14 
Aon of Padua. 
By the Rev. Canon J. E. Jackson, F.S.A. 
has never yet been satisfactorily answered. Yet an answer, if one 
could be found, ought to be interesting to Wiltshire people, seeing 
that this person is traditionally said to have designed the finest 
house in their county—Longleat, the seat of the Marquis of Bath. 
He is not named by our oldest topographers, Leland and Camden, 
and the writer who appears the first to mention him is Walpole, in 
his “ Anecdotes of Painters,” where Dallaway, the editor, adds, in 
a note :— But who was John of Padua ? what was his real name? 
how educated ? and what were his works previous to his arrival in 
England? No research has hitherto discovered with satisfaction.” 
Mr. Digby Wyatt also, in a very interesting essay (1868) ‘On the 
Foreign Artists employed in England in the Sixteenth Century,” 
says:—‘ No research has yet clearly made out who ‘ Johannes de 
Padua, the celebrated architect who mainly took the place of 
Holbein as Henry the Eighth’s chief designer, really was.” * 
In the following paper I propose to shew 
I. Who “John of Padua” may really have been. 
II. What little probability there is that he could have had 
anything to do with the building of Longleat. 
T.—All that is hitherto really known about him is, that at Easter, 
84 Hen. VIII. (A.D. 1542), he began to be employed in the service 
of King Henry, and that two years afterwards, by letters patent, 
dated 30th June, 1544, an allowance was granted to him (the 
payment commencing retrospectively from Easter, 1542) of two 
shillings a day “for good service in architecture and various new 
1“ Anecdotes of Painting,” Hdit. 1828, vol. i., p. 216. 
2 Mr. Sarsfield Taylor has some severe remarks upon the style of architecture 
reputed to have been introduced by Holbein and the un-identified John of 
Padua. (‘Origin of the Fine Arts,” vol. i., 243 and 262.) 
