From the start, so said his pupil John Webb (no mean architect himself) he wanted "to study the arts of design". So, after the death of his moderately prosperous cloth-merchant father, and with Queen Elizabeth then still on the throne, he took himself off to Italy, where he discovered the shockingly radical, classically-inspired houses and churches of Andrea Palladio and his followers. The Italian Renaissance was in full swing, while back in England it was still quite something if a house was built in brick, with a lot of turrets and twisty chimneys. There was a huge cultural gap to be bridged. Jones's subsequent career attached to the doomed Stuart court was gradually to introduce progressive design in generally inauspicious circumstances.

Unlike Jones' successor Wren, or even some of his Elizabethan predecessors, there is relatively little of his built work that survives. No entire country houses, though he worked on the south front and fine rooms of Wilton House near Salisbury. There is the odd chapel. His work at the old St. Paul's cathedral vanished with the Great Fire of London. The 1622 Banqueting House remains, somewhat altered from his day, but still with its original Rubens ceiling paintings. There is the Queen's House in Greenwich, impressive despite its somewhat dubious restoration. And the Covent Garden piazza - London's first square - with its church of St Paul, one of the great, austere neo-classical buildings in Britain. Even this has been rebuilt. Everything else is fragments. Moreover, so much of what Jones designed was determinedly temporary - as many as 50 royal masques, most scripted by his great collaborator and eventual enemy, the prickly Ben Jonson. Huge sums of money were spent on elaborate mechanical sets and gorgeous costumes for these one-night-only allegorical romps, all of which had only one aim in mind - to make the king feel good about himself.