For many years, Dublin guidebooks ascribed the Royal Hospital, Kilmainham, to Sir Christopher Wren (1632-1723), perhaps on no better authority than that it was Ireland's equivalent to his Chelsea Hospital (both based on the Invalides in Paris though architecturally quite different from each other).
In 1923, no less an expert than Professor (later Sir) Albert Richardson wrote that "the design could not have been produced by any other hand than Wren's. Maurice Craig finally nailed the old canard 50 years ago, pointing out the abundance of contemporary references to the true author of the RHK, the Irish surveyor general Sir William Robinson. Wren, his opposite number in England, had no responsibility for Irish buildings, though, as Edward McParland has established, he did design a prefabricated hut for William of Orange's campaign in 1690. Several of Wren's intellectual friends had Irish connections, notably the political economist and inventor Sir William Petty, who organised the Down Survey, the scientist Robert Boyle and the philosopher William Molyneux. Molyneux served as joint surveyor general of Ireland in 1684-88. McParland has noted that in 1684 Robinson supported Petty in a presentation of one of his inventions (a catamaran) to Wren at the Royal Society. In 1680, Wren was elected president of the society after Boyle had declined the honour.
Though now remembered as an architect, Wren was firstly a scientist and mathematician (he held the post of Savilian professor of astronomy at Oxford from 1661-1673). On the other hand, his associate Robert Hooke, now remembered as a scientist, actually practised as an architect with him, bringing, as Professor Jardine argues, a knowledge of structural engineering to the partnership. Their collaborations included the rebuilding of 50 London churches after the Great Fire of 1666 and the construction of the Monument, the giant Doric column that commemorated it. The innovative design of the support structure for the dome of Wren's masterpiece, St Paul's Cathedral (built 1675-1711), also owes much to Hooke's research. Before the fire, Wren had proposed the construction of a central dome over its medieval predecessor. Seven years after it had been burnt out, he finally got the instruction to design a new cathedral. His design for the Royal Hospital for Seamen at Greenwich (for which he was surveyor-in-charge from 1696 to 1716) was also to have a central dome but he was obliged to retain Inigo Jones's Queen's House as a centrepiece. In resolving potential duality with a twin-domed design, Wren showed a mastery of planning and composition.
Jardine claims to have rediscovered the subtext to the Monument's design; that it was constructed as a scientific observatory. She postulates that it was to be used as a giant telescope, a use for which Wren was also to propose the south-west tower of the new St Paul's. Of Hooke and Wren's gentleman contemporaries in the architectural profession, only John Webb, Inigo Jones's pupil, had received any formal training. In an etymological aside, Jardine notes that Wren described the designer of the original, medieval, St Paul's as an artist; an architect was a "person with technical, construction expertise".
In their early careers, both Hooke and Wren were associated with the "club of virtuosi", scientists and inventors at Oxford in the circle of the warden of Wadham College, John Wilkins. This was during the Commonwealth, when the scions of many Royalist families, Wren and his cousin Matthew included, kept their heads down and busied themselves with science and other non-political academic pursuits, remaining mostly in the provinces. Matthew's father, the Bishop of Ely, had been imprisoned in the Tower; Christopher's father, the former Dean of Windsor, lived in straitened circumstances in a country vicarage. Wilkins, who had embraced the Cromwellian side, acted as protector of the Oxford philosophers. It seems, however, that Wren's contribution to the several early inventions with which he was credited (including a transparent beehive and an instrument for double writing) was in developing and constructing prototypes and in perfecting the ideas of others. Hooke, similarly, was a consummate technician, and was later employed by the Royal Society in that capacity, the only man who could get Boyle's air pump to work. The society, whose early members included the core of Wilkins's group, had been constituted following the restoration of the monarchy in 1660.
Of Lisa Jardine's many books, several have been on the theme of science, art and humanism, a subject indeed popularised by her late father, Jacob Bronowski, author and presenter of the television series, The Ascent of Man, in the early 1970s. Her earlier works have included biographies of Francis Bacon and Erasmus and studies of the Renaissance and the English scientific revolution of Wren's contemporaries. She is professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London, and last year chaired the adjudication panel for the 2002 Man Booker Prize.
The present work is biography rather than architectural history, illustrations of buildings being balanced with portraits, including colour plates. Over 30 books on Wren, both general and specialist, have been published since 1970. He has been well covered by such architectural historians as Kerry Downes, Howard Colvin and John Summerson as well as other specialists, yet he remains a difficult subject. While his descendants published a biography, Parentalia, in 1750, his personal papers are scant compared to those of his friends, Evelyn, Pepys and Hooke. It is through their eyes that one must often view him.
No single volume work can reproduce more than a fraction of the plates in the 20-volume series of the Wren Society, published between 1924 and 1943. Despite all the studies, Wren has not been a particularly fashionable subject in recent decades, partly, one suspects, because of his familiarity as a tourist icon, but also, perhaps, because his brand of early, academic Baroque is seen as a foretaste to the more exciting eccentricities of his followers, Hawksmoor and Vanbrugh. Professor Jardine's book necessarily skips over much of the architectural detail, only three of the London churches, for instance, being described and illustrated. For pictures of his demolished Winchester Palace and the unexecuted designs for Hampton Court and the Greenwich Hospital, one must look elsewhere. Some editorial pruning might have been beneficial. The text seems overburdened in places by lengthy quotations, whole documents being transcribed over two or more pages. Short quotations and indeed comments are sometimes repeated a couple of pages apart, whether for emphasis or for the forgetful is unclear. The footnotes themselves are extensive and show the breadth of sources consulted.
The contemporary influence of Wren on Irish architecture was probably best seen in church design, St Mary's in Dublin, for instance, having a similar plan to St Clement Danes. Surprisingly, despite changes in taste, the influence proved long-lasting, recurring in the late eighteenth century with Gandon's dome on the Dublin Custom House, inspired by Greenwich. Later still, at the turn of the twentieth century, Alfred Brumwell Thomas's City Hall, Belfast, took its dome and other details from St Paul's and Greenwich, while Sir Aston Webb's Government Buildings and College of Science in Dublin was designed in a style popularly known as "Wrenaissance". Wren's contribution to architecture has indeed been long-lasting and deserves to be studied more. On a Grander Scale sets Wren in the tumultuous and challenging times in which he lived. As Lisa Jardine ably chronicles, he was a great survivor, his amiable personality and scientific virtuosity sustaining him for over nine decades.
On A Grander Scale: The Outstanding Career of Sir Christopher Wren, By Lisa Jardine. HarperCollins, 600pp. £25 sterling