On a Grander Scale: The Outstanding Career of Sir Christopher Wren (Hardcover)

On A Grander Scale: The Outstanding Career of Sir Christopher Wren is Lisa Jardine's (aptly titled) expansive and scholarly biography of the architect responsible for some of London's finest buildings. Wren was not only an extremely talented architect; he was also a gifted mathematician, inventor, anatomist and astronomer. The latter interest, Jardine reveals, shaped his designs for the Greenwich Observatory, St Paul's cathedral and the Monument to the Great Fire of London, which was constructed with a scientific laboratory in its basement.

Illuminating Wren's perpetual commitment, and his contributions, to science forms the major part of this study. (Later in life, Wren himself complained that he "had been obliged to spend all his time in rubbish" instead of working on his true vocation, science.) One of the most compelling aspects of Jardine's book, however, proves to be her thorough examination of the influence of the regicide on Wren¹s life and career. Wren's father and uncle were distinguished Royalists who idolised the martyred Charles I during the Commonwealth era. At the Restoration, Charles II rewarded faithful old Royalists by giving them and their offspring senior positions in his deeply nepotistic court. Wren and many of his circle--including John Evelyn, Robert Hooke and Robert Boyle--were recipients of such patronage. As this impressive work shows, the ideals of the Royal restoration and the architect's own ambitious building schemes were always inextricably linked.--Travis Elborough

Of Ingenious Pursuits (1999): 'LJ has the knack of making science easy to understand. Her book brilliantly recaptures the excitement of the seventeenth-century scientists and the new word of objects they were finding and theorizing' Roy Porter Of Wordly Goods: 'A pleasure to read, as well as a pleasure to hold' Observer

'He lived more than ninety years, not for himself, but for the public good', said Sir Christopher Wren's epitaph, and Lisa Jardine's new biography is a fascinating study of the architect who gave his nation what is still its pre-eminent public building, St Paul's Cathedral. Jardine, a writer and academic with an impressive string of publications, university posts and awards to her name, stands in proper awe of Wren's 'brilliant versatility of mind', which she explains in the context of the intellectual and political times in which he lived. She begins with an exciting discovery which sets the compass of the rest of the book. Wren's Monument to the Great Fire, the column that stands in the City of London to mark the site of the outbreak of the 1666 conflagration, has a hidden laboratory in the basement, to be used in conjunction with the hinged 'lid' on the urn that tops the structure to make observations and experiments. Similarly, Wren's genius was based on scientific pioneering as much as his understanding of aesthetic harmonies. He lived through a period of great transition in the arts, politics and learning. He was an enthusiastic supporter of Charles II, restored to the throne in 1660, and a leading scientist of an age that, while making ground-breaking discoveries in physics, chemistry, medicine astronomy and engineering, was also wedded to centuries-old 'knowledge' rooted in earthy folkloric cures and religious taboos and superstitions. The creation of his great buildings is dealt with in fascinating detail, from conception to completion. Greenwich and Chelsea hospitals, combining beauty and function with sublime grace, are another two masterpieces, though the drawings of some projects that never came to fruition leave a tantalizing sense of what might have been. And of course, St Paul's, the crowning achievement, though the brilliant, dedicated but truly modest polymath would, claims Jardine, have been mortified to hear it claimed as his 'monument'. (Kirkus UK)

A lucid portrait, abrim with encyclopedic detail, of the English architect, scientist, and inventor. Biographers, it is true, have long overlooked Wren (1632-1723), but British historian Jardine (Ingenious Pursuits, 1999, etc.) incorrectly claims that hers is "the first integrated modern account of his career." Not so: Adrian Tinniswood's His Invention So Fertile (2002) was both integrated and modern, if a little on the slow side. Without supplanting Tinniswood's biography, which is more scientifically fluent, Jardine's is more pleasurable to read as it covers much of the same ground. The author marvels, and appropriately so, at Wren's scholarly attainments, extraordinary even in an age when such brilliant, multitalented individuals as John Locke, Samuel Pepys, and William Harvey were working their wonders. Jardine does not shy away from the gruesome subjects of Wren's early scientific experiments; he once claimed that he could "easily contrive to convey any liquid Poison into the Mass of Blood" and set about doing so by slicing open an unfortunate dog and introducing into it "2 ounces of Infusion of Crocus Metall: thus injected, the Dog immediately fell a Vomitting, & so vomited till he died." Fortunately for the dogs of London (and squeamish readers), Wren turned to architecture, designing St. Paul's Cathedral and other grand structures in the aftermath of the great London fire of 1666. Caught up in the complex, antimonarchical political struggles sweeping England, he had a way of picking the losing side, which diminished his reputation within his lifetime. Jardine remarks sympathetically that "the failure of each of his royal patrons in turn . . . to see through to completion the great buildings Wren designed for them as their 'great Monuments' was symptomatic of their failure to give moral leadership," and symptomatic of the difficulties he faced as an artist dependent on a fickle, endangered audience. As solid as its subject's surviving buildings, and a useful addition to Restoration studies. (16-page color insert, b&w illustrations throughout) (Kirkus Reviews)