reorganisation and destruction of irish catholic churches
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Ti’s a darn shame we can’t embed video here anymore. Here’s a link about the upcoming restoration of painted panels in Chichester Cathedral.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0POv7HrjRc&feature=player_embedded
@Recorder wrote:
Hey Prax et al., just to say that St. Conleth’s Catholic Heritage Association (http://www.catholicheritage.blogspot.com), whence the shots of Carlow Cathedral on the last page, have published the December issue of their journal CHRISVS REGNAT with the first part of an interview with Prof. Duncan G. Stroik and an article on ‘The Architects of Kildare and Leighlin’
Thanks for that information Recorder, welcome to the thread & a happy new year to you.
Some examples of the work of Patrick Pollen:
Christ Church, Dublin
The Cathedral of Christ the King, Johannesburg, South Africa
Drawing for St. Mary’s, Galway
WIndows from St Vincent de Paul’s, Solly Street, Sheffield, since demolished and its contents dispersed.
Some examples of the work of Patrick Pollen:
Christ Church, Dublin
The Cathedral of Christ the King, Johannesburg, South Africa
Drawing for St. Mary’s, Galway
WIndows from St Vincent de Paul’s, Solly Street, Sheffield, since demolished and its contents dispersed. This work was subsequently sold at Whytes in 2006. The unidentified nun in the panel is probably St Louise de Marriac, foundress of the Daughters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul.
The individual subjects of the window are as follows: St. Patrick With St. Brigid At His Feet; The Virgin Mary Trampling The Snake Above Ste. Catherine Labouré And Her Miraculous Medal; Christ With The Sacred Heart And Ste. Marguerite-Marie Alacoque Kneeling At His Feet; St. Vincent De Paul With A Charitable Vincentian Nun At His Feet Patrick Pollen, son of a sculptor whose uncle was J. Hungerford Pollen, the well-known Pre-Raphaelite painter and designer of Dublin’s University Church, was trained at the Slade School in London and, in 1951, in Paris at the Académie Julian. Such was the effect of Evie Hone’s great nine-light Eton College Chapel Crucifixion and Last Supper window (completed 1952) on him that Pollen resolved to go to Dublin to learn the art of stained glass with her. Since 1944, on the dissolution of An Túr Gloine cooperative in Dublin’s Upper Pembroke Street, Hone had been working prolifically but in increasingly poor health on her greatest masterpieces in stained glass from her small studio beside Marlay Grange, Rathfarnham. On her advice, in January 1953, Pollen rented a small area off the large studio from Catherine O’Brien, the An Túr artist who had bought up the studio and its contents, much of which were destroyed by fire in 1958. He worked from there aided by the studio glazier, Peter Connolly, until O’Brien’s death in 1963, sometimes taking on commissions Hone could not take on, cherishing the use of her brushes which she bequeathed to him on her death in 1955. Hone’s profound influence on Pollen, apparent in this early work by him, is seen in the superb quality of the deep, thick pieces of glowing ruby, blue, amber and green glass selected to capture the passing light, the bold, expressive painting with thick brushstrokes and loose washes to enhance the rich colours and ensure clear, graphic legibility from a considerable height, and the gentle compassion with which each figure is depicted. Each of the figures, which were given to the artist by the Irish Vincentian fathers in Sheffield, is identifiable by distinctive attributes: St. Patrick by his crossed-snake mitre, torc, green alb and shamrock; St. Brigid by her Cross and Abbey; Ste. Catherine Labouré, the devout 19th century French Vincentian nun who beheld a vision of the Virgin Mary poised on a globe on which a serpent was prostrated, and was bidden to have a medal struck with this living picture; kneeling Ste. Marguerite-Marie Alacoque, the aristocratic 17th century Burgundian nun of the Order of the Visitation, whose visionary and penitential devotion to the Sacred Heart led to its subsequent official adoption; St. Vincent de Paul, the 17th century charitable reformer of hospitals, galley slave conditions, nursing and parochial missions and founder of the Vincentians holds a crucifix and looks down on a saintly blue-clad Vincentian nun who cradles a baby in one of the foundling hospitals he systematized. Dr Nicola Gordon Bowe Dublin Whyte’s wish to thank the artist Patrick Pollen, Dr Nicola Gordon Bowe, Ken Ryan of Abbey Stained Glass, Mrs Muriel Hone and the late Oliver Hone for their concerted help in the cataloguing of this work.
