Fictitious View of the Crossing and Transepts

William Emmett was the nephew of another William Emmett, a skilled stone carver who worked among other places at Hampton Court. At the start of the 18th century the younger Emmett identified a public need and attempted to meet it with a series of engraved plates of St Paul's in competition with the authorized ones. Relying on espionage for what was not yet on public view, he produced credible exteriors, but he had no idea of Wren's intentions within the building, still in progress above the level of the Whispering Galley. From Wren's external elevation he expected the dome to be a single tall masonry funnel; on this bad guess he based his elaborate wide-angle view.

The angle of the view, both vertically and horizontally, is about 120 degrees, or almost as much as one eye can take in. By choosing a hypothetical viewpoint about twice as high as normal eye-level, he inevitably made the interior look smaller than it is, but he also showed great skill in adapting geometrical perspective to avoid the excessive upwards diminution that a wide-angle camera would produce when tilted enough to show the top of the dome. It is a remarkable feat of both drawing and imagination.

Emmett also anticipated that Victorian decorators by suggestion painted work in the spandrels of the main arches and in the half-domes of the diagonal quarter-galleries. But there is no authority either for this or for the geometrical patterning he depicted inside the dome and lantern.