Inigo Jones - Part 3 - Banqueting House

In January 1619 the Old Banqueting House was burned down. It was the nucleus of royal activities including:

In fact one of the few things it was not used for was banquets. Jones was asked to design the building and this gave him the opportunity to use it as a symbol of peace and harmony, supporting the idea of the King of Peace.

It was based on a basilica design from Vitruvius with Palladian influences. The basilica was a Roman meeting hall and Jones thought this came closest to the function of a banqueting hall. Vitruvius said a basilica should be twice as long as wide which led to dimensions of 110' long by 55' wide by 55' high. The building cost £15,618 14s, a large sum that is difficult to translate into today's prices.

Jones had plans for a star chamber that he was working on when the Old Banqueting House burned down but it was never built. It was started in 1619 and finished in January 1623, a remarkably quick time. In fact the first masque was held on Twelfth Night 1622, it was Jones and Jonson’s Masque of Augurs and it was performed when the building was in the final stages of completion.

It was originally conceived as a nave but in 1624-6 the great apse was blocked off. The interior uses Ionic columns below and Corinthian for the piano nobile with both columns fluted.

 

   

The side ends were never completed as can be seen below. It is believed it was intended to be part of a larger building.

   

Externally it has seven bays of superimposed columns, Ionic and Composite/Ionic above. The exterior is rusticated with a marble cornice. All the blocks are chamfered creating a "V" shape between each block. It avoids the use of quoins, a normal feature of Jacobean houses. There are two half columns in the centre with almost fully rounded columns either side.

Giulio Romano's Palazzo Thiene (see below, 1542, visited by Jones in 1614) also has full rustication with double pilasters at the corners.

The Banqueting Hose has swags on the frieze (and this can be seen as a feature on the original facade from the 18th century engraving below). The Master Mason of the King’s Works, William Cure, rather unusually was not responsible for the stone work which was put instead into the hands of the 33-year-old Nicholas Stone with the title of Chief Mason for the Banqueting House. Today not a stone of the original facade remains as it was replaced by Sir William Chambers in the eighteenth century and by Sir John Soane in the nineteenth century with all white Portland stone. The façade was originally built in three different types of stone: a honey-coloured Oxfordshire for the basement, pinkish-brown Northamptonshire above and white Portland for all the main architectural features and the parapet.  The windows are square headed with half round and triangular pediments alternating. The mullion and transom windows were replaced by Georgian windows by Soane or earlier.

An Elizabethan Banqueting House of 1581 was probably meant to be only a temporary structure but it continued in use for 25 years. Although the building had substantial foundations its main structure was of timber and canvas and so it must have become very dilapidated by 1606 when what we now call the Old Banqueting House was started. It was built of brick and stone and was completed in March 1609. It consisted of a large hall above a ground floor basement and internally it had two stories with side galleries supported on Doric columns with Ionic columns above, supporting the roof. The Old Banqueting Hall's internal columns stood in the hall and there were complaints that they blocked the view of the masques.

 

   

The Star Chamber Plan by Inigo Jones (now in Worcester College) was a building for the law court that would have been half the size of the Banqueting Hall. It was designed in 1617 but never went ahead as the more pressing commission for the Banqueting House took precedence.

A pediment was originally planned for the Banqueting House. It does have a low pitched roof but it cannot be seen from ground level. In the drawing from the masque it is not rusticated in the upper two storeys. There is a central door in the basement but not in the finished building suggesting the plans for the building may have changed. The rear facade is the same as the front. There is also a drawing of the Banqueting House by Inigo Jones from a masque drawing. Holbein Gate is seen on the right (this is a structure created in the 1530s by Henry VIII). On the left is a typical Tudor building. There is a temporary structure on the left which was used to enter the building and to reach the gallery on the first floor. James I would have entered at the other end of the building. It is so different from other Jacobean buildings that it looks as if it has been dropped from outer space. However, it was not used as a model for other Jacobean buildings perhaps because it was associated with masques. Its original coloured stone of brown basement, grey and white may not have suited the modern taste.

John Smithson recorded the earlier Banqueting House built in 1606. It had Ionic columns above with Doric columns below. The internal columns were not against the wall so people complained of an obstructed view. The court sat on tiers against the sides. The 1606 design also has links to Vitruvius, who don't know the designer but we assume it was Simon Basil, the King's Surveyor.

The Banqueting House was built remarkably quickly. Note that in the 16th century the term "banqueting" had a different meaning. It referred to the period after a meal when you had sweet wines and sweet meats (such as marzipan and quince in syrup). It only began to acquire the modern meaning in the seventeenth century.

