Inigo Jones costume design and symbols in a stage costume in late Renaissance court masque

摘要

In this study, I have explored Inigo Jones’ (1573 – 1652) costume design, his career as a costume designer and how he used symbols in his work. By focusing on one case study, the Masque of Queens, performed in 1609, the overall aim is to discover, how Inigo Jones used sources in his designs, such as masque writers text and his Italian sketchbook and in particular, his use of Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia (1598) as a source for sym-bols in his design work. Inigo Jones is known as one of the great architects in late Renaissance England. His major work also included costume and set design, which concentrated on Royal Masques. The masque was a method of displaying the magnificence of the Royal family to the public. Each masque had a script written to proclaim the power of King and Queen and the most important roles were reserved for those two. Actual performance lasts for hours with a combination of acting, dancing and singing. A tight hierarchy can be seen in the disposition of masque roles with a descending order of status for the people from the highest social class. In the performance only the most expensive and grand materials were used, such as velvet, brocade and silk.Masques were performed indoors which meant that light from candles and torches were not as strong as outdoor light. Real gold and silver together with mirrors and other artificial sparkle were used in every costume to brighten and make light more visible. Symbols were part of a masque costumes and used in many ways in the Renaissance era. At the time when most of the people were not able to read or write, em-blems were attached to the costumes in ways such as colours, styles and decoration.My case study Masque of Queens was written by Ben Jonson and presented at the Whitehall Banqueting House on February 2nd 1609. The topic for this masque was a battle between good and bad and it was created in the form of a two-part masque. Inigo Jones’ was appointed to design costumes for 12 roles in this masque, including Queen Anne’s role as Bel-Anna. My case study demonstrates, that Inigo Jones used Ripa’s Iconologia as a source for his costume design in many ways. In one case, the role of Queen Candace, he has used a symbol from Iconologia with a combination of the masque writer Ben Jonson’s text describing Candace as Queen of Ethi-opia and therefore an African. Jones has clearly taken influences for Candace’s costume from a symbol for Africa in Iconologia, where we can find several similarities between Ripa’s symbol and Jones’ final design. For other roles, there is evidence of Jones using Iconologia as a source for his designs such as using symbols, for instance, to find a way to draw the posture of a character.For other influences on Inigo Jones’ work and evidence shows he made use of the following: One of his main sources for costume design was a sketchbook Jones made during his travels in Italy between 1598 to 1604 and 1612-1614. This source is present in all of his costume designs as seen in features from ancient Greek dress and variations of Roman armour: This was the idealistic style of the stage costume in late Renaissance Italy and Jones brought this innovative style to England from his travels and it was totally new to the early 17th century audience. We can clearly perceive that Inigo Jones has combined all his three main sources when he designed costumes. Case study Masque of Queens shows that Jones utilised the masque writer text to find the storyline of the masque as well as to pick up important detail of characters. He has not used Iconologia in order to take directly one symbol to his design; instead, he visually interprets it to suit his purpose for a masque and thus used it in a way that ena-bles him to create costume designs as multi-dimensional as possible.