We could maybe do with a couple of people with Don Justo’s extraordinary persistence & zeal in Ireland.
Madrid man builds cathedral from junk
By Sarah Rainsford BBC News, Mejorada del Campo
Cathedral Don Justo collects reject bricks and broken tiles from nearby factories and yards
It’s the sheer size of the structure that first strikes you. Almost 40 metres (131ft) tall, its spires and giant dome tower over the surrounding apartment blocks in this Madrid suburb.
That’s not unusual for a Spanish church. But this one is being built by an elderly man, almost single-handedly, out of junk.
Justo Gallego – or Don Justo, as he’s known – embarked on his epic endeavour almost half a century ago.
Now 85 years old, he still has a huge amount to do.
OctogenarianChristmas was a rare rest day for Justo, whose one concession to age – and the weather – is to work inside during winter.
Even so, he’s on site by 6am each day, sporting his red woollen skullcap. His grubby overalls are tied loosely with one red scarf; an identical one is draped – almost elegantly – around his neck.
“I do it for faith. That’s clear, no?” the energetic octogenarian wonders, pausing to warm himself by an open fire.
Don Justo Don Justo is neither a qualified architect or bricklayer – he is a farmer“My mother was very pious. She taught me my faith and I love the Church. So I put everything into this.”
But as a printed statement on the wall declares, Justo Gallego is “not an architect or a bricklayer” and has “no training related to construction”.Even his basic education was interrupted by the Civil War (1936-39).
“You don’t need to study. You just need strength. It all comes from above,” he reasons.
So is Justo’s giant construction a remarkable act of faith or pure folly?
His church has no planning permission or formal architectural plans. All the details, Justo says, are “in my head”. People have called me crazy and insulted me. But they’re ignorant”
Partly modelled on St Peter’s in the Vatican, Justo claims his construction also borrows from the White House, various castles and other Madrid churches. It’s an eclectic mix.
Oil drumsThe vast central dome took 20 years to erect and there are two dozen more incomplete cupolas around the building.
There are cloisters, a sacristy, even a cavernous crypt. Sections of several walls have been painted gaudily to depict scenes from the Bible.
But, with no funding, the entire place is built out of recycled materials.
At 0400 every morning, Justo collects reject bricks and broken tiles from nearby factories and yards and deploys them in his church to higgledy-piggledy effect.
The columns supporting the ceiling were moulded using empty oil drums. The covering for one cupola is made from plastic food tubs, cut up.
Cathedral central dome Don Justo says his construction is partly modelled on St. Peter’s in the Vatican“People have called me crazy and insulted me. But they’re ignorant,” Justo says defiantly, during a guided tour of his life’s work.
“When I look at what I’ve created, it overwhelms me and I give thanks to the Lord.”
A former novice monk, Justo began work on his DIY church when he was expelled from the monastery after contracting tuberculosis. He has since invested his entire inheritance in the project.
He has one faithful helper who dropped by almost 20 years ago to visit.
“I thought the place was a ruin and Don Justo was a tramp,” Angel Lopez Sanchez recalls, as he marks patterns onto glass with gold paint. His two ferrets sleep in a cage in the corner.
The bricks don’t meet minimum standards, either in themselves or the way they’ve been laid.”
Pablo Queralto Architect working for Mejorada del Campo council
‘Icon of the town’“But we spent all day chatting, he fed me chorizo and as I had a lot of spare time, I told him I’d help. He got so deep into my heart that I’m still here today and very content.”
Angel estimates the window he’s decorating is about the hundredth. There are around a thousand more to complete.
“But this is all Justo’s work, and his ideas” Angel smiles. “I’m just his disciple.”
“I work in a hurry, always in a rush,” Justo says, as he smashes panes of coloured glass into tiny fragments for Angel to glue to the windows.“Realising my ideal spurs me on. People today are very passive, they don’t value anything. They’re slaves to worldly things.”
Inside the cathedral With no funding, the entire place is built out of recycled materialsBut Justo is well aware his extraordinary ideal may never be fully realised.
As well as finishing the windows, the central dome still has no cover and the floor is bare; spiral staircases curl up towards the heavens and end in mid-air.
Scrawled on the wall in chalk are urgent appeals to visitors to donate funds for the church’s completion.
