Since Sir Christopher Wren has come to be perceived, in the words of his Edwardian champion Reginald Blomfield, as "the most English of all English architects", it is now difficult to imagine him as following any other profession. Nonetheless, in the opening page of his new book, Adrian Tinniswood quotes the late Sir John Summerson's observation that had Wren died at the age of 30, he would have been regarded subsequently as "a figure of some importance in English scientific thought, but without the word 'architecture' occurring once in his biographies".
While he was always destined for success - his friend Robert Hooke wrote that "since the time of Archimedes, there scarce ever met in one man, in so great a perfection, such a Mechanical Hand and so Philosophical a Mind" - the precise focus of his activities remained unclear for many years. As a young academic, his interests were many and varied, covering such fields as anatomy, geography and navigation, microscopy and astronomy - he became Oxford's Savilian Professor of the last of these in 1661.
Unusual as it may seem in our more specialist age, this engagement with a diverse range of subjects was typical of a period which could be said to have had curiosity almost as its most distinctive characteristic. In one of his many amusing asides, for example, Tinniswood tells how, after the Great Fire of London in 1666, a Fellow of the Royal Society called Edmund Wylde made a hole in an early 16th century coffin which had been disinterred and, in the interests of scientific research, drank some of the liquid found inside; he subsequently reported "Twas of a kind of insipid tast, something of an Ironish tast".
While Wren did not go quite to these extremes, he did show an extraordinary propensity for operating on dogs in order to see whether they could live without their spleen - sometimes yes, sometimes no, was the answer, depending, it would seem, principally on whether the animal was sufficiently robust to survive surgery without anaesthetic. And that he should have practised architecture alongside other activities should also be of no great surprise. His friend William Petty, for example, who came to Ireland as Oliver Cromwell's physician and would later become a Professor of Music at Gresham College in London, designed several buildings, including homes for himself in Dublin and Kerry.
Aside from James Gandon's oft-acknowledged later debt to the older architect, Petty provides one of Wren's few Irish connections, another being his fellow scientist Robert Boyle, a son of the Earl of Cork. But Boyle was based in London and it was there, with intermittent forays to Oxford and Cambridge, that Wren spent his life. Only once did he venture overseas and that was during the great plague of 1665 when he travelled to France and spent several months in Paris.Though this was a relatively brief stay and though Wren disapproved of French design - the misogynist in him felt women had too much of a say and were responsible for what he described as "works of Filgrand and little Knacks" - even so, the sojourn would seem to have been crucial for his development as an architect. In particular, he never forgot the grandeur of French classicism and much of his work was an attempt to recreate that in England.
Lacking formal training and with little personal experience of building work elsewhere in Europe, Wren still managed to become the most successful architect of his generation - and indeed, it could be said, of many subsequent generations - because he read all the important texts from Vitruvius to Alberti and Serlio as well as looking at engravings of both ancient and modern structures which were regarded as being of primary importance in terms of their design. From this disciplined examination, he formulated his own version of classicism, one in which formality and order were held in the highest regard and which was therefore eminently suitable for official purposes.
For just under a half century, as surveyor-general of the royal works, Wren was a government employee, while also undertaking a large number of jobs for the Church of England. He scarcely managed any other work and the number of private houses indisputably ascribed to him is tiny. The character of his official position, and the fact that Wren managed to survive through a number of quite turbulent changes of regime, such as the period during which possession of the crown was being disputed between James II and William and Mary, suggest that Wren's temperament was that of a survivor. The difficult circumstances of his upbringing seem to confirm this assessment - his father and uncle, both High Anglican and Royalist clerics, lost their livelihoods when Charles I lost the Civil War.
But a survivor is not necessarily someone possessed of great originality. Wren's determination to hold on to the positions he had secured - typically, even after being appointed surveyor-general, he retained his Oxford astronomy professorship for several years - and his dependence on studying the work of other great architects, surely means that his own work lacks the flair found among his European contemporaries. He was not a risk-taker and cannot therefore be considered one of the masters of the baroque era.
A characteristic of the baroque sensibility is that designers created problems in order to solve them successfully. This was never Wren's way. When he encountered problems, whether with the dome of St Paul's Cathedral in London or the shape of certain sites on which London churches had to be built, he would tackle them with gusto but he avoided making difficulties for himself, perhaps in part because there were plenty of people, usually other architects, prepared to do so. While the decorative detailing of Wren's work may be regarded as baroque, especially elements such as the twin towers on the western facade of St Paul's, in essence his work is safely, even staidly, classical.
It is probably inevitable that Tinniswood holds his subject in high regard and makes great claims for Wren, not least that he "helped to change the course of European cultural history". One of the problems with such grandiose statements is that they should be supported by evidence and this the author fails to provide. He gives scarcely any information about developments in architecture elsewhere in Europe, mentioning Bernini, for example, only because the Italian polymath met Wren in Paris. And while Tinniswood succinctly describes many of the buildings designed by Wren in terms of their specific elements, he offers little explanation as to why the structures as a whole are satisfying. Perhaps this task can only be accomplished by an abundance of illustrations, which this book does not have.
Instead, it is primarily a chronological biography but even within this genre the author has to admit being hampered by a shortage of material. Unlike Pepys or Hooke, Wren left no diaries to provide an insight into his character, his extant correspondence tends to deal with professional matters and his personal life remains a mystery. This regularly leads Tinniswood to engage in rather tiresome interjections such as "if we want to speculate - and why not . . ."
Speculation aside, the eventual impression is of a rather cool and ambitious administrator who ran a large organisation with great competence and an almost imperious authority. Wren was unquestionably also a great architect, although whether he was "Britain's most eminent" as Tinniswood insists, is open to question.
Robert O Byrne is an Irish Times journalist and author