The first half of the seventeenth century saw a fundamental change in the popular style of English architecture. As is well known, the work of the Stuart Court architect Inigo Jones introduced the fashion for building all’antica, that is, for the coherent display of the antique architectural Orders on facades following Renaissance building practices by then common throughout Europe. Certainly previous English architect-masons had used the Orders in isolated but coherent ways, as on the gate to the Old Schools in Oxford and on that to Gonville and Caius College in Cambridge, but no one had used the Orders to compose an entire facade, as Jones was to do at the Banqueting House in Whitehall from 1619. This book sets out to describe how Jones achieved this transformation through his awareness of native prejudices and practices, as well as his constant attention to the books on classical subjects in his library, the body of which survives at Worcester College in Oxford. The study deals in some detail with the content of this library and with Jones's individualistic responses as recorded in his copious annotations. It is at its most original in this study, outlining for the first time the full range of Jones's scholarship and the context that informed his literary interaction with the past masters in the art of building.

The aims of the book are to explain how through this study Jones made the foreign, classical architectural language acceptable to an English audience. The context for this adaptation by Jones revolved around Stuart Court symbolism and its adaptation of the emblematics of Neoplatonism, as well as the all-important Protestant debates on the appropriateness of the display of pagan and catholic architectural forms. Jones clearly saw the five antique column types—from plain Tuscan to decorative Composite—as a language capable of expressing the shifting ambitions of his Stuart masters, ranging from Protestant imperialism and decorative temperance on the one hand, to Catholic toleration and decorative luxury on the other. This book only mentions these issues in passing, however, and therefore despite its claims does not in fact deal in any detail with the meaning of Jones's style. Rather it concerns itself with describing how he adapted antique forms, useful in its own way, although only three of Jones's buildings are analyzed in relatively short sections that compose one chapter. Having examined Jones's library in such detail, the reader might reasonably expect a similarly detailed interpretation of his work in the light of what the library has to say about his attitudes to social and architectural morality, ethics, and decorum, for example, which Jones clearly saw as giving him the license to design as he did. Unfortunately this book for the most part misses this obvious opportunity to make the connection between books and buildings.

The introduction presents the book as a response to the Palladian school of architectural interpretation offered in the writings of John Summerson, Rudolf Wittkower, and Fritz Saxl. But in so doing it gives a false sense of inertia in Jones's studies, whereas much has been done in the last ten years to address the superficial polarity between “foreign” forms and native tastes that these authors perpetuated. The significance of heraldry and the role of Jones's Stonehenge study are advanced as if they are new topics, without any reference either in the text or notes to their discussion by various commentators on Jones over the past decade. Nor, curiously enough, is there mention of the recent biography of Jones by Michael Leapman, not even in the bibliography. At times the work is prone to inaccurate generalizations, such as the assertion that the final judgment of modern scholars “always seems to be that while the love of devices is of some interest, ultimately that tradition pales before the great authority of Jones's classicism and the study of antiquity” (9), and also to internal contradictions—classicism is presented at first as based on a system that is “permanent and unchanging” (148) but later becomes based on “cyclical reference and reinterpretation of models from the past” (212), and ancient models and Italian innovations apparently “held no inherent appeal” (34) in the second half of the sixteenth century, yet emphasis on the publication of Italian terms and models by John Shute and John Dee, and Jones's own travels, seem to contradict this. The relationship between Jones's study of his books and his buildings is at first described as “tenuous” (165) but later provides a basis for the all-too-brief analysis of his buildings.

The absence of a coherent argument in the book and a methodology that might have attempted to link books and buildings (which is perhaps the argument that is struggling to emerge here) is underlined by the book's conclusion, which is not a conclusion to the proceeding chapters at all but rather a recapitulation of the by-now familiar explanation for the traditional dominance of the Palladian understanding of Jones's work. This offers a view of Jones seen once again through the eyes of Lord Burlington and William Kent, which has little or nothing to do with the actuality of the Stuart culture that he so powerfully addressed and represented and that this book is surely meant to be about.