So far, the town council has tolerated the illicit structure, which lures a steady trickle of visitors to the nondescript suburb. Some suspect the chaotically-constructed church will not outlast its creator.
“It’s very difficult to get a license now,” says Pablo Queralto, an architect working for Mejorada council.
“For example the bricks don’t meet minimum standards, either in themselves or the way they’ve been laid.”
But he described the eccentric edifice as an icon of the town now, unlikely to be torn down.
Justo has bequeathed his building to the local bishopric in the hope it can eventually serve as a fully functional parish church. That’s his ideal, though he’s pragmatic.
“Who knows what he’ll do. It’s up to him,” he shrugs. But as Don Justo rushes back to yet another urgent task, he says he has no regrets.
“If I lived my life again, I’d build this church again, only bigger. Twice the size,” he smiles, his elderly eyes sparkling.
“Because for me, this is an act of faith.”
From the CIty Journal:
Theodore Dalrymple
The Vandals in Retreat
Britain rediscovers its architectural heritage.During my childhood, we still had pea-soup fogs in London, so thick that you couldn’t see your hand when you held it more than a few inches from your face. The fogs were exclusive to November, so that I imagined that they were simply features of the climate, like snow in winter. I longed for them to come. They were exciting, these fogs. They were just as described at the beginning of Bleak House: “Fog everywhere. . . . Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets. . . . Most of the shops lighted two hours before their time—as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look.”
Of course, it wasn’t gaslight that loomed through the fogs of my childhood, but electric light. The shape of a double-decker bus would slowly transform from the merest blur into something more definite only a few feet away, its headlights like the malign yellow eyes of some devouring beast. Before the bus, a man would walk, guiding the driver through a gloom far more impenetrable than the darkest night. The fog was not merely an absence of light; it was the opponent and scatterer of light, locked in mortal battle with it and almost triumphing. The fogs killed thousands, mainly old people with lungs weakened from decades of smoking. I didn’t know this at the time, and I don’t suppose it would have worried me much if I had known it. Childhood is not an age of enlarged views and philanthropic feeling.
The decline of smokestack industries, the abandonment of domestic coal fires, and the passing of a Clean Air Act soon made the fogs as remote in memory as manual typewriters are now. Within less than a decade, they came to be associated more with the London of Sherlock Holmes than with the city of a few years before. No child would again experience the excitement that I had felt because of them.
But this was genuine progress. The fogs were a manifestation of the pollution that did terrible damage not only to people’s lungs but to the buildings of the past, and therefore to something more intangible: people’s view of the past. Soot and grime covered almost every building in every British city; one looked at a building and thought, “How grim.” The country was like a vast Victorian funeral. This was one reason, no doubt, that Britain then undertook an orgy of urban destruction unparalleled in peacetime. The Luftwaffe had been bungling amateurs, it turned out, compared with the town and city fathers of Britain. The Germans managed to destroy a few cities—though none utterly beyond repair, if a will to repair had existed—but the local authorities ruined practically everything, with a thoroughness that would have been admirable in a good cause.
When they looked at a grimy building, the authorities, armed with new legal powers to plan and reconstruct towns and cities, saw only the grime and not the magnificence beneath. The authorities were not, on the whole, imaginative men, except when it came to imagining the fortunes that one could make from demolition and redevelopment. Advising them were architects and engineers who had converted en masse to modernism and who, even before the destruction brought by the war (which many of them welcomed), were groping toward Gropius. They agreed with Gropius’s view that “a breach has been made with the past, which allows us to envisage a new aspect of architecture corresponding to the technical civilization of the age we live in; the morphology of dead styles has been destroyed; and we are returning to honesty of thought and feeling.” On this understanding, any thought of preservation, of harmonizing the new with the old, let alone of new building in old styles, was a perversion.
The grime had become the sign of a past now hated with a lack of moral discrimination comparable to that once displayed by the jingoists, who had assumed that all was for the best in this, the best of all possible islands. Postwar Britain was a defeated power in everything but the military sense; its old industries, which had caused the grime, could not return it to prosperity; much better, then, to pull everything down and start again. The grime symbolized Gradgrind and Bounderby, and nothing else.
