In 1620, King James I commissioned his surveyor general, Inigo Jones, to investigate the origins of England's most celebrated ruin, Stonehenge. Jones dutifully performed what some have called the first archaeological study of Stonehenge. His conclusions were not made public until three years after his death, when in 1655 his assistant John Webb published Stone-Heng Restored, a book written by Webb from Jones's notes and including drawings made by Jones. The book, written in the first person as though by Jones, asserted that Stonehenge was a Roman ruin and restored it through Jones's drawings to its status as an original work of classicism, derived from basic Platonic geometries. This theory was considered ridiculous even at the time of the book's publication, resulting in sales so low that nearly every copy was destroyed when the publisher's house burned down in the Great Fire of London in September 1666.
展开▼
