The History of Cities and their Architecture
by Barry Wright
Essay: The History of Cities and their Architecture
Pages: 10
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The History of Cities and their Architecture
HEAVEN AND EARTH: discussing the relationships between the church of St Stephen’s Walbrook by Sir
Christopher Wren and Agnolo Bronzino’s Allegory with Venus and Cupid (also known as Venus, Cupid, Folly and
Time).
The current church was designed by Wren to replace an existing building destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666.
Constructed 1672-91, it is an example of English Baroque Architecture and was praised by Palladio as “the truest
proportioned enclosed building in the world”2. Allegory with Venus and Cupid predates the church by a little over
a century (painted C.1546)3. It was likely to have been commissioned by the Medici family and was later sent as a
gift to King Francis I of France4. It is an example of the High Mannerist style of painting which characterised the
late Italian Renaissance.
These two works use a similar vocabulary, drawing on classical forms, but the rhetoric of each is very different. The
painting is a taut, visceral image: it shows the complex agony of the desires of the flesh. It is explicit to the point of
antagonism and unusually, it appears not to be a straightforward moralistic, ‘anti-vice’ allegory5 .
The church rejects the high drama of the painting. Wren's restrained baroque styling is applied in a rational
scheme with emphasis on harmony, space and light. It is a sanctuary from the noisy, overcrowded, foul smelling
and necessarily earthly surroundings (in 1685 the North door of the building was bricked up against the odours
from the slaughter houses)6. By excluding the darkness and turmoil of the streets, Wren provided an enclosure of
purity for the parishioners of St Stephen’s - a different vision from Bronzino’s allegory.
One of the most stri...
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