1676 Trinity College Wren Library

Trinity Library was begun in 1676, and completed internally in 1690. It is, according to Pevsner, one of Wren's most mature and perfect works. "The Library must have come as a revelation to Cambridge, still used to such fundamentally unclassical buildings... Here was sonerous grandeur, without bragging, simplicity and ease combined with a mastery of the Romance idiom (more French in detail than Italian, although the shadow of Sansovino's library at Venice looms in the background). It made everything else look fussy and finicky."

[Thumbnail image of Trinity College Wren Library, West side]
Trinity College Wren Library, West side

The architecture is a highly successful compromise, executed in a typically Baroque fashion. There was a desire to have a classical facade, and a seemingly inconsistent practical requirement for the library to have windows positioned above bookshelves. The solution was to fill in the tympana of the arches on the ground floor of the East facade. This allowed the first floor to be as low as the bottom of the tympana, and level with the first floors of the North and South ranges of Nevile's Court. The low first floor also necessitated the unusual blank horizontal panels underneath the entablatures of the gates in the West facade.

The libary is built of cream and pink Ketton stone, the hues of which are brought out particulary well by the evening sun on the West elevation.

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