“If we try to enclose him in his own time and look into his works instead of outward from them,” John Summerson lamented with a distinct echo of William Kent more than 200 years before him, “we find ourselves gazing at something extremely hard to bring to focus” (Inigo Jones, London: Penguin, 1966, 13). They were both speaking about Inigo Jones, the first intellectually complex architect England has produced in its history of the built environment. John Webb, Jones’s son-in-law, actively promoted Jones as a heroic figure for English architecture; in his book on Stonehenge, Webb carefully edited the voice of Jones to resemble that of Palladio: “Being naturally inclined in my younger years to study the Arts of Design, I passed into foreign parts to converse with the great masters thereof in Italy.” Jones maintains an elevated status in the history of English architecture, but this has not always been the case; Restoration England did not seem to have regarded Jones highly in the way we do today. Despite Webb’s insistent propaganda of Jones’s virtues (or perhaps because of it), Christopher Wren and his colleagues at the Royal Society probably thought of Jones as having contrived Italian manners, and of being a little more pedantic than rational in his approach to solving architectural problems in the English context. Webb did not have a track record of being truthful in his books; his treatises on Stonehenge and on the Chinese language were full of unsubstantiated speculations. They may be intriguing documents through which we can look into a mind of the seventeenth century, but Wren and his Royal Society colleagues were philosophizing at the dawn of rational knowledge.

Webb committed the first mistake in the new age of science by framing his objects of study to his hypothesis, as John Aubrey summarized in his Brief Lives. But the intellectual climate had changed since the beginning of the eighteenth century as the empirical-knowledge project was once again integrated with humanism; this was the time when Jones came back with a much greater importance attached to his works. For Colen Campbell, William Kent, and other Burlingtonians, Jones was the figure at the heart of a reconstitution of a “British classicism,” completing, with Vitruvius and Palladio, the assembly of three great figures in the history of architecture. A lack of details in the life and works of Jones—something Summerson found wanting—had been a conspiring factor in the fabrication of the Jones legacy for many centuries.

The scientific method that Wren and his Royal Society fellows were developing has given rise to new levels of accuracy in our knowledge of Jones. Stephen Orgel and Roy Strong’s curatorial investigation into the production of the masques at the court of the early Stuarts (Inigo Jones: The Theatre of the Stuart Court, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973) provides fascinating insights into Jones’s visualization of intricate political meanings, his development of theater technologies, and his articulation in aesthetic sensibilities. John Harris and Gordon Higgott’s forensic studies of Jones’s drawings and annotations help consolidate the empirical field which had been uncertain in many ways (Inigo Jones, Complete Architectural Drawings, London: Zwemmer, 1989). These works—and others that followed—seem to have gone some way to address Summerson’s concerns a few decades before them.

However, there is perhaps another aspect in Summerson’s contemplation that the accumulation of empirical data could not explain, namely, that Jones was a complex figure artistically and intellectually, and must be understood in a complex way. It is in this aspect that Christy Anderson’s Inigo Jones and the Classical Tradition delivers a more richly delineated Jones as a self-conscious creator of theater and architecture in the English cultural context. The first important contribution of Anderson’s book is a study of Jones’s library and his relationship with his books. The innovative yet disciplined designs suggest strongly that Jones was an intellectual architect and not a procurer of styles; to attain a sophisticated level of design, Jones relied heavily on his books. The proliferation of books changed the way we formulate knowledge, and this must have been felt acutely by Jones; he pored over his books, brought them with him wherever he traveled, filled margins with copious notes, and cultivated a critical dialogue with the contents. Anderson took advantage of the unique survival of so many of Jones’s books and annotations, and navigated through a possible constitution of the mind of Jones.

The second and more ambitious aim of Anderson’s book is to construct a complex picture of English classicism both as a continuation and reflexive critique of its Italian sources. Buried in Jones’s portraits and annotations, there was a deep-rooted anxiety to construct a self image—following the tradition of the artist as the divinely inspired individual, as formulated by Giorgio Vasari in his Lives and enthused by Jacob Burckhardt in The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. Sustaining Jones’s theory, practice, and reputation were several important underlying political and intellectual demands: the construction of England as a place of civilization through its proper use of the classical tradition against the liberal adaptations of the classical sources by the Flemish (the Flemings), the heightened sense of nationalism as one of the most important aims of Stuart dynasty ideology (seen in masques such as Albion’s Triumph, Coelum Britannicum, Britannia Triumphans), Jones’s suggestive references to gender characteristics as a way of conceptualizing architecture and design, and England’s tradition of producing works of inventive and marvelous effects. Anderson’s formulation of these “discourse-enunciated” themes (chapter 6) is crucial in bringing the complexity of the subject to focus; although her treatment here is perhaps more documentary than expositive, they nevertheless suggest enormous research spaces in which one could attempt to be less monographic and more discursive. The last chapter, although briefly and descriptively dealt with, broaches another important subject concerning the Burlingtonian propaganda of Jones’s achievements, which also calls for brighter expansions.

On the whole, Anderson’s book adds more substance to her earlier efforts in Lucy Gent’s anthology of essays (Albion’s Classicism: The Visual Arts in Britain, 1550–1660, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), which echoed distantly a critical tidal wave in the late twentieth century to revise the Enlightenment project (and by implication the traditional frameworks of the classical tradition). This anthology is connected to another anthology of essays—of writings from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries—put together by Caroline van Eck (British Architectural Theory, 1540–1750, London: Ashgate, 2003), which provides a repositioned empirical field for a better understanding of England’s reconstitution of classicism.

The printed book and the marketplace changed the world of Jones and his intellectual development; our own astonishing technologies of movement and communication are giving rise to—for all its problems and hyperboles—a form of “global knowledge.” It is perhaps this condition that demands new investigations into Jones and English classicism. The “modern English culture” from which Anderson formulated her studies on Jones (xv) has become prevalent in many parts of the world over the twentieth century due to the enormous influences of British and U.S. cultures. Much of the globe has engaged with a condition of cultural production largely similar to what Jones experienced in his time—high intellectual ideals as well as high fashions imported from elsewhere but also internalized as part of the modernized local traditions. As Soane and Ruskin showed, this reconstituted subjectivity (and moral and aesthetic tastes) may be deeply contradictory intellectually, but it has been one of the most powerful forces in the production of architecture and cities. Nations and cultures have their own Joneses as they struggled to reinvent their cultural traditions in line with imported intellectual ideals as a way to modernize—think of Ito Chuta in Japan and Liang Sicheng in China.

While attempting to be English and classical at the same time, Jones had become an international figure. Thus, it is informative and fascinating to look into the complexities of Jones’s roles, his ingenious inventions, and the intricacies of the English political world in the early seventeenth century. The classical tradition was a tremendous achievement in the history of civilization; in one sense, the fundamental importance of classicism lies in the ways in which humanistic studies are integrated with physical materials through notions of proportion, decorum, and style. In our age of abstract systems and expert knowledge, it is quite tempting to put aside human interests in pursuit of systemic excellence—higher efficiencies, better profit margins, faster and cheaper methods to produce—as the ways of our “modern life”; the twentieth century is full of such examples. It is deeply reassuring that the classical ideal can be, and has been, reinvented in different and resourceful ways. Anderson’s study of an architect in pursuit of humanistic proportions, despite the idiosyncrasies of the time, gives insight into our own conditions, aspirations, and failings as we try to reach our own human potentials.