’At last I have come to Rome againe which I find is ye only place for a Painter’
In March 1946 Rudolf Wittkower read a seminal paper on ‘Lord Burlington and William Kent’ to the Royal Archaeological Institute. Whilst it paved the way for a reassessment of Lord Burlington’s achievements as an architect in his own right, it also unequivocally reduced Kent to a subservient role, denying him any real degree of autonomous creativity in the field of architecture. Kent was said to have turned his hand to architecture only relatively late in his career, thus his education in this field had taken place under the scrutiny of the Earl of Burlington, a purist and uncompromising disciple of Palladio and Jones. Wittkower, and after him all the major British scholars in the field have asserted that as a style British neo-Palladianism was entirely dependent upon Palladio, Scamozzi and Jones. It was in the works of these masters that the ‘academic’ architects of the Burlington circle believed they had discovered the eternal rules of architecture. So Wittkower, and those writing after him, postulated a privileged relationship between the British architectural innovators of the early part of the eighteenth century and the architectural tradition of sixteenth-century Veneto. Kent was forced into this straightjacket, even though many aspects of his work jarred with this overall interpretation of the period; indeed in 1945 Wittkower himself had acknowledged the presence in English architecture between 1720 and 1760 of elements which are not Palladian at all. But after this initial admission of complexity and contradiction Wittkower chose to concentrate on Burlington, on whom he planned to publish a monograph. Kent had vanished from his horizon.