OLD CHARLTON, KENT
Jacobean, Red Brick and Stone Facings
GEORGIAN CHIMNEY PIECE AND OVERMANTEL
By Robert Adams. [P. 428]
Italian Influence.—This was augmented, as the century advanced, by the foreign craftsmen who sought refuge in England from the religious persecutions in the Netherlands and the Huguenot war in France. They introduced not only superior skill of workmanship, but the French, Dutch, and Flemish modes. Meanwhile Henry VIII, in surrounding himself with a new kind of political advisers, had also welcomed foreign artists to his court. Among them were Holbein, a versatile designer in various mediums as well as a great portrait painter; Torrigiano, who executed Henry VII’s Tomb in Westminster Abbey (1512); Giovanni da Majano, who modelled the busts of the emperors in the terra-cotta medallions over the entrance-gates of Hampton Court; Benedetto da Rovezzano, designer of the Tomb of Cardinal Wolsey, which has perished, and a certain John of Padua, who is supposed to have been the architect of Longleat House in Wiltshire.
Henry’s partiality for Italian artists may well have been inspired by the example of Francis I, whom he met in 1520 on the celebrated “Field of the Cloth of Gold.” At any rate there are many examples of sculpture, dating from the first half of the sixteenth century, represented in tombs, choir-screens, and organ-screens, which were purely Italian in their decorative design and of marked refinement. Terra-cotta enrichments, of similarly pure Italian craftsmanship, are to be seen in certain specimens of domestic architecture, such as Sutton Place, near Guildford, Surrey, and the entrance tower of Layer Marney, Essex, both of which were completed in 1525.
The suppression of the monasteries, 1536-1540, resulted in a revival of architecture, for in many cases the buildings were bestowed upon laymen who converted them into mansions, while a large part of the Church funds was devoted by Henry VIII and Edward VI to the erection and endowment of Grammar Schools.