On William Kent's Roman Sources

Abstract

’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.

‘Our Great Master Kent’ and the Design of Holkham Hall: A Reassessment

“…The drawing has been described as showing windows for the north front of the house, which would suggest that piano nobile rustication was still planned in 1743. 68 It is far from clear, however, that the drawing does depict the north front of the house. It shows the basement unrusticated and not high enough to accommodate the groundfloor rooms, whilst there are also insufficient courses of masonry and wall surface above the tabernacle window (or voussoirs over the Venetian window) for the piano nobile to be represented here.…”

“…37 As Cinzia Sicca has suggested, Kent's architectural aesthetic had been developed in Rome, central and north Italy -especially at Mantuawell before he began working with Burlington, and he had acquired a predilection for contrast and texture in wall surfaces and openings that had led to 'an almost Mannerist horror vacui', which would become a distinctive feature of his work. 38 In the mid-i730S, even though he continued to maintain very close relations with Burlington, he was at greater liberty able to indulge his taste for surface complexity given his ongoing positions at the Office of Works. A further design feature that importantly links Holkham to Kent's architectural work elsewhere concerns its planning.…”

Virtus on Whitehall: The Politics of Palladianism in William Kent's Treasury Building, 1733–61

“…Cinzia Sicca has already underlined that Rome, both ancient and modern, was of particular significance to Kent himself, having lived there for ten years from the age of twenty-four. 34 As for his Palladian sources, Inigo Jones was also a connoisseur of Roman architecture. According to Harris and Higgott he was the only architect before Burlington to see Palladio's Four Books, particularly the fourth book, as a Roman grammar to be drawn upon and implemented in the modern world.…”