This section is from the book "Character Of Renaissance Architecture", by Charles Herbert Moore. Also available from Amazon: Character of Renaissance Architecture.
Of the architectural treatment of the exterior as a whole little need be said further than that it has no relation to the real form of the building. The masking of the buttress system by the false wall, and the application of orders without any structural use or expression in harmony with the real structure, are entirely in keeping with the spirit the Renaissance.
Wren's other churches exhibit a medley of elements from spurious Gothic to pseudo-classic in manifold irrational combinations, such as can be found in the works of few other architects. These churches with their vaultings of wood and plaster — whether in the form of domes on pendentives, sprung from the entablatures of classic orders, as at St. Stephen's, Walbrook, or with Welsh vaulting on simulated cross ribs of plaster, as at St. Bride's, Fleet Street, or with barrel vaulting on an attic, as at St. Peter's, Cornhill, — it would be superfluous, as well as tiresome, to examine in detail. Nor is it worth while to analyze the spires of these churches. Spires made up of superimposed stories with classic entablatures in telescopic adjustment, like St. Bride's, or temples of Vesta crowned with flying buttresses holding up neo-classic tabernacles surmounted by obelisks, like St. Mary-le-Bow, are hybrid compositions of utterly barbaric character, notwithstanding the excellent portions for which they have been justly admired.
 
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