and very few outside a Charmed Circle had any idea what was going on inside the only glimpse everyone else got was of the banqueting house ceiling an epic work accessible to more or less anyone who wanted to see it but both the ceiling and the architecture of the building in which it was set were considered the products of a minority interest of a court bound up in its own concerns it's not really very surprising that Parliament resolved to execute the king outside the banqueting house rather than on Tower Hill it was the end of a king who was intransigent and out of touch outside a building which in so many respects represented the alienation between governor and governed so in my next lecture we will be moving on to the later 17th century and we will see how the art market in England was created how the appreciation of painting spread outside the confines of Whitehall to adorn country houses up and down the land but for this next installment ladies and gentlemen I'm afraid you're going to have to wait until April the 3rd thank you very much [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Gresham College

Views: 9,113

Keywords: Gresham, Gresham College, Education, Lecture, Public, London, Debate, Academia, Knowledge, built environment, simon thurley, architecture, history, english history, image making, stuarts, English Royalty, art, art collectors

Id: UZel1VDup_Q

Length: 56min 15sec (3375 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 11 2019