Understanding Roman Architecture From A Distance: Sir Christopher Wren on the Temples of Peace and of Mars the Avenger

Abstract

Abstract The large majority of British architects in the seventeenth century had not seen Greek or Roman architecture with their own eyes. This chapter considers the process of grasping Roman architecture from a distance, starting with the first English editions of Serlio, Scamozzi, and Vignola. The main part of the chapter is devoted to the descriptions Sir Christopher Wren wrote of two Roman monuments, the Temple of Peace and the Temple of Mars the Avenger, without ever having set eyes on them. These texts document the change from the first efforts to learn how to handle the classical orders to a critical analysis of Roman buildings that is informed by Wren's experimental attitude. At the same time, while Wren subjects Roman architecture to empirical scrutiny like any other natural or artificial phenomenon, he brings to its understanding the same rhetorical and emblematic knowledge as his sixteenth‐ and seventeenth‐century predecessors used. His Tracts thus stand at an important crossroads in European architectural thought. They move away from Renaissance deference to classical authority toward critical scrutiny based on the new empirical science that was developed at the Royal Society, of which Wren was a founding member, and thus prepared the way for Enlightenment revisions of Vitruvianism. At the same time, paradoxically, by bringing to bear traditional early modern rhetorical and emblematic modes of thought on the problem of the meaning and expressive character of the orders, Wren announces eighteenth‐century approaches to design that would start from the effect of a building on the spectator, of which the Picturesque is the most obvious instance.