Rosemary Hill
speaker
490 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 7 Sep
Rosemary Hill’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
So Jones comes back with having read his Vitruvius and looked at the continent, and he has a description of the architect.
The architect, he writes, is perfect in design, expert in geometry, well seen in the optics, skillful in arithmetic, a good historian, a diligent hearer of philosophers, well experienced in physics, music, law, and astrology.
So, I mean, not self-effacing in any way.
I think before we go on and talk a bit more about what Jones did with this fabulous repertoire of talents and accomplishments, I think it's interesting to talk about the fact that he includes astrology there because we're right on the cusp of a move away from
what we might call the old learning from number theory, menagerie as they called it, towards the new learning and empirical understanding.
Yes.
I think for me, it is the most exciting time when you've got Isaac Newton discovering or discussing gravity at the same time as being very interested in number theory.
And that moment when it is both important to be empirical in your studies, but also to make allowance for this element of mystic metaphysic understanding of the world is terribly rich.
And all the way back to the Middle Ages, you see in Christian imagery also the Zodiac.
Yes.
So there is not felt to be any contest there.
But Jones's big idea, apart from bigging up the architect as a social figure, was to introduce...
Renaissance architecture, which meant the rule of proportion.
Everything had to be measurable in relation to everything else.
The diameter of the column was the unit.
And his first major intervention in London
was the development of Covent Garden.
In terms of the landscape, yes.
In terms of the landscape.
It wasn't his first important building.
Showing 361–380 of 490 · page 19 of 25
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