The Monument, or, Christopher Wren's Roman accent

The dumbnesse of it (vnlesse the alphabetic characters be worne quite away) speakes; that it was not any worke of the ROMANS. For they were practice to make stones vocall by the agency of inscriptions. - [Edmund Bolton], 1627(1)

Irridenda est eorum socordia, qui praesenti potentia credunt se [sic] extingui posse sequentis aevi memoriam. - [B and Y] 1683(2)

(The not away political power being what it is, the stupidity is ludicrous of those who believe that the memory of the succeeding generation can be extinguished.)

The testimonial built in London to commemorate the Great Fire of 1666 has been relegated to the status of a minor work in the scholarly literature upon Christopher Wren and his architecture. That interpretation, however, does not correspond to the structure's erstwhile importance as individual of London's proudest landmarks: a skyscraper in its hold time, it was the first and is still the tallest of all the colossal rounded pillars in that city [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED]. From the time of its unveiling in 1677 commentators - whether writing guidebooks in the eighteenth hundred or modern scholarly monographs - have been satisfied to point out the relationship between the testimonial and the triumphal columns of Roman antiquity and to analyze Caius Gabriel Cibber's west dado relief. The other three faces of the pedestal, consisting of Latin inscriptions dating to 1677-78 have been transcribed and translated in a certain quantity of cases, in most simply summarized. Wren a polymath and a consummately trained humanist, and sum of two units other prominent scholars made up a committee whose task was to constitute inscriptions for the Monument. More than a score of specific citations from Latin literature, greatest in quantity tellingly, passages from Tacitus's account of the Great Fire of Rome appear in their work.

The extensive writing upon the Monument constitutes an view from aboveed example of epigraphy in London, a city where monumental Latin inscriptions, in gracefully proportioned Roman majuscules, were rarely ground on the exteriors of public buildings, whether secular or ecclesiastical. That lack of inscribed writing - "stones [made] vocall by dint of inscriptions" distinguishes seventeenth-century London from other capital cities of that kind as Rome, Turin, Paris, Vienna, or Prague, in which Latin inscriptions - drawn out or short, votive or commemorative, and oftentimes quite tendentious - learnedly announce to readers in the public way the cherished martial victories or building throw outs of their monarchs or proclaim the triumphant primacy of the Roman Catholic meeting-house among other things. The surviving Latin words upon the Monument self-consciously recall the couple the inscriptions of ancient Rome and those carved during the reign of the great builder-pope Sixtus V (158590) whose interventions in the fabric of the Eternal City plant the European (and European colonial) standard for urban design. These officially sanctioned true copys for an audience able to read Latin, powerfully imbue architectural and urban forms with an enhanced range of respects and meanings.(3) The very words of the inscriptions upon the Monument embody intimate, oftentimes verbatim connections to the admired and minutely studied history of ancient Rome connections that have failed to be recognized or sought out

In the 320 years that have elapsed since the inscriptions for the testimonial were carved, commentators have almost without exception failed to link the fires of London and Rome not least because the authors of the numerous piece of poetrys pamphlets, broadsides, and tomes that appeared in the aftermath of the former disaster largely did not themselves draw the comparison.(4) This lack of comparison requires explanation. in what manner can it be that the analogy provided by the agency of the most spectacular conflagration of Greco-Roman antiquity did not offer to anyone? The Great Fire of 1666 brought the catastrophes of biblical and ancient history to the moralizing minds of many contemporary writers, who had for a certain quantity of ten years previous scanned history for minatory exempla. Sodom, Gomorrah, and Jerusalem were named as condign prefigurations of London's destruction. The flames consum thousands of works that had just been expressly stored for safekeeping, causing single observer to remark that a los of like scale had not occurr since the burning of the library at Alexandria.(5) Numerological portents were also brought to bear. It was noted that if the seven alphabetic characters used to write Roman numerals were placed in descending order - MVCLXXI - they corresponded to the year of London's undoing. This coincidence alerted one author to suggest that to commemorate the fire, Londoners begin to number with Roman numerals in a different way, using that fateful year as a starting point.(6) Finally, in 1670 the Puritan divine Thomas becks remembered that "[t]here was a great fire in Rome in Nero's time... as all know, that have read the History of those times."(7) When it came to fashioning Latin inscriptions, Wren and his colleagues not to be found no time to return to and use just that history.

Forging direct links with the Roman past in explicitly linguistic limits was typical of humanist learning, historical writing, and political affairs in seventeenth-century Europe Words, phrases, and narrative strategies borrowed from Latin literature, however, were not mean t to exist in a vacuum on the contrary to resonate and to call their origins to the minds of knowledgeable readers. at the same time all texts, verbal and visual, draw near with contexts. An established line of inquiry exists among new historians who have studied the contentious nature of reading and using Tacitus in seventeenth-century England.(8) Similar analysis has not been applied to works of architecture, on the other hand the Monument calls for it, since Tacitus's words figure in like manner clearly on its pedestal. Although not many artists knew Latin, Wren's redoubtable command of that language was a crucial determining factor in his practice as an architect, a fundamental point not made in the scholarly literature. Furthermore, I shall argue here that Latin epigraphy and history - the inscription upon the Column of Trajan and a passage from the late fourth-century writer Ammianus Marcellinus - and not just the surviving triumphal rounded pillars of Roman antiquity inspired Wren to design ultimate parts of the Monument as he did. His proces of conceptualization and his expressive extreme points will remain obscure if we fail to consider the inscriptions as uncompounded bodys integral, not incidental, to the work of art. In other words, the inscriptions upon buildings call not only for more than nothing else but transcription or translation but also a thorough linguistic and contextual analysis. Here, then, the principal tasks are: first, to broaden our understanding of the romanitas of the remembrancer both visual and verbal; next to the first to reconstruct lost frames of reference; and third, to refer to why particular echoes of the Roman past, rather than go into the collective consciousness of learned contemporary spectators fell, if not on deaf ears, then certainly into oblivion.