That the Soviet Union emerged triumphant from World War II would also prove a catastrophe for the British urban environment, for it supposedly showed the superiority of central planning over its absence. Intellectuals viewed British towns and cities as the antithesis of planning: like Topsy, they just growed. It didn’t occur to the intellectuals that these were places where successive generations, over many centuries, had produced an urban environment that had charm and was intensely social and livable, largely because those who built it had to live in what they built; or that where planning had taken place—in Bath, for example, or in the New Town section of Edinburgh—it was carried out by men of the highest possible caliber, for a population of refined and elegant taste. In fact, refinement and elegance were now ideologically suspect. As George Orwell pointed out before the war, our civilization (at least as it then was) ultimately rested on coal mining, a horrible industry that maimed people, blighted lives, and blotted landscapes. To live in elegance in such a society was like living in peace with an art collection stolen from Jewish families during the war.
Thus the towns and cities of Britain needed a new moral and physical beginning. And as rational men, the planners knew what people needed: roads and parking lots, so that they might conveniently get to and make use of their shopping and cultural centers. Many medieval lanes, and entire Georgian streets, were destroyed in the name of driving and parking—the appetite for which seemed only to grow with the feeding, and now less than ever has been met.
The planners and city fathers saw attachment to the city of the past as politically sinister. In 1947, the Labour-led city council of Bristol, which had been severely bombed during the war, laid plans to redevelop the city rather than restore it. When the local shopkeepers’ association polled 13,000 people to see whether they liked the council’s plans, and only 400 answered affirmatively, the council denounced the poll: “The so-called poll is without any official sanction and can carry no weight. The slipshod, inefficient and utterly un-democratic methods by which it is being conducted are reminiscent of Hitler’s early efforts in political demagoguery.”
Of course, the poll likely was not scientific, according to the canons of academic political research; but the results were surely startling enough to merit serious consideration by the city council. The notion that one could disregard the poll because it lacked “official sanction” offers insight into where the councillors believed both power and wisdom properly lay: with themselves. The reference to Hitler was peculiar, for it suggested that the preservation of buildings was somehow a harbinger of Nazi revolution. It was ironic as well, for the councillors failed to see that their own desire to organize the old, higgledy-piggledy city into a “rational” plan that fulfilled an ideological ideal was very much like the Nazis’ radical architectural ambitions for German towns and cities.
But throughout Britain, many city engineers and architects proved only too willing to engage in that project. For instance, it was the hope of Sir Herbert Manzoni, the city engineer of Birmingham, to pull down every non-modernist building in the city center. Luckily, he died in 1963 before achieving his ambition, but he got quite far, and his spirit sputtered on after him, with the magnificent Victorian library of 1866 pulled down in 1974 and replaced with an inverted concrete ziggurat of such ugliness and (now) dilapidation that it defies description, at least by me. Its environs serve now as a giant pissoir and, at night, as a safe haven for drunks and rapists; and thus the Albert Speers of Britain have converted the Victorian dream of municipal munificence into the nightmare of administered anomie.
I find it difficult to write temperately on this subject. I have only to see an example of the mass desecration of Britain’s architectural heritage to start trembling with rage. No town or city in Britain has inherited so little in the way of beauty that officials did not think it worth destroying. Recently in Rotherham, a steel town near Sheffield, I saw the historic environs of a magnificent fifteenth-century church falling into ruins, while all around there was a concrete mess, aesthetically worthy of being the administrative capital of an autonomous region of Soviet Central Asia at the height, or the depth, of the Brezhnev era.
My wife tells me to calm down; as she rightly notes, I can do nothing about this disaster now. But it is not merely the physical ugliness of what has been done that affects me; it is the ugliness of soul that was necessary for it to be done. The men entrusted with planning and rebuilding Britain’s towns and cities, one cannot help but think, must have suffered from a deep sense of humiliation, an awareness that, in an age of the most startling technical progress, they were not equal to the most jobbing of jobbing provincial builders of two and a half centuries earlier. Destruction of the heritage was all that was open to them, then, and in this, at least, they excelled. They were like Satan, who, expelled from heaven, exclaimed:
Me miserable! which way shall I fly
Infinite wrath, and infinite despair?
Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell.
