Architecture: A Very Short Introduction

Jones’s buildings influenced by Palladio were isolated and untypical of their age. English Palladianism is more firmly associated with the 18th century, when it became the normal modern architecture for the time, ushered in under the patronage of the Earl of Burlington, who built a small but carefully wrought pavilion next to his house at Chiswick in west London (Figure 16). He worshipped Palladio and collected his drawings, and set himself up with his close friend William Kent as arbiters of architectural taste. The artistic salon that operated at Chiswick was presided over by Lady Burlington, who was the only person who actually lived in the villa, and was undoubtedly important in seeing that there was a congenial atmosphere at the place, in which ideas could be freely exchanged. The villa became a focus of artistic creativity, which accounts for a part of the building’s great influence. Without this influence it is quite possible that the Baroque in England might have flourished for as long as it did in France and Germany. It is possible that Jefferson, isolated in Virginia and learning from books, might have picked up on Palladio’s ideas, but he might have been seen as an eccentric individualist rather than a man of taste by Chastellux when he visited. The current of changing taste cannot be generated entirely by a very small group of people — there must have been receptive audience ready to listen to the Burlington circle’s ideas — but nevertheless the villa has a significance in architectural history that is much greater than its small size would suggest. Along with the architectural work and the influence of Lady Burlington’s salon, the architect Colen Campbell worked to achieve similar ends with his monumental scholarly undertaking, Vitruvius Britannicus, which was a three-volume publication that illustrated architectural works that met with Campbell’s approval — all of them in a classical manner, and many of them Campbell’s own designs, some of them executed commissions, some of them flights of fancy. Burlington employed James Gibbs, who designed in an Italianate manner that evidently suited Burlington well enough, when he returned from his travels, to remodel his town house, Burlington House in Piccadilly. However, he was replaced by Campbell, who persuaded Burlington that he, Campbell, was the more correctly schooled and authentically Palladian architect. (The building incidentally was on the same site, but is not the same building, as the current Burlington House on Piccadilly that houses the Royal Academy.) Campbell’s publications helped to establish and to spread the idea of simple well-proportioned buildings as a model of excellence, always contrasted with the trashy barbarism of the Baroque, which was portrayed as overladen with ornament that distracted the viewer from its neglect of fundamental principles.