Readers of my blog will know that I never miss an opportunity to study, celebrate and enjoy the amazing stone carving with which the essential Baroque structure of St. Paul’s, stolid and agreed at the beginning of the design, was enriched and embellished by craftsmen working in the School of Wren, including work by Grinling Gibbons and Caius Gabriel Cibber in the north and south Tympana and, following Cibber’s death in 1700, much of it by Francis Bird, who had worked under both before travelling to Italy.

The great columns and capitals of the West Front were based on drawings by Wren from the 1690s:-

But who carved the smaller decorative putti and the rich, surrounding carving, so full of swagger and so carefully individualised ?