Speaking of Architecture: The Evolution of a Vocabulary in Vasari, Jones, and Sir John Vanbrugh

Abstract

The reading Jones gave to the books he owned could serve him in various ways. This article is concerned with one such use he made of the materials in the Vite by Giorgio Vasari, one volume of which we know he possessed and on which he made notes. It is suggested that this text gave him an opportunity to construct a critical vocabulary for architecture, different in character from that available to him from such sources as Palladio, Vitruvius, or Serlio. And it is also suggested that this new vocabulary is specifically reflected in two passages about architecture, and in what J. A. Gotch called Jones' sentiments about architecture, written in the notebook now at Chatsworth. In addition, this article is concerned with the development of a more general vocabulary in England in the seventeenth century, for gentlemen and architects alike, that came from the tradition of praise, or epideixis, together with terms of a more particular kind to refer to the parts of architecture that came both from Italian and French.

HOW DO BUILDINGS MEAN? SOME ISSUES OF INTERPRETATION IN THE HISTORY OF ARCHITECTURE1

“…The evolution of a specialized vocabulary, for example, undeniably altered how people understood architecture, and how architects themselves conceived it. 169 Equally, as Gillian Darley has shown, Joseph Gandy's illustrations of John Soane's work both influenced the public's reception of the work and Soane's own perception of it. "It is as if Soane's architecture had been waiting for someone to translate [sic] his buildings from pleasing fair copies into continuous narrative-a visual argument with which to confront a critical world," she writes.…”