Word: vanbrugh
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...itself, which Giulio designed from the ground up as a pleasure pavilion for Federico. This rectangular, single-story building, with its courtyards, pools, screen colonnade and enfilade of frescoed rooms, was Giulio's masterpiece. Its architecture would inspire many future designers, among them Inigo Jones and Sir John Vanbrugh. But its frescoes, which have been thoroughly and sympathetically cleaned in recent years, would be no less influential...
...THINGS left to us from the generally stagnant era of English history called the Restoration is Restoration comedy. Playwrights such as Congreve, Vanbrugh and William Wyncherly fashioned a brand of theatrical social satire using the raw materials afforded by courtly foppery and greed and the devil-take-all decadence of the urban upper classes. Relying heavily on wit, bawdry, and ludicrously fashioned images, these plays were often quite vicious in their criticism of London society despite the fact that many of the playwrights were a part of the madhouse themselves...
Curiously, though, the five foremost practitioners of the genre were far from prolific. Etherege wrote only three plays; Wycherley, four; Vanbrugh (also renowned as an architect), three and a half; Congreve (the most accomplished of the group), five; and Farquhar, seven and a half. This corpus laid the foundation and set the standard for the two supreme masterpeices of the genre: Sheridan's The School for Scandal, a century later; and Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, two centuries later...
...split-level people who yearn to wake up one morning in a Palladian villa, a Roman palazzo or a great Georgian house in County Wicklow. The sumptuous interiors on display evoke the spacious days when every European princeling was building his own little Versailles and architects like Nash, Vanbrugh, Inigo Jones and Wyatt were adapting Italian magnificence for English country gentlemen. The modern eye can only goggle in awe at heroic staircases, ceilings bulging with putti, acres of marble floors reflecting miles of gilded plaster. Magnificence had become largely a semi-public affair, as in Queen Victoria's railway...
...latter of these inedequacies had perhaps become apparent as early as 1698, the year that Sir John Vanbrugh's The Provoked Wife first appeared...