The Brio of a Great All-Rounder

By ROBERT HUGHES

Tucked away in lower Manhattan, far off the museum track, the nonprofit Drawing Center has been quietly at work since 1977. Along the way it has become one of the few necessary art institutions to be born in the U.S. in the past 15 years. Necessary because, unlike the muddle of private and semiprivate vanity museums full of outsize contemporary art foisted on the American public in the late '80s, the Drawing Center really does stand for quality -- as against what is only spectacular or "relevant." It has never done a less than interesting show. Its new one, "Inigo Jones: Complete Architectural Drawings" (through July 22), curated by the English art historian John Harris, is one of its best.

Inigo Jones, court architect and masquemaker to the Stuarts, was undoubtedly a genius; but except by name he is not a well-known genius in America, since he built nothing outside England and no attempt, until now, has been made to gather a full exhibition of his drawings. But he was the great English all- rounder of the 17th century: designer, painter, mathematician, engineer and antiquarian.

His career was long. Not many Englishmen of his day lived to push 80. Born in 1573, he grew up in Elizabethan England, collaborated on masques with Ben Jonson and probably knew Shakespeare. He lived on into the time of Cromwell and died in 1652. He cannot have been wholly sorry to leave a world that had killed his King and friend, Charles I.

Jones was the greatest royal architect England ever produced. During his quarter-century of service as Surveyor of the King's Works (from 1615 under James I and from 1625 to 1641 under Charles I), he acquired a Bernini-like authority. Through the example of his most famous buildings, such as the Queen's House in Greenwich and the Banqueting Hall in Whitehall -- which, with its ceiling paintings by Rubens, is one of the grandest collaborations of talent in the 17th century -- Jones guided English architecture out of its Elizabethan mannerism. He led it into an Italian grandeur and amplitude, based on Roman and Venetian models but with its own distinctive qualities. It was, as he wrote himself, "sollid, proporsionable according to the rulles, masculine and unaffected."

Moreover, Jones was adaptable. When he was designing the piazza of Covent Garden with its integrated church of St. Paul, the Earl of Bedford (who was paying for it) told Jones he wanted the church to be "not much better than a barn." "Well, then! You shall have the handsomest barn in England," Jones answered, and produced it. He never delegated a design or failed to transform what he copied. He thought -- and drew -- in terms of large volumes, generous spaces, exalted plainness relieved by lucid, ingenious detailing. Later Georgian architects would owe him an immense debt. He was the father of English classicism.

Curiously enough, not much is known about his life. Jones was a clothworker's son, and he began his career as a journeyman painter. Quite early on, in his mid-20s, he went in the Earl of Rutland's retinue through France and Germany, and then to Italy, where he may have spent five years. How he afforded that stay is a mystery; one theory holds that Jones, who never married and may have been homosexual, was kept by one or another of the powerful exquisites of the Elizabethan court, the Earl of Essex or the Earl of Southampton. But whatever his arrangements, his taste for European travel and study would change the face of English culture. As curator Harris points out, Jones was the first in what would be a long line of English intellectual travelers, bringing lessons back from the Continent.

Everything Jones drew breathes an air of amplitude and sophistication quite new to English art. This includes his stage designs, for he revolutionized the English theater by giving it, for the first time, the elaborate scenery with backdrops, revolving screens and sliding flats that had been developed in Italy. The confidence of his fantasies was striking, and even a costume sketch like the "fiery spirit," a torchbearer for one of his court masques, shakes its red plumage with Italianate brio. And though his inventiveness is best seen in the stone and brick of his finished buildings, one marvels at its evidence in the drawings -- the variations he would run, for instance, on designs for ceremonial doorways, now grave and severe, now bursting with free uses for acquired Italian motifs.

Drawing mattered a great deal to Jones, more, probably, than it had to any English architect before him. He was not content to direct work with rough perspective sketches and leave details to the inherited skills of artisans. He had collected some 250 sheets by his paragon, Palladio. From these he learned the conventions of drawing to a fixed scale, combining them with a fluent pen- and-wash technique to give a truthful, not just impressionistic, account of the future building. One sees his formidable skill as both a technical and a pictorial draftsman growing right through the show. "Altro diletto che Imparar non trouo," he scribbled in his notebook in Rome in 1614: "I find no other pleasure than learning." That pleasure stayed with him throughout his life and is almost palpable in the drawings he left behind.