“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...