His Invention So Fertile A Life of Christopher Wren by Adrian Tinniswood Oxford University Press, 463 pp., $35 SI monumentum requiris, circumspice. So runs the famous inscription on Christopher Wren’s tomb: “If you seek his monument, look around.” And what you see is the whole of St. Paul’s, the cathedral Wren began designing for London in 1666. At the end of “His Invention So Fertile”–the first biography of Wren in a generation–Adrian Tinniswood asserts that as a scientist, astronomer, and architect, Wren was responsible for far more. “If you seek his monument, look around.” And what you see is much of the modern world. It’s an exaggerated claim, of course. The truth is, whatever our verdict on Wren’s influence, previous ages did not regard even his architecture as sacrosanct. By the time Wren was an old man, tastes had already changed, and his “English Baroque” style struck the next generation–prissier in their neoclassicism–as ornate and old-fashioned. Town-planning, road-widening, and the taste for Gothic revival all took a shocking toll in the succeeding centuries. The Victorians demolished almost as many of Wren’s designs as Hitler’s Luftwaffe did. The last of Wren’s legendary City of London churches to fall to English hands was All Hallows in Lombard Street, leveled in 1939. And then the miracle happened. During the Blitz, St. Paul’s Cathedral somehow escaped major damage, and its dome rose triumphantly from amidst a smoking wasteland as the symbol of England’s fortitude. Wren became a national icon, and the rebuilding of London after World War II reminded everyone of the rebuilding of London that Wren had overseen after the Great Fire of 1666. Born in 1632, Christopher Wren had first seemed bound for a career in the Church of England. His father was the dean of Windsor and his Uncle Matthew the bishop of Ely. Both were fervent supporters of Charles I and Archbishop Laud, who were endeavoring to overhaul Anglicanism during the 1630s. “Laudians” like the Wren family wanted congregations to kneel before communion rails and altars–in churches refurbished with statuary and wall-paintings–rather than to remain seated in plain pews where bread and wine were brought to them from simple communion tables. Such Laudian changes were vilified as “popish,” and Charles’s control of church and state started unraveling during the late 1630s. Laud was beheaded in 1645, King Charles in 1649. Oliver Cromwell and his Puritans held sway until the Restoration of Charles II (and Anglicanism) in 1660. During such interesting times, there was no career for the young Wren in the church. Wren’s father, driven from his parishes, mooched around during the 1640s, failing to find work as a schoolmaster. In 1642, Uncle Matthew was imprisoned in the Tower of London where, unconvicted of any offense, he remained for eighteen years. Meanwhile Christopher was educated at Westminster School, where his contemporaries included John Locke and John Dryden, and at Wadham College, Oxford. The Warden of Wadham College, John Wilkins–who, in 1652, married Cromwell’s widowed sister–had been installed by the Puritan regime, but he was a doctrinal moderate and an impresario of the “new philosophy” (as modern science was then known) that was already flourishing. Even as a schoolboy Wren had displayed a virtuosity for making sundials and other instruments, and Wilkins proceeded to introduce the young prodigy to all the right people. (Indeed, during the 1650s, Wren dined with Cromwell, who told him that his Uncle Matthew “may come out if he will,” but Matthew angrily rejected any pardon from Cromwell’s “detestable tyranny” and remained in the Tower.) TO THE sightseers who now throng Wren’s buildings–St. Paul’s Cathedral, the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford, the library of Trinity College, Cambridge, the Royal Naval Hospital at Greenwich, Chelsea Hospital, and the City Churches in London–Wren’s scientific work outside architecture is, at best, obscure. But Wren had a remarkable series of careers. He was a professor of astronomy in London by age twenty-four and the Savilian Professor at Oxford by twenty-nine. In “His Invention So Fertile,” Tinniswood celebrates Wren’s “ground-breaking discoveries in optics, astronomy, anatomy, mathematics,” but Wren’s lasting achievements as a scientist are debatable. During his twenties, his “New Theories, Inventions, and Mechanick Improvements” brought him fame, both in Oxford and London, as a visionary of the new philosophy. But, as Tinniswood sees, many of his mechanick improvements seem closer to the gadgetry of late-night television ads–It slices! It dices!–than to hard science. During the 1650s, Wren was tinkering with submarines, talking statues, and a double-writing instrument. To Charles II, Wren presented microscopic drawings of fleas and lice, but it was his presentation of a “lunar globe” to the restored monarch–a result of Wren’s telescopic surveys–that was acclaimed as a marvel. Wren also proved himself a dab hand at canine splenectomies and other gruesome vivisections. In 1663 he assured the Royal Society that he had found “sympathetic medicine”–treating a patient’s handkerchief, for instance, instead of the patient–to be efficacious. When his second wife became ill with thrush, Wren prescribed a bag of bog-lice to be worn around her neck; again he claimed success. Wren was hardly alone in such endeavors. For many of its practitioners, the new philosophy was not so far removed from the old mumbo jumbo. Seventeenth-century British scientific genius witnessed William Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood, Robert Boyle’s chemical experiments, and Isaac Newton’s “Opticks” and “Principia Mathematica.” But on his deathbed, Harvey submitted to useless bleedings, futile and dangerous treatments that his own discovery of blood’s circulation should have discredited. Boyle spent years endeavoring to wangle the philosopher’s stone from an elusive bunch of Rosicrucians. Newton was a closet alchemist and apocalypsist. The curious thing about Wren, however, is that he abandoned most of his scientific interests in his early thirties to follow architecture as a career. Tinniswood provides salient and absorbing details of how Wren’s family background in conservative Anglican politics as well as his own scientific gifts may have influenced this mysterious swerve toward architecture that has always perplexed scholars. But Tinniswood can’t quite pluck out the heart of Wren’s decision to disengage himself from science and the Royal Society during the 1660s. Did Wren, he wonders, find himself