Today, in 1573, was born the architect, Inigo Jones. (Please do not confuse him with the other great Inigo, Inigo Montaya, gifted orator). Jones is one of my favorites and I made a strong bid, defeated by my wife in some of the ugliest back room dealing I have ever seen, to name my son, Inigo. Probably for the best, really. Over a fifteen year period from 1625 to 1640, Jones was responsible for the repair and remodeling of St. Paul's Cathedral (more associated with Wren which is why I give no link to it here), and the design of Covent Garden. There is a nice bio of him here, if you are so inclined. You can see what he looked like in his self-portrait.
Why else is he so cool? Look upon his wonders and weep:
* The Banqueting Hall at Whitehall Palace: "When the Banqueting House in London was completed, it bore no resemblance to anything ever built in England before". Cool, right?
* The Queen's House at Greenwich. If you go here, you can take a virtual tour of some of the rooms and grounds which are available for hire for weddings.
Jones was also known as a set designer and party giver (and there is a nice portrait of him there as well).
By the way, it was a good day for the arts all around as, in 1606, Rembrandt van Rijn was born in Leiden, Netherlands.
Such a short post and yet it took so long to put together!
Posted by Random Penseur at July 15, 2004 09:41 AMThank you for another fascinating post, RP. I have a technical question: now that you're on this site, when I click on a hyper-link it doesn't automatically open it. Now it moves the screen, and I have to click on the link again to open it. Has anyone else had this problem?
Posted by: GrammarQueen at July 15, 2004 12:46 PMI'm glad you enjoyed it.
I had no problem with any of the hyperlinks and I just tested each one in this post and several in some of the other posts. I suppose it could be your browser.
Posted by: RP at July 15, 2004 12:55 PMRumor has it that I am a direct descendent of Inigo Jones. However, we can't find any proof of this. We know that he was never married, but of course that does not preclude the existence of any children born to Inigo Jones. We have a photograph of his supposed grandson, and I must say there is quite a resemblance. If you have any information on this topic, it would be greatly appreciated if you could pass it on to me.
Posted by: Frank Evans at February 27, 2005 12:56 AM