Following his work on the Queen's House in Greenwich (1616), Jones undertook a number of small commissions and then produced a major design for the King's Star Chamber in 1617, a fully-formed neo-classical building, never actually built, where Robert Tavernor observes “the Stuart dynasty intended to rule supreme without the restraint of parliament, ensuring their own economic wellbeing by levying taxes which Parliament would never have approved” (129). A modern architecture which carried echoes of imperial Rome, however transmuted through the Italian Renaissance and French absolutism, was evidently thought the appropriate dress for autocracy, its mathematically calculated symmetries echoing the supposedly divine rules of natural order which the monarchy itself incarnated. Whilst the…
341 words
Citation: Clark, Robert. "Inigo Jones designs the Banqueting House in White Hall". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 06 January 2009 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=211, accessed 23 November 2024.]