Ben Jonson and the Uses of Architecture
The terms of Jonson's quarrel with Inigo Jones about the rival claims of poet and architect have been clear ever since D. J. Gordon's discussion of the matter in 1949. The problem, as Professor Gordon explains, was far more significant than a temperamental clash between two ambitious artists vying for royal favor. Unfortunately, while they could probably agree about the inevitably intellectual origins of all artistic invention and about the important distinctions to be made between invention and expression, they could not help but come into conflict over the relative importance of poetry, on the one hand, and architecture, on the other. A passage from Vives translated in The Discoveries (160-167) indicates that Jonson knew and probably endorsed those divisions between the liberal and mechanical arts which placed architecture in the inferior group.