They certainly produced a visual hell, all the more hellish because they allowed elements of what existed before to remain, so that the contrast was inescapable. In what was once the beautiful small city of Worcester, to take one more example, part of the graceful complex of ecclesiastical buildings next to the cathedral was destroyed in order to erect the Giffard Hotel, a concrete building in the style of Le Corbusier that would have gladdened the hearts of Nicolae and Elena Ceauşescu. The hotel now vies with the cathedral for one’s visual attention: it is impossible to screen it out.Yet matters have improved greatly in the last few years. Acts of official vandalism are rarer, and when attempted cause a public outcry. Citizens have formed groups to protect what remains of their heritage and no longer stand by watching the destruction of whole townscapes. Old buildings are routinely adapted to new purposes (as civilized people have known how to do for centuries) instead of being treated as impediments to progress or to traffic. Victorian buildings are cleaned up instead of demolished, and the architectural detail beneath the grime has come as a revelation to many who previously might have held the Victorians in contempt. London’s remaining Victorian railway stations have been modernized, keeping their basic features, so that the elegance and beauty of the ironwork is obvious to all. St. Pancras station, a masterpiece of Victorian Gothic architecture, has been lovingly (and, admittedly, expensively) restored and made the terminus of the train to Paris. Fittingly, the concourse has a statue of the poet Sir John Betjeman, whose protests helped save the station from demolition and replacement—perhaps by something as ugly as the new Euston station, a few hundred yards up the road, which took the place of the magnificently neoclassical original Euston station. The open space around Euston, probably not coincidentally, is as dirty as anywhere in London: people vote with their litter.
Not only has the official vandalism been much reduced; architecture and urbanization have considerably improved. Cities such as Birmingham, Leeds, and Manchester have undergone something of a revival, though it is too late to save the parts of them destroyed in the frenzy of self-hatred, utopianism, social engineering, and financial corruption that I have described.
Among other discoveries made by the town planners, architects, and general public is that cities with central residential districts are better places to live than those that relegate all domiciles to the outer fringes and leave the centers as ghost towns every evening. Birmingham and Manchester have also belatedly discovered an unsuspected asset that the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries bequeathed: they have more canals than Venice. Before the advent of railways, the portage of goods in industrial Britain was largely by canal, and Birmingham and Manchester were at the center of canal networks. The canals were beautifully constructed, but they were then left derelict for more than a century and became ditches where thistles grew and rubbish was dumped. The brick or iron bridges that span them are, despite the utilitarianism of their construction, of a surprising and moving elegance. The early industrialists were not quite as impervious to aesthetic considerations as Gradgrind and Bounderby might have led one to suppose.
These canals crisscrossed the cities’ hearts. As if by some operation of the zeitgeist, houses and flats began to rise in large numbers along the canals during the 1990s, and, in some cases, they were elegant places in which someone with an aesthetic sense might actually like to live. The raw concrete that during the worst years of destruction became a kind of phallic symbol for British architects was nowhere to be seen; walls were made of brick, or at least received a brick veneer. Many details could have been done better, doubtless, but one’s first impression was not horror.
The repeopling of city centers, largely with the young and educated middle class, brought other advantages. For many, cultural activities were now within easy reach—indeed, walking distance—rather than a tedious ride away. Such cultural amenities as already existed (and Birmingham and Manchester always had good orchestras) expanded, and new ones arrived. It astonishes me how well one can now eat in these cities, given their long, dismal record of bad food. In other words, the civilized pleasures and advantages of living in a city began to make themselves felt.
But to this I must now enter several caveats. The first is that much of the building, though more attractive than anything erected for many years, is not of high quality. With few exceptions, no contemporary British architect believes that he builds sub specie aeternitatis; on the contrary, he expects what he constructs to be pulled down soon and replaced. That a building should be sound enough to last perhaps 30 years is the city council’s main demand, which is conducive neither to solidity nor to fine workmanship. This explains why builders have used methods and materials that look well enough when new but will soon look tawdry.
The second caveat is that far more houses and flats were built than demand could absorb. This didn’t seem to matter much while prices were rising: a house by a canal, bought new in Birmingham for $300,000, was, within a few years, worth upward of $1 million. But, as we have since seen, the whole British economy was like Ophelia after she had fallen into the brook:
Her clothes spread wide,
And mermaid-like a while they bore her up
Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes,
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and endued
Unto that element; but long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.
