Jonson, Jones, and Vitruvian Romance
Vitruvianism offered Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones more than a set of rules. Even a cursory consideration of the early collaborative masques and entertainments – in which formal Vitruvian elements are mixed with ruins and pyramids in an overall mood which seems to take its cue from romance rather than the architectural treatises – reveal that they took at least some part of their inspiration from the less-formal tradition of Vitruvian thinking. This chapter examines the influence of one work – Francesco Colonna's romance, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili – which Jonson and Jones used as a common imaginative resource in the shaping of their early masques and entertainments. They used it because it offered them a narrative (from which Jonson could draw segments and adapt them to his own purposes), as well as ceremonies, hieroglyphs, striking visual images, and a statement of Vitruvian theory couched in literary terms that both poet and architect would have found congenial.
Keywords: Ben Jonson, Inigo Jones, masques, entertainments, Vitruvian theory, Francesco Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili
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