In 1629 Rubens wrote to the English resident in Brussels (a title one below an ambassador), William Trumble pointing out that he was better able to work on large works than small. It is not known whether he was dropping a big hint regarding the Banqueting House ceiling or was following up a request that had already been made. Sir Dudley Carlton, English ambassador at the Hague, wrote to Rubens in 1610. So the English were in contact a long time before the 1630s Banqueting House assignment.

Rubens sent his self-portrait of 1623-4 to Charles who kept it in his bedchamber. This was an astonishing compliment by a monarch to a "mere" artist. Rubens is wearing a hat so it thought it was unlikely to have been painted for Charles (as you never wore a hat in a monarchs presence in the same way that in donor portraits the donor never wears a hat in the presence of the Virgin Mary). Rubens had previously sent a lion hunt (a favourite subject of Charles) but Charles rejected it on the grounds that it had been painted by assistants. This tells us a lot about Charles connoisseurship. Rubens formed a relationship with the Arundel's in the 1610s and Buckingham when he met him in Paris in 1625 when he was there to escort Henrietta Maria to London to become Charles's bride.

The apotheosis of Buckingham is in the National Gallery (see below). It was painted for Buckingham's house in London - York House (just to the right of Embankment tube station, part of which is still there, it used to be the river entrance to the house).

Rubens was not an ambassador but paved the way for the peace accord with Spain. When Rubens first arrived in England he was impressed by the English collections. He was knighted by Charles (1629-30) when in London for seven months. He painted Peace and War (below, National Gallery) and the Charles brand "CR" is still burned in the back of the canvas. The nude woman is Pax symbolising the peace treaty with Minerva (wisdom) behind her pushing away Mars the god of war. This is typical of the kind of painting Rubens was famous for.

Rubens was not the first to paint these allegorical paintings. For example, Jacopo Tintoretto also painted Minerva pushing away Mars with Peace on the left in the sixteenth century.

 

The Baroque painting by Rubens is much  more complex and dynamic.

The Allegory of the Tudor Succession (1572), artist unknown, shows Mary, Edward and Elizabeth. Mars the god of war is next to Mary on the left and Elizabeth is shown with peace on the right with Minerva holding a cornucopia.

 

 

 The following Rubens sketch may have been shown to Charles to get approval for the Banqueting House ceiling. Rubens started the ceiling in 1632-4 perhaps because he was busy elsewhere. We have 16 oil sketches which are now scattered around the world. The Banqueting House ceiling is now the only major work by Rubens that is still in situ. it is enormous and he would have had to have a scaffold in his studio and rolled the canvas as he went along. It was not formally put up until 1636 as Rubens refused to send it until he had been fully paid.

Rubens also gave Charles in 1629-30, St George Defeating the Dragon (Royal Collection). Charles was the proud head of the Order of the Garter whose patron saint was St. George. Charles aggrandised the order by for example inventing the great shoulder star that is still worn. The river in the background has been argued to be the Thames and London. Also it has been argued that George is a portrait of Charles (and the woman even Henrietta Maria) but historians such as John Peacock have questioned this thoery.

 

The ceiling has nine compartments, designed by Inigo Jones. The are an inversion of the squares and ovals in the ceiling of the Palazzo Ducale in Venice and the tradition of such ceiling paintings was a Venetian tradition that is also found in churches such as San Sabastiano, Veronese (1556).

Note the guilloche ("gi-osh") pattern in the white and gold bands on the Banqueting House ceiling. By this time Jones is a bit old-fashioned designing a ceiling in this style as the Italians had moved on.

In use the walls of the Banqueting House would have been covered by tapestries so it would have been dark inside. This meant that candles and torches were needed and as a result Charles stopped holding masques there after the ceiling was installed and had another building for masques built opposite.

Charles does not appear in the ceiling, it is all about James. As Charles did not build him a funerary monument it is possible the ceiling was intended as a monument to his father.

In the first picture from the throne end we see the twisted columns of Solomon's temple as James saw himself as "the New Solomon". The divine right of kings was a tradition from Tudor times and earlier but James took it to new extremes. James believed that kings were appointed by God and were minor gods in their own right ("Kings are justly called Gods"), were answerable to no one and could not be removed from office.

Rubens arrived in 1629, the year Charles started what is called his 11 years of personal Rule or the Rule of Tyranny.

References

Banqueting House