BRITAIN AND FRANCE. l6TH TO l8TH CENTURY
*ourt at that period. He became soon the accepted theatrical designer
to the royal family. Plenty of drawings for masques exist. They
are brilliantly done, the costumes of that fantastic kind which the
Baroque connected with ancient history and mythology, the stage-
settings nearly all in the classical Italian style. Jones had, perhaps, been
in Italy about 1600, interested probably more in painting and archi-
tectural decoration than in architecture proper. Then, however, the
Prince of Wales made him his surveyor, i.e. architect, as did a short
time later the Queen, and, in 1613, the King. So he went back to
Italy, this time, we know from his sketch-books, to study Italian
buildings seriously. His ideal was Palladio: an edition of Palladio
annotated by Jones is preserved.
Looking back from the Queen's House (pi. ixxxm)—a villa in
the Italian sense, out at Greenwich—to Palladio's Palazzo Chierigati
(pi. LVH), the close connection of style is evident, though nothing
is copied. In fact we find nowhere in Jones's work mere imitation.
What he had learned from Palladio and the Roman architects of the
early i6th century, is to regard a building as a whole, organised
throughout—in plan and elevation—according to rational rules.
But the Queen's House has not the weight of die Roman Renais-
sance or Baroque palace. It was originally even less compact than
Palladio's country houses, for it was not a complete block, as it is
now, but consisted of two rectangles standing to the right and the
left of the main Dover Road and only connected with each other by a
bridge (the present centre room on die first floor), across the road—
a curious, if not unique, composition of a spatially most effective
openness. In contrast to this freedom in general plan, the strictest
symmetry governs the grouping of the rooms. Now in Elizabethan
country houses we find the decision already taken to tidy up
facades into more or less complete symmetry. One may even come
across blocked windows and similar contrivances to force into out-
ward symmetry what could not be made to match inside. For
wholly symmetrical plans were still rare by 1610, although the
trend towards them is unmistakable. In this Inigo Jones is the
logical successor to the Jacobeans. But if one takes his elevations,
th<5ir dignified plainness is in the strongest contrast to the Jacobean
animation by windows of varying sizes, bay windows, rounded
and polygonal, dormer windows, gables and high-pitched roofs.
The centre portion of the Queen's House with the loggia projects
slightly: that is the only movement of the wall surface. The ground
158