Probably Wren had little sympathy with the efforts of that typical Frenchman Philibert de l’Orme to invent new Orders a century earlier; and is there a finer epigram of architecture than the phrase in italics?
But his travels took him wider than Versailles.
“After the incomparable Villas of Vaux and Maisons, I shall but name Ruel, Courances, Chilly, Essoane, St. Maur, St. Mande, Issy, Meudon, Rincy, Chantilly, Verneul, Lioncour, all which, and I might add many others, I have survey’d; and that I might not lose the Impressions of them, I shall bring you almost all France in Paper, which I found by some or other ready design’d to my Hand, in which I have spent both Labour and some Money.”
Would that Wren’s collections and drawings had been preserved with something of the faithfulness which makes the Adam collection at Sir John Soane’s Museum such a mine of information on one of Wren’s greatest successors. One reference is helpful as showing the source of much of Wren’s detail, though the work itself is informing without his note:
“I have purchas’d a great deal of Taille-douce, that I might give our Country-men Examples of Ornaments and Grotesks, in which the Italians themselves confess the French to excel.”
It would have been better if Wren had relied more on English decorative motives.
Unfortunately there is silence in the letter on the purpose of the jaunt abroad. Was the stay in Paris the prelude to an intended visit to Italy, or was it an end in itself? It is odd that he should not have followed the example of Inigo Jones and studied the Renaissance at its source, but there is no written evidence that he ever projected an extension of his journey southwards. The effect of the Paris journey was to give a French accent to Wren’s work throughout his life, and to dilute the current of Palladian influence, which was not fully renewed in England until the Earl of Burlington, William Kent, and others returned to Inigo Jones and his Italian master as the fountains of inspiration.
It is useless to speculate as to how Wren would have developed on a fuller Italian basis. His art would have been more informed: he would almost certainly have avoided the technical uncertainties that mar some of his finest achievements: but he could hardly have lost the freedom and inventiveness which make him one of the most individual of English architects.
One of the results of Wren’s French orientation might have been that of becoming a follower of Vignola rather than Palladio. In spite, however, of Mansard’s work at Maisons and Blois, Wren, probably from the influence of his great predecessor, Inigo Jones, remained on the whole faithful to Palladio and the Ancients. As we shall see, the two-order system of the exterior of St. Paul’s was a practical necessity, and not an artistic preference. There is evidence enough from his work that he did not regard architecture as bound up with the application of Orders to building, or as the only means of salvation.