Wren’s Stylistic Development

In the half century since the completion of the elaborate, twenty-volume Wren Society project (Oxford University Press, 1924-43), supposedly the definitive account of the architect and his works, scholars have bit by bit corrected the record, adding a great deal of new information, even turning up missing designs and piecing together more reliable sequences of plans for various projects. All of this should have contributed to a better understanding of Wren's development and of his place in the English architectural tradition; but since most of this new information is scattered across many books and articles, and since these are aimed primarily at specialists, the implications of this accumulated knowledge have not yet percolated up into the world of architectural history. Thus, the outmoded interpretations that the Wren Society volumes helped foster and that have informed subsequent architectural commentary hold sway. Despite the labors of more recent scholars, the "received tradition," the tradition students of art history are still absorbing, is that Wren borrows his ideas extensively from European sources. So David Watkin, in A History of Western Architecture (Melbourne: Barry & Jenkins, 1986), explains that Wren's Hampton Court designs "echoed projects for the Louvre by Bernini, François Mansart and Le Vau" (p. 285). Later on Perrault and Sangallo make an appearance as sources, and Watkin even goes so far as to put a photograph of the façade of St. Paul's (p. 288) opposite a photograph of Bernini's colonnade in front of St. Peter's (p. 299) to stress similarity, although a skeptical student might question the oddity of putting a two-level, rectilinear porticoed entrance next to an elliptical colonnade and claiming resemblance. Also, the west towers of St. Paul's are "Borromini-esque" (p. 290), a linkage, to be discussed later, that has been made so often as to become an art history commonplace. Similarly, Spiro Kostof, in his History of Architecture (1985; Oxford University Press, 1995), an academic book currently distributed through an American book club, remarks that "the colonnades of Greenwich Hospital are a match for Bernini's colonnades for the square of St. Peter's [at least this compares colonnades to colonnades], and that the sweep of Hampton Court Palace shares something of the grandeur of Louis XIV's Louvre and Versailles" (p. 550). ¹

Not only did Wren supposedly borrow his ideas from abroad, but, in the generally accepted view, he moved stylistically "from Brunelleschi to Carlo Fontana in his own life-time," i.e., from one Italian influence to another, the former admired for his elegance, his classical symmetries, proportions, and geometrical integration of parts, the latter for his dense detailing, his heavy classical ornamentation, with clustered columns and pilasters, and his interest in curved façades. ² Furthermore, Wren is often considered stylistically distinct from his English successors in that he thought primarily in terms of surface rather than volume and never reached their level of complexity or grandeur. As John Summerson puts it,

Wren had little feeling for the pure relation of one volume to another, for the spacing of openings in plain masonry or for the effective recession of one surface behind another.... He was embarrassed by sheer mass... [His] heart was in the motifs he was deploying rather than the planes and volumes over which he deployed them. Now, in the style of Wren's two successors this attitude was completely reversed. Sheer mass became their passion. ³

According to the standard view, Wren emerges as something of an anomaly, isolated from his own culture, importing ideas from foreign sources throughout his career, and at the end leaving the field to other more forceful, more original, more fully Baroque architects. He is cut off from both the English examples that might have influenced him and the followers he might have influenced.

I intend to make a different case for Wren's stylistic development, emphasizing his originality, and placing him back within an indigenous tradition that does not...