One man under Palladio’s spell was to change all that. Inigo Jones, like Palladio, was the right man in the right place at the right time. A year after visiting the Veneto villas in 1614 this ambitious architect, aged 42, snatched the top job – Surveyor of the King’s Works – as architect for James I’s court, and, therefore, chief tastemaker for the nation.

Armed both with having seen Palladio’s work in the flesh and a copy of his Quattro Libri, Jones immediately laid down his own immutable laws for aggrandising this behind-the-times nation in the correct classical style, with two buildings – Whitehall’s Banqueting House (first fragment of a plan to rebuild in splendour Whitehall Palace) and the Queen’s House in Greenwich – so pale, so weirdly different, so, well, Italian, that they stuck out like alien craft crashlanded from a distantgalaxy called the Renaissance in a dark Gothic London of clustered alleys and steep gables. They were, perhaps, as freakish to the Jacobeans as the work of Zaha Hadid or Daniel Libeskind appears today.

Through Jones, the architecture of aspiration that Palladio had invented – “the classic country house” with a central block divided into three, a grand portico and spreading wings all delivered within an equally important arcadian landscape – became the style of the rich.