The Banqueting House
Half way along Whitehall stands the Banqueting House - the last remnant of Whitehall Palace.
The palace of Whitehall had grown up during the Middle Ages as a straggling, rather random collection of buildings. Into this Gothic and Tudor muddle, Inigo Jones placed a monument of classical reason - it must have come as a shock, a building more Italian than English, clashing with everything around it.
Of course later on, classical style became pretty common in London - Nash’s terraces, Lutyens’s neo-imperial, every other bank and insurance company using pediments and colonnades. But this was pretty much the first classical building of any prominence in the city.
James I commissioned it, and he must have been looking for a touch of ‘modern’ style. He got a masterpiece.
Outside, the building is a triumph of symmetry - none of the quirkiness of native Jacobean building. Jones uses alternating round and triangular pediments to set up a fine rhythm, and the whole facade feels light and elegant.
It’s the interior though that is the reason I’d put the Banqueting House on my London top ten list. It was Charles I, James’s son, who commissioned the ceiling, showing his father’s apotheosis. And it was commissioned not from an English painter, but from the Flemish baroque painter, Peter Paul Rubens - probably the wealthiest and best known painter in the Europe of his day.
This was very different from anything that had been painted in England before. If you look for instance at the allegorical portraits of Elizabeth I, you can see they’re really just portraits with some extra scenery. This is completely different - it’s an entire panorama in which the figure of James is almost lost. (I think you can understand how Parliamentarians and Puritans, looking at this, would have been amazed and disturbed by this imperialist depiction of the divine nature, not just the divine right, of kings!)
If you’re interested, you can make a little visit to the National Gallery afterwards, to see the preparatory sketch Rubens made for a similar ceiling in the Duke of Buckingham’s house.
Why ‘Banqueting House’? Well, the Stuart court was addicted to masques - small dramas which were acted by members of the court, with songs and dances, and usually a final chorus praising the King or one of the royal family. Inigo Jones provided the scenery for many of these, working with his friend, the dramatist Ben Jonson. The Banqueting House was a place for staging masques and other court events - a sort of cross between a dining room and a theatre. It opened in 1622 with the Masque of Augurs.
The great irony of the Banqueting House is that it was built as a piece of propaganda for the Stuart dynasty. Yet it was from one of the windows of the upper storey that King Charles I stepped out on to the scaffold in 1649.
Where: Whitehall
When: 10-5 Mon-Sat
How much: £4.50 (£3.50 concessions and £2.25 children)
Photo credit: Matt Brown on flickr
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POSTED IN: Art, Attractions
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