St. Paul's Cathedral, London
description: St. Paul’s Cathedral in London is a magnificent building, a titanic Latin cross of ornately-carved white limestone capped by a lead dome which soars 280 feet (not counting its lantern or its cross) over the streets of London (Britannica). The Baroque cathedral combines a Continental architectural sensibility with a distinctly English attitude to architecture, religion, and even secular power. St. Paul’s Cathedral is built on the site of several older buildings, mostly older cathedrals of St. Paul but also including, supposedly, a Roman temple to the goddess Diana. This latest iteration of the structure was planned and built under the supervision of the architect Christopher Wren after the previous St. Paul’s Cathedral, which had been badly damaged after the troops of Lord Protector of England James Cromwell had used it as a barracks, burnt down during the 1666 Great Fire of London. Wren was commissioned by the English government, which had itself recently been restored from Cromwell’s Protectorate to a monarchy ruled by Charles II, to create a new cathedral to replace the one which had been destroyed, and he did so with aplomb. Aside from the aforementioned massive dome (which is actually composed of three layers: the outer lead dome, an inner masonry dome adorned with frescoes, and a hidden brick cone in between the two to provide structural support), the cathedral boasts a Greco-Roman-style facade, with a two-story Corinthian colonnade and pediment. The Corinthian columns continue around the exterior of the cathedral, sometimes as full columns on the semicircular porticos which open from the secondary facades at the ends of the transept and sometimes as pilasters which frame the building’s windows in sets of two. The tholus (circular colonnade) beneath the cathedral’s dome and the pediments over the second-story windows also refer to classical architecture. The building is marked as baroque, however, by the ornate designs which cover it (e.g. relief carvings of ga…
creator: Interior view: David Illif Exterior view: Steve Cadman Architect: Christopher Wren
source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:St_Paul%27s_Cathedral_Nave,_London,_UK_-_Diliff.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:St_Pauls_Cathedral_from_West_adj.JPG "Saint Paul's Cathedral." Encyclopedia Britannica. Last modified March 17, 2017. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Saint-Pauls-Cathedral-London
date: Completed 1710
contributor: Brendan Glenn
rights: interior: CC-BY-SA 3.0 exterior: CC BY 2.0; free re-use