Editing Christopher Wren (section)

=== Early architectural work ===
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| image1 = Later Renaissance Pembroke College Library Cambridge Plate 135 0166 (cropped).jpg
| image2 = Sheldonian Theatre, 2011.jpg
| image3 = Emmanuel College Front Court, Cambridge, UK - Diliff.jpg
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| caption2 = Sheldonian Theatre
| caption1 = Pembroke Chapel
| caption3 = Emmanuel College Chapel
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}}Wren's first known foray into architecture came after his uncle, [[Matthew Wren]], [[Bishop of Ely]], offered to finance a new chapel for [[Pembroke College, Cambridge]]. Matthew commissioned his nephew for the design, finding the architecturally inexperienced Christopher to be both ideologically sympathetic and stylistically deferential. Wren produced his design in the Winter of 1662 or 1663 and the chapel was completed in 1665.

Wren's second, similarly collegiate work followed soon after, when he was commissioned to design Oxford's "[[Sheldonian Theatre|New Theatre]]", financed by [[Gilbert Sheldon]].<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Geraghty|first=Anthony|date=2002|title=Wren's Preliminary Design for the Sheldonian Theatre|url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/1568785|journal=Architectural History|volume=45|pages=275–288|doi=10.2307/1568785|jstor=1568785|issn=0066-622X}}</ref> His design for the structure was met with lukewarm to negative reception, with even Wren's defenders admitting the young architect to have not yet been "capable of handling a large architectural composition with assurance".<ref name=":0" /> Adrian Tinniswood credits the building's flaws to "Sheldon's refusal to pay for an elaborate exterior, Wren's inability to find an adequate external expression for a building which was wholly conditioned by the functionality of its interior space and, ...his refusal to bend the knee to classical authority in the way that our experience of eighteenth-century architecture has conditioned us to believe is right."<ref name=":0" /> Prior to the theatre's 1669 completion, Wren had received further commissions for the Garden Quadrangle at [[Trinity College, Oxford]], and the chapel of [[Emmanuel College, Cambridge]].<ref name=":0" />

Wren left for Paris in July 1665 on his first and only trip abroad. In France, the architect encountered an architectural milieu more closely linked to the ideals of the [[Italian Renaissance]]. Wren also met  Gian Lorenzo Bernini, who was "widely acknowledged by contemporaries as the greatest artist of the century". Though Bernini's concrete influence on Wren's designs was transmitted via published plans and engravings, the encounter surely impacted the budding architect and his vocational trajectory.<ref name=":0" />