Sir Christopher Wren, P. R. S. (1632-1723)

Abstract Christopher Wren was at the very centre of the group to which the Royal Society owes its origin. It was after his astronomy lectures at Gresham College in 1660 that the meetings took place at which the Society was created and it was to him that the composition of the pre-amble to the charter was entrusted. He participated regularly in the Society’s activities in the first three years of its existence and always maintained his interest in it. He was President in 1680-82. There exists no authoritative account of Wren’s scientific work: indeed, there is as yet no biography of him which is anything like definitive. In the absence of such a work the study of Wren is haunted by an enigma which may well seem more formidable than it really is. This enigma is the relationship of what are held to be his two quite distinct careers; his career as an experimental philosopher, in the course of which he made fairly substantial contributions in the fields of biology, astronomy and physics; and his career as an architect, in the course of which he reached a level of artistic performance unique in the England of his time and of European consequence. The question arises: were these two careers distinct in origin, developing from two sides of a personality or did Wren’s architecture develop naturally out of or alongside his scientific studies? For us today the problem is bedevilled by those distinctions between ‘scientific’ and ‘artistic’ which were erected in the course of the nineteenth century and which it is extremely misleading to attempt to apply in the seventeenth.