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Jacobean Style

1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

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The name given to the second phase of the early Renaissance architecture in England, following the Elizabethan style. Although the term is generally employed of the style which prevailed in England during the first quarter of the 17th century, its peculiar decadent detail will be found nearly twenty years earlier at Wollaton Hall, Nottinghamshire, and in Oxford and Cambridge examples exist up to 1660, notwithstanding the introduction of the purer Italian style by Inigo Jones in 1619 at Whitehall. Already during Queen Elizabeth's reign reproductions of the classic orders had found their way into English architecture, based frequently upon John Shute's The First and Chief Grounds of Architecture, published in 1563, with two other editions in 1579 and 1584. In 1 577, three years before the commencement of Wollaton Hall, a copybook of the orders was brought out in Antwerp by Jan Vredeman de Vries. Though nominally based on the description of the orders by Vitruvius, the author indulged freely not only in his rendering of them, but in suggestions of his own, showing how the orders might be employed in various buildings. Those suggestions were of a most decadent type, so that even the author deemed it advisable to publish a letter from a canon of the Church, stating that there was nothing in his architectural designs which was contrary to religion. It is to publications of this kind that Jacobean architecture owes the perversion of its forms and the introduction of strap work and pierced crestings, which appear for the first time at Wollaton (1580); at Bramshill, Hampshire (1607-1612), and in Holland House, Kensington (1624), it receives its fullest development. (R. P. S.)