His Invention So Fertile: A Life of Christopher Wren Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

His Invention So Fertile: A Life of Christopher Wren Book

In his biography His Invention So Fertile: A Life of Christopher Wren Adrian Tinniswood offers a sweeping account of Sir Christopher Wren, allegedly the greatest architect England ever produced. Wren's long life spanned the English and Scientific Revolutions, the Restoration of the monarchy in 1688, the Great Fire of London and the creation of the most enduring of all London monuments, St Paul's Cathedral. As Tinniswood points out, Wren was a key player in all these events, "a man who made ground-breaking discoveries in optics, astronomy, anatomy, mathematics; a man who combined his scientific interests with an architectural career spanning six reigns and nearly six decades; the arbiter of architectural taste to generations of designers and courtiers". Tinniswood tries to put the man back into the genius, despite conceding that "we need to appreciate that Wren's work was his life". The domestic details of Wren's complex private life are carefully detailed, but Tinniswood often seems overawed by his hero, especially when trying to come to grips with the finer points of Wren's mathematical achievements and his extraordinary architectural output, which require a more scholarly grasp than Tinniswood is able to provide. Concluding that no one "has ever possessed as much vision as Christopher Wren", some may feel that Tinniswood himself has identified, but ultimately failed to capture the precise nature of this remarkable vision. --Jerry BrottonRead More

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  • Foyles

    Christopher Wren (1632-1723) was the greatest architect Britain has ever known. But he was more than that. A founder of the Royal Society, he mapped the moon and the stars, investigated the problem of longitude and the rings of Saturn, and carried out groundbreaking experiments into the circulation of the blood. His observations on comets, meteorology and muscular action made vital contributions to the developing ideas of Newton, Halley and Boyle. His Invention So Fertile presents the first complete picture of this towering genius: the Surveyor-General of the King's Works, running the nation's biggest architectural office and wrestling with corruption and interference; the pioneering anatomist; the mathematician, devising new navigational instruments and lecturing on planetary motion. It also shows us the man behind the legend. Wren was married and widowed twice, he fathered a mentally handicapped child, quarrelled with his colleagues and fell foul of his employers. He scrambled over building sites and went to the theatre and drank in coffee-houses. The book explores what it was like to be at Oxford during the Commonwealth, as a generation struggled to make sense of a society in chaos; it recreates the tensions which tore apart the court of James II; it brings to life the petty jealousies that formed an integral part of both the building world and scientific milieu of the Royal Society. Above all, His Invention So Fertile makes clear to the general reader and the art historian just why Wren remains a cultural icon - both a creation and a creator of the world he lived in.

  • Blackwell

    This portrait of Christopher Wren (1632-1723), the great British architect, aims to show us the man behind the legend - a man who was the Surveyor of the King's Works, a pioneering anatomist and mathematician, who devised new navigational...

  • 0712673644
  • 9780712673648
  • Adrian Tinniswood
  • 2 May 2002
  • Pimlico
  • Paperback (Book)
  • 480
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