Banqueting House, Whitehall - Architecture

Architecture

The design of the Banqueting House is classical in concept. It introduced a refined Italianate Renaissance style that was unparalleled in the free and picturesque Jacobean architecture of England, where Renaissance motifs were still filtered through the engravings of Flemish Mannerist designers. The roof is all but flat and the roofline is a balustrade. On the street façade, all the elements of two orders of engaged columns, Corinthian over Ionic, above a high rusticated basement, are interlocked in a harmonious whole.

The building is on three floors. The ground floor, a warren of cellars and store rooms, is low; its small windows indicating by their size the lowly status and usage of the floor, above which is the double-height banqueting hall, which falsely appears from the outside as a first-floor piano nobile with a secondary floor above. The seven bays of windows divided by Ionic pilasters of the "first floor" are surmounted by alternating triangular and segmental pediments, while the windows of the "second floor" are unadorned casements. Immediately beneath the entablature, which projects to emphasize the central three bays, the capitals of the Corinthian pilasters are linked by swags in relief above which the entablature, crowned by a balustrade, is supported by dental corbel table. Under the upper frieze, festoons and masks suggest the feasting and revelry associated with the concept of a royal banqueting hall.

Much of the work on the Banqueting House was overseen by Nicholas Stone, a Devonshire mason who had trained in Holland. It has been said that until this time English sculpture resembled that described by the Duchess of Malfi: "the figure cut in alabaster kneels at my husband's tomb." Like Inigo Jones, Stone was well aware of Florentine art, and introduced to England a more delicate classical form of sculpture inspired by Michelangelo's Medici tombs. This is evident in his swags on the street façade of the Banqueting House, similar to that which adorns the plinth of his Francis Holles memorial. All of this was quite new to England.

In 1638, Jones drew the designs for a new and massive palace at Whitehall in which his banqueting house was to be incorporated as one wing enclosing a series of seven courtyards. However, Charles I, who commissioned the plans, never truly had the resources to execute them; his lack of funds and the tensions that eventually led to the Civil War intervened and the plans were permanently shelved.

The plans of the new palace reveal the ideas behind Jones' concept of Palladianism, which is not obvious from viewing the Banqueting House today as one entity. The plans show that it was intended to be one small flanking wing of one bay of a monumental façade.

Architecturally, the Banqueting House was always be to be at odds with its surroundings. In January 1698, the Tudor Palace was razed by fire; fire engines pumping water from the adjacent River Thames were unable to check the flames, which raged for seventeen hours, after which all that remained was the Banqueting House and the Whitehall and Holbein Gates.

Following the fire, Christopher Wren and Nicholas Hawksmoor were asked to design a new palace, but nothing came of the scheme. It has been said that the widowed William III never cared for the area, but that had his wife Mary II been alive, with her appreciation of the historical significance of Whitehall, he would have insisted on the rebuilding.