Use of Orders.—The orders when applied to the façade, are treated with little regard to purity of style and are often disfigured with strap ornament. When used in interior decoration, the pilasters frequently diminish in width toward the base, or swell out in bulbous curves; there being little or no limit to the extravagance of form that columns and pilasters alike assume in chimneypieces and furniture. Indeed, during the Jacobean period the grotesqueness of ornament notably increased, accompanied by a corresponding coarseness in the modelling. Moreover, this characteristic invaded the gardens, where trees and hedges were trimmed or “pleached” into the shape of birds, or beasts, or fantastic designs.
However, although the mansions of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods will not stand scrutiny on the score of architectural propriety, they have besides their picturesqueness a quality that is aptly characterised in Cowper’s phrase, “the stately homes of England.” They possess dignity and, above all, are homelike. They bear the stamp, not of the professional architect, but of the variegated family life that they have fostered for successive generations.
Interiors.—And this is equally true of the interiors. Comfort is not sacrificed to stateliness. The chief apartments may attain grand proportions, but they do not give the impression of being reserved for merely ceremonial purposes; they are centres of domestic life. The Gothic feature of the Great Hall was preserved; and, in the early examples, while the family and the retainers still took their meals together, a dais occupied one end, the opposite end being separated from the buttery or larder, and the kitchen by a richly decorated wooden screen, above which was the minstrel gallery. The conspicuous feature of the hall was the fireplace, with a chimneypiece on which the most elaborate decoration was lavished, the rest of the walls being panelled in wood to a height of eight or ten feet, leaving a space above for trophies of the chase or family portraits. This type of hall is still retained in all the dining halls of the Oxford and Cambridge colleges.
Adjoining the hall was a solar for the intimate life of the family. Gradually, as the taste for privacy increased, a separate room was used for dining and other living-rooms were added until the hall came to be more and more an entrance hall, and the main living apartments were disposed as in Italian and French custom, on the second floor. This caused the staircase to be treated as a prominent feature, which, as it were, prolonged the spaciousness of the hall. Occasionally of marble or stone, it was usually constructed of oak with massive newel-posts and balustrade, richly decorated.
In the earlier examples, and even in some later ones, as Inigo Jones’s design of Chevening House, the apartments are arranged on the “thoroughfare” system, opening into one another en suite. But the inconvenience of this in the entertaining of guests led to the adoption of a corridor along one side. By degrees this was widened and developed into what is the most distinctive feature of these old English houses—the Long Gallery. Lit with tall windows, often with deep bays that form attractive alcoves, it served as a pleasant sitting-room and equally as a place for exercise in wet weather, while its inner wall provided space for pictures. In fact, this room seems to have been the origin of the term “picture gallery.”
Special care was bestowed upon the ceilings. Occasionally the beams were exposed, but the usual practice by this time was to sheathe them with lath and plaster, the surface of which was decorated with stucco relief in geometrical designs. At times the flat of the ceiling was connected with the walls by a concave member, called a cove. Often, when the wainscot was not carried up to the level of this, the upper part or dado also was decorated with stucco relief.
It is characteristic of the use of the pattern books that the motives of decoration employed in the exterior and interior embellishment are used also in the furniture of the period, which on the whole is distinguished by its massiveness, exuberance of ornament, and the mechanical method of the workmanship. For much of the ornament is either cut out of the flat wood with a jig-saw or carved upon forms that have been turned upon a lathe.
ANGLO-ITALIAN PERIOD
With the accession of Charles I commenced an era of more refined and cultivated taste. The King, as a young man, escorted by the pleasure-loving Duke of Buckingham, had visited the Court of Spain in search of a wife, and had seen the wonderful array of Titians and Rubens’s in the Royal Gallery. Later he had married Henrietta Maria, daughter of Henri IV, who, under the inspiration of his wife, Marie de’ Medici, was introducing the classical style into French architecture.
Inigo Jones.—Charles himself had planned to erect a palace at Whitehall that should surpass the Louvre in grandeur and found in Inigo Jones (1573-1652) an architect fully qualified for the ambitious enterprise. He had made a prolonged study of the Renaissance style in Italy, spending much of the time in Vicenza, where he had become an ardent admirer of Palladio’s work.