ABSTRACT
G iven his reputation (as early as 1605) as ‘a great traveller’, the Spanish-named Yñigo Jones may have visited Spain as well as southern Italy around the turn of the century. But the farthest south he is known to have travelled was to Naples in March 1614. Together with his patron Lord Arundel (and the latter's wife who joined them there) [Figs 14 and 15], he stayed in this huge, Spanish-dominated city for two months. Today, the church of S. Paolo Maggiore looks much like any other post-Renaissance Neapolitan church [Fig. 30]. Before the 1688 earthquake which severely damaged it, however, it looked like the Roman temple it essentially was, featuring a magnificent, hexastyle Corinthian portico. Since Palladio had fully discussed and illustrated this, the so-called Temple of Castor and Pollux, in the copy of I Quattro Libri which Jones possessed and carried everywhere with him, Jones had known of this building even before seeing the real thing. From the annotations in his Palladio (now in Worcester College Library, Oxford), we find the former painter and masque-designer and now aspiring architect visited the church-temple at least three times, judging it ‘on[e] of the Best things that I have seen’. Towards the end of his stay in Naples, Jones acquired another book which survives at Worcester College, a then recently published history of Naples. This contains a critique of Palladio's account of the temple, which is illustrated by a more accurate engraving. This may have encouraged Jones to return yet again to the site before returning to Rome where he fully exploited his enhanced understanding of classical building. The giant statuary which had stood on the pediment of the Neapolitan temple, and whose ‘excellent’ remains Jones found lying beneath it, became a favourite feature of his most distinguished buildings in London.
