INIGO JONES
floor is rusticated, the top floor smooth. A balustrade sets the
facade off against the sky. The windows are thoughtfully pro-
portioned. There is no ornament anywhere but the delicately
moulded cornices above the first-floor windows.
This was a principle with Inigo Jones. He wrote on Jan. 20,1614:
"Ye outward ornaments oft to be sollid, proporsionable according
to the rulles, masculine and unaffected". The character of the Queen's
House could not be better described. And Jones knew that in building
thus he was holding up an ideal not only in opposition to contem-
porary Britain but also to contemporary Rome, i.e. the Baroque.
"All thes composed ornaments", he added, "the which Proceed
out of ye aboundance of dessigners and wear brought in by Michill
Angell and his followers in my oppignion do not well in solid
Architecture/* Yet he did not despise ornament altogether. He uses
it inside the Queen's House and, with luxurious exuberance, in the
so-called double-cube room at Wilton House. Even there however
there is nothing crowded. The form of his wreaths and garlands of
flowers and fruit is compact. They fit into clear-cut panels, and
never overgrow the structural divisions of a room. Again, Jones was
fully aware of the contrast between his simple exteriors and his
rich interiors. He wrote: "Outwardly every wyse man carrieth a
graviti in Publicke Places, yet inwardly hath his imaginacy set on
fire, and sumtimes licentiously flying out, as nature hirself doeth
often times stravagandy", and demands the same attitude in a good
building. And once more the way in which he puts his observation
is personal to a degree inconceivable in an architect in England in
Elizabethan and Jacobean days. For Inigo Jones is the first English
architect in the modern sense. He achieved in this country what the
earliest artist-architects had achieved in Italy at the beginning of the
Renaissance. And as one is interested in Alberti or Leonardo da
Vinci as individuals, so the genius of Inigo Jones makes one deplore
over and over again how little is known of his personality.
Of Jones's other works—and those attributed to him with
some degree of certainty—only two more can be mentioned.
One is Lindsay House in Lincoln's Inn Fields, because with its rusti-
cated ground floor and its giant order of pilasters above, supporting
entablature and top balustrade, it is the prototype for a whole series
of representational English town houses down to the Royal Crescent
at Bath (p. 186) and Nash's Regent's Park terraces. The other is
the layout of Covent Garden with its tall houses, dignified and un-
E.A.—12 159