’At last I have come to Rome againe which I find is ye only place for a Painter’ In March 1946 Rudolf Wittkower read a seminal paper on ‘Lord Burlington and William Kent’ to the Royal Archaeological Institute. Whilst it paved the way for a reassessment of Lord Burlington’s achievements as an architect in his own right, it also unequivocally reduced Kent to a subservient role, denying him any real degree of autonomous creativity in the field of architecture. Kent was said to have turned his hand to architecture only relatively late in his career, thus his education in this field had taken place under the scrutiny of the Earl of Burlington, a purist and uncompromising disciple of Palladio and Jones. Wittkower, and after him all the major British scholars in the field have asserted that as a style British neo-Palladianism was entirely dependent upon Palladio, Scamozzi and Jones. It was in the works of these masters that the ‘academic’ architects of the Burlington circle believed they had discovered the eternal rules of architecture. So Wittkower, and those writing after him, postulated a privileged relationship between the British architectural innovators of the early part of the eighteenth century and the architectural tradition of sixteenth-century Veneto. Kent was forced into this straightjacket, even though many aspects of his work jarred with this overall interpretation of the period; indeed in 1945 Wittkower himself had acknowledged the presence in English architecture between 1720 and 1760 of elements which are not Palladian at all. But after this initial admission of complexity and contradiction Wittkower chose to concentrate on Burlington, on whom he planned to publish a monograph. Kent had vanished from his horizon.

The aim of this paper is to place the projected tomb of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon within a wider context of events that are specifically of a political and economic nature. The artists are at once pawns in the hands of diplomats and financiers motivated by their inner rationale, as well as actors in their own right, discovering in a somewhat tentative way that, though not entirely free from the system of patronage of either institutions or princely families, they could jostle for position on the international stage, relying almost entirely on their own enterprising skills. The episode of the tomb, far from being a footnote in the history of the competition between Michelangelo and Bandinelli, offers an unusual insight into the workings of Medici patronage at a very delicate time in the history of both Leo X and Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici. The favour accorded to Baccio Bandinelli precluded, during Leo's lifetime, the possibility that any other sculptor would be offered even a chance of being a candidate for this commission. The death of the pontiff left the Cardinal not only in a political quandary but also in dire financial straits. Yet the support and loyalty of the English monarch were crucial to Giulio de’ Medici's success in his own endeavours to ascend the papal throne and, perhaps more importantly, to preserve Medici control over Florence. The trusted members of the Medici entourage representing both Florence and the family's interests at the court of Henry VIII, prevented the tomb project from dying altogether. The involvement of Giovanni Cavalcanti and his business partners Pierfrancesco de’ Bardi and Zanobi Girolami, as well as that of Giovanni Gaddi, was financial since each partner bought stakes in the models prepared by a number of artists, but at the same time aesthetic judgement had to be exercised by one if not all the investors in selecting the authors of the models sent to London in 1521–1523. This opened the way for sculptors who had previously suffered from Bandinelli's overbearing dominance: namely Baccio da Montelupo, and Jacopo Sansovino.

The third Earl of Burlington is generally recognized as the moving power behind the flourishing of neo-palladian architecture in Britain during the first half of the eighteenth century, but his own architecture has been said to be marred by a peculiar stiffness and academicism. This accusation, however frequent, is rarely qualified with any precision; the alleged academicism has been generally explained in terms of Burlington’s strict dependence upon a very limited number of sources, namely Palladio and Inigo Jones, whose authority, according to some scholars, was always sought by the Earl. Such a treatment does not do justice to Burlington, who was in fact a highly original architect using the classical language of architecture in a way which can only be described as innovative. The striking and often jarring quality of his architecture is achieved by producing large surfaces of bare, smooth, astylar wall interrupted only by neatly cut out fenestration and by juxtaposing pure volumes, untrammelled by decoration, so as to achieve a typical staccato quality — first noted by Rudolph Wittkower; and, finally, by avoiding any chiaroscural and textural treatment of the façade. The final product is an architecture which it will be suggested is of a logical clarity unparalleled until the surge of neo-classicism, much later on in the century. Rather than dry ‘academicism’, it will be argued that this new type of architecture represents a clear and deliberate development of Burlington’s aesthetics into a coherent architectural system which consciously selected, and rejected, common Renaissance practices.

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