Sir Christopher Wren
By Paul Rabbitts
Shire Publications, 96pp, £9.99/$14
Displaying a typically Victorian aversion to the classicising aesthetics of 17th- and 18th-century architecture, Anthony Trollope once attempted to satirise English Palladian and English Baroque styles by saying that they would be called Italian despite the fact that they did not look like anything found in Italy. The criticism was, of course, a cheap shot. Devotees of 19th-century medievalist aesthetics were even more emphatically opposed to slavishly purist imitation of Italian styles than to Anglicisation of them, while such Anglicisation of Italian styles is merely one instance of the more general law of aesthetic evolution – in which artists and architects take the great work of their professional forebears as models to be in part imitated, in part used as a basis for innovation.
