the restoration of that cathedral he made two capital faults. He first renewed the sides with very bad Gothic, and then added a Roman portico, magnificent and beautiful indeed, but which has no affinity with the ancient parts that remained, and made his own Gothic appear ten times heavier."[1]
The art of Inigo Jones has been thoughtlessly lauded in more recent times. "His special strength," says Mr. Bloomfield, his latest panegyrist, "lay in his thorough mastery of proportion, his contempt for mere prettiness, and the rare distinction of his style. His own theory of architecture was that, in his own words, "it should be solid, proportional according to the rules, masculine and unaffected."[2] Was Inigo Jones a master of proportion? Does he not in this declaration betray a fundamental misconception of the true meaning of proportion? Is any genuine work of art "proportional according to the rules," i.e. the mechanical formulas of Vitruvius or Palladio on which he professed to base his practice? And did Jones ever carry out in practice his avowed theory that architecture should be unaffected? Can an art be unaffected which is so frankly copied from a foreign style? I have characterized the spirit of much of the architecture of the Renaissance as theatrical; that of Inigo Jones is preeminently so, and it is significant that he was extensively employed, in his early career, in designing architectural backgrounds for the stage.
The artistic career of Sir Christopher Wren, the most justly famous architect of the belated English Renaissance, began after the Civil War. Inigo Jones had prepared the way for him, and a body of aristocratic dilettanti, ardently devoted to the neo-classic propaganda, had arisen. The artistic notions of these people are instructively set forth in the following passage from Parentalia:[3] "Towards the end of King James I's Reign, and in the Beginning of his Son's, Taste in Architecture made a bold step from Italy to England at once, and scarce staid a moment to visit France by the way. From the most profound Ignorance in Architecture, the most consummate Night
