Giovanni Portinari

He was living in England by 1526, in which year he is recorded as one of the gentlemen pensioners of King Henry VIII (a position he retained until at least 1547), and in February 1537 he was formally naturalised as an English subject.

[2] In the late 1530s the Dissolution of the Monasteries got under way, and Portinari was hired by Thomas Cromwell, the king's chief minister and principal architect of the anti-monastic policy, to undertake the demolition of the Cluniac Priory of St Pancras in Lewes.

After completing the work, Portinari submitted a detailed report to Cromwell, and this together with physical evidence from the site enables the demolition process to be reconstructed to an unusually extensive degree.

[6] He proposed extending the walls east to the coast, which would bring the Magdalene Fields within the defensive perimeter and make the town considerably easier to defend against landward assault, but his scheme was rejected, apparently because it would have been too expensive.

[7][8] Portinari was nevertheless retained as a consultant on the project for several years, along with his fellow-Italian Jacopo a Contio, but there were frequent disagreements between them and the English chief engineer, Sir Richard Lee, continuing to at least 1564.