David Watkin

Courtly Architecture

Inigo Jones and the Classical Tradition

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Cambridge University Press 276pp £50 order from our bookshop

Inigo Jones and the European Classicist Tradition

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Yale University Press 220pp £40 order from our bookshop

By coincidence, two admirable monographs on Jones have appeared at the same time with almost identical titles. Christy Anderson’s is an academic study which began life as a dissertation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Not having had the benefit of Yale as a publisher, her book lacks the rich colour of Giles Worsley’s and is illustrated with ninety-eight black-and-white photographs reproduced in varying shades of grey. This is unfortunate with an architect whom she notes as the first in England to make architectural drawings of beauty and in colour. His buildings also incorporated polychromy – as at the Banqueting House, which was built of three stones in contrasting colours, all now replaced by dead white Portland stone. 

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