V. RENAISSANCE ARCHITECTURE IN ENGLAND The Renaissance architecture of England may be conveniently divided into two phases which correspond roughly to the 17th and 18th centuries, to the period of the Stuarts and the period of the Georges. In the first phase the genius of two great architects, Inigo Jones and Christopher Wren, created for England a new system of design, based upon elements imported from Italy. In the second phase a host of other architects, highly talented but less original, imitated and developed the architecture formulated by Jones and Wren. The 17th century supplied a mine of archi tectural motives and enriched England with a few supremely great masterpieces; the 18th century made use of that mine to create a great number of brilliant designs, no one of which quite achieves greatness. (See MODERN ARCHITECTURE : 18th and 19th Centuries.) There are not lacking in England many examples of the use of Renaissance forms before the I 7th century, but the spirit of her architecture remained essentially mediaeval. In the Tudor period, when the cathedral-building impulse had come to an end, when the monasteries ceased to exist and when the building of great country houses had become the chief preoccupation of architects, there grew up a certain simplicity and breadth of handling, a horizontal tendency in composition, which presaged the Renaissance. At the same time the ornamental motives of Italy appeared on the mantelpieces and around the doorways of the Elizabethan houses; and the craftsmen of Flanders, then numerous in England, employed these motives in their decorative work in plaster or carved wood.
revive in England the conception of architecture as a form-giving art, having an academic and intellectual basis, and to get this accepted as the foundation of a new, national development.
This conception of at chitecture, rigorously developed by the somewhat intransigent architects of the 18th century, brought into English architecture a certain artificiality which is no doubt the cause of much that is deplorable in the English tradition. A lack of vitality and saliency results when architecture becomes, as it did in Georgian England, a wholly academic art, when the authority of books and of the Italian masters replaces a tradition in building to which the usages of the people, the needs of insti tutions, the clirriate and the temper of the nation have con tributed. Nor did England develop great sculptors and mural painters to soften, as in France, the austerity of the Roman column and vault. The traditions of fine craftsmanship in plaster and in wood carving remained but they did not suffice to give English Renaissance architecture the warmth., the feeling of having become wholly assimilated, wholly expressive of a national temperament, that one finds in the Renaissance of Italy or Spain.
The reputation of Inigo Jones rests in no small degree on the designs that he made for the great palace at Whitehall in the years 1619-25. This palace is comparable in size to the great projects of the Louvre and the Vatican. The design is splendid and monumental and the palace, had it been erected, would with out doubt have been unrivalled, except perhaps by the Escorial, in grandeur of effect. The facades of its seven courts abound in original motives, in which Palladian architecture is skilfully made comformable to English needs. In this, as in all his designs, Jones displays the correctness in proportion and the vigorous and unaffected handling of space and detail, that give his style a nobility and strength excelling that of any other English architect. The Banqueting hall, which is the only part of the palace of Whitehall actually executed, is an embodiment of these qualities.