| buy book | INIGO JONES AND THE CLASSICAL TRADITION By Christy Anderson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2006 Compared with Christopher Wren, Inigo Jones has been ill-served by historians and, until 2007, the standards were John Summerson’s excellent if now old-fashioned life of 1966 and the irreplaceable 1989 catalogue raisonnée of the architectural drawings by John Harris and Gordon Higgott. More up-to-date assessments have been scattered in the periodical literature. Last year was an annus mirabilis in Jones studies with the appearance of two books, this work and the late Giles Worsley’s magisterial reassessment of Jones in a European context. For his period, Jones is unique in Europe in the survival rate of his personal collections of books, prints and drawings (including more than a hundred by Palladio) and Anderson has examined them to see what light they shed on his design methods and the evolution of his intellectual approach to architecture. Jones was an inveterate annotator of his books, returning to them repeatedly as his ideas on design evolved. Anderson’s fascinating approach is to read them as a continuing debate between Jones and the authors, although, irritatingly, she gives no guidance as to when the annotations were made, despite telling us that they can be dated through the evolution of Jones’s handwriting. As only continental books from Jones’s library survive (French and Italian), Anderson also examines the English books that Jones must have known and does an excellent job setting him in the intellectual context of his day and demonstrating that he was an architect-scholar. She spreads her net wide, from John Dee on mathematics to Spenser’s Faerie Queene. The breadth of Jones’s reading must have been extraordinary; the surviving books from his library include philosophy and history, apart from the more obvious architecture, antiquities, military history and fortifications, mechanics and geometry. There is a huge amount of interest in this book, aimed at the specialist reader. The design is a let-down, unworthy of a university press. The use of American spellings is surprising, there are no colour illustrations and the rare photographs of actual buildings are fuzzy snaps mostly taken by the author. At £50, it looks poor value compared with Yale University Press’s £40 for Worsley’s book, which is handsomely designed and lavishly illustrated in colour. What is inexcusable is that Anderson chose to reproduce Jones’s drawings from decaying negatives between 50 and 100 years old (one is clearly from a broken glass negative), supplied from an academic institution. The vast majority of the drawings illustrated are in the RIBA and modern photographs (in colour!) of them exist. To get the real feel for Jones as a draughtsman and architect, this book has to be read alongside Worsley and the Harris & Higgott catalogue. CHARLES HIND |