networking more effectively with conservative clerics than with scientific meliorists? My own hunch is that Wren intuited that the new philosophy had not attained a point at which it could deliver many practical benefits. Perhaps Wren sensed–despite an apparent “contempt for his own easy mastery of every known branch of scientific thought”–that the technological apex of science was still not within reach. CHRISTOPHER’S father died two years before the Restoration. But in 1660 Matthew was reinstalled as Bishop of Ely, and in 1663 he secured and funded his nephew’s first architectural contract: a chapel for Pembroke College, Cambridge. Wren visited Paris between July 1665 and March 1666, and it was there he met Lorenzo Bernini, the architect and sculptor who had already changed the face of Italy and was set to begin on France. “Bernini’s Designs of the Louvre I would have given my Skin for,” Wren wrote after their short interview, “but the old reserv’d Italian gave me but a few Minutes View.” Yet Bernini (who told Louis XIV, “Let no one speak to me of anything small”) and Louis XIV (who replied, “I see that this is indeed the man as I imagined him. . . . As far as money is concerned, there need be no restriction”) helped inspire Wren with a vision of grand architecture. The Great Fire devastated London in September 1666, six months after Wren’s return from France. (Margaret Boerner quips that he probably set the fire himself so he could redesign the city’s tangled medieval streets.) After six days picking through London’s smoldering “Rubbish,” Wren presented Charles II with a comprehensive plan for a new city. Critics have since complained that its “European” geometrical plazas and avenues were–like L’Enfant’s plan for Washington, D.C.–somehow alien to the “English temperament.” Whatever the case, Wren’s extraordinary plan was thwarted by the immediate need to rebuild and insurmountable problems of land-title. (Even World War II failed to obliterate London’s medieval configuration.) But there was still much for Wren to do as King’s Commissioner for the Rebuilding of London. The city needed a brand-new cathedral and a fresh panorama of parish churches in contemporary classical styles. ENGLAND’S continuing ecclesiastical crises also affected Wren’s church architecture, as sour memories of the Puritan abolition of Anglicanism yielded to worries about the Catholic sympathies of Charles II and James II. Wren’s first idea for St. Paul’s–the glorious “Great Model”–was rejected as too “popish.” Wren wept. His grand vision of architecture was repeatedly thwarted by an impecunious court and a parsimonious church and city. The constant changes of personnel in the court, church, and city also proved a vexation. Wren took some bribes, threw some tantrums, and engaged in some dodgy practices, but these were all part of the workaday world of the building trades. Even in St. Paul’s as completed–Europe’s first purpose-built Protestant cathedral–“there was,” as Tinniswood observes, “an air of popery about the gilded capitals, the heavy arches, and the opulent carving.” Wren’s decisions were, however, aesthetic rather than doctrinal. During the tumultuous events of his long life, Cromwell’s dinner guest of the 1650s found himself “invincibly armed against all the enchantments of Enthusiasm.” Yet his “Happy Invention of a Pulpit on Wheels” for St. Paul’s still reflects his youthful enthusiasm for gadgetry. Other churches soared around the city before the cathedral dome was finished in 1708 when Wren was seventy-six years old. What the Anglican establishment looked for in its London churches after 1660 was an elegant “box” that would audibly accommodate preachers, and what the individual parishes wanted was to top them off with unusual or high steeples (preferably both, if funds for “steeple envy” permitted). Tinniswood emphasizes that Wren has frequently been given too much credit for “his” City Churches–only six are attributable to him alone–but their vision and vocabulary register what their prime mover communicated to his fellow designers. Unfortunately, Wren’s team was not contracted to plan their interiors. Only St. Paul’s realized the full vision of Wren, and its sumptuous altar-pieces and rails looked back to Laudian priorities. Tinniswood can write with a dry and economical wit. The narrative can lose its way in a mass of incidental detail, but episodes like the collapse of a coastal quarry which provided St. Paul’s with its sole source of Portland Stone–and the ensuing difficulties with finances, logistics, and quarrymen–are important moments in both the cathedral’s history and Wren’s biography. Even the information that a bronze plate for one of the designs upon which Wren modeled his “lunar globe” was melted down to make a tea pot provides a whimsical anecdote that Wren’s contemporaries would have savored. What Tinniswood cannot provide are many facts about Wren’s private life because, like the “lunar globe” and half his City Churches, these have vanished. Wren’s references to his family are scant. All but one of his nine sisters are noted “only for their marriages, or the dates of their deaths, or both, or none.” Wren married his first wife, Faith Coghill, in 1669; in 1675 she died of smallpox. Seventeen months later he married Jane Fitzwilliam, who died in 1680. Wren had two children by each wife. The first of these died in infancy; the third was “Poor Billy,” a handicapped boy. The second was another architect, also named Christopher, who championed his father’s reputation (and added the resonant epitaph to his father’s tomb). His only daughter Jane was a gifted musician who never married and kept house for her father. Wren was single or widowed for all but nine of his ninety-one years, and left none of that dirty linen through which biographers now enjoy rummaging. What little evidence there is suggests he was a good husband and loving father. His many friends loved him. STILL, Wren’s background and life are better documented than Shakespeare’s, and his immensely varied professional and intellectual life are far better documented. But it is his art that commands attention. While I was growing up amidst the rubbish of postwar London, St. Paul’s and the surviving City Churches seemed simply to be: the work of God rather than of human mind and hands. But Christopher Wren actually did build them, and Tinniswood’s “His Invention So Fertile” provides an enthralling description of his mind and hands. In London, at least, si monumentum requiris, circumspice. Hugh Ormsby-Lennon teaches eighteenth-century literature at Villanova University.