This is the fate, it seems, of economies that base their prosperity upon asset inflation—often a deliberate government policy. When apartment blocks remain empty, as they now do, can dereliction be far behind?The third, and potentially most serious, caveat relates to the behavior of the British population. Every Friday and Saturday night (and often other nights as well), thousands of young adults invade Britain’s towns and cities, intent on getting publicly drunk and making a nuisance of themselves in the name of self-expression. No one, apparently, has ever asked them not to, let alone told them; and by now, such activities as screaming at 2 am, hair pulling, vomiting in the gutter, smashing glasses, and climbing at random into passing vehicles are seen as inalienable rights—perhaps because they have yet to be alienated. Menace is never far away.
People have sometimes accused me of exaggerating the chaos of these street scenes, to which I can reply that one American journalist who harbored such a suspicion came to investigate for himself. I took him to central Birmingham at 10 pm one Saturday night, before the fun really began; in less than five minutes, he was convinced that I had not exaggerated.
No doubt some people exist who do not mind this behavior, but few will tolerate it for long, especially as they get older. It will surely alienate the old from the young and drive them away; and if civilization requires at least some understanding and sympathy between generations, and an ability to live together, this will ultimately prevent a lasting renaissance of the cities.
Still, Rome wasn’t built in a day, and it is a considerable relief that the worst of the architectural vandalism and brutalism is now behind us. It was a nightmare, but we have almost woken up.
Theodore Dalrymple, a physician, is a contributing editor of City Journal and the Dietrich Weismann Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
From December 2010 Traditional Building:
Learning from Ralph Adams Cram
By Ethan Anthony, AIA, president, Cram and Ferguson Architects
We humans are extremists. We tend to see best by contrast, in polarities and without shades of grey. Ralph Adams Cram yearned for a philosophical and learned approach to architecture. Reading in his father William’s study in the parsonage of the First Unitarian church in Westford, MA, talking with the men of his extended family as they made shoes in a little shed on his family farm through the long New England winters in Hampton, NH, or practicing French in the one-room school house where he was taught by his mother, Sarah Blake Cram, he was inducted into an intellectual way of life.
Intellectual curiosity led him when he was at last on his own as a young architectural apprentice at the firm of Roach and Tilden in Boston, to yearn for an architecture that was more than mere slavish copy of a master work. He sought an architecture that had an inner spirit. And having found that inner spirit most powerfully resident in religious architecture he sought to design churches.
Through designing churches, Cram hoped to change his society. Early on, he hoped to improve the artistic impulse of the people, to educate the public through his position as a crusading art critic for the Boston Transcript and thus to create a climate where inferior art would be shunned in favor of more sophisticated and more intellectual work. He was somewhat successful, saving Copley Square from falling into the hands of a developer who would have filled it in with apartment buildings. His crusading impulse soon met with complaints from advertisers whose shows he panned. Job lost, he had to look for another outlet for his crusading.
He soon found ample opportunity for crusading in his architecture. From the first, he criticized the architecture around him, even holding it up to ridicule in his books. But for the most part, he concentrated on setting a good example through his own work. His ideal world was one where public life centered on spiritual fulfillment and religious worship. He planned and designed his academies and colleges always placing the chapel at the center of campus life and always finding his starting point in the master works of other eras whose values he sought to emulate.
Much of his life was invested in the study of source buildings and their founding cultures. He studied ruined abbeys, great cathedrals and ancient monasteries to find new direction for the rough new society that he and others of his generation were planning. His early work was more archaeological; the later work grew more mannerist. As his travels exposed him to wider and more disparate sources, his work broadened to include more and more eclectic elements. In later life, trips to Egypt, Spain and Russia augmented decades of summer trips to England and France.
Research was one skill that separated Cram from his contemporaries. Where his contemporaries often halted, satisfied with a contemporary solution clothed in the uniform of another place and time, or packed a contemporary program into the whole cloth of another time, Cram transformed the historic use into a synthetic contemporary solution, mixing the soul and spirit of the one with the other to find a new form from the spirit of the old.
His experiments with Islamic and Byzantine, Russian and Greek themes returned him in the end to his own starting point. Beauty was the universal value that ran through everything. It was the manifestation of the divine in all. Beauty was immutable as logic, undeniable and universally recognizable especially when contrasted with ugliness. It was the highest manifestation of culture. Beauty and evolution were governed by universal laws. In The Catholic Church and Art, published by Macmillan and Company in 1930, Cram says that “…it is increasingly apparent that if evolution is a law of life, devolution is its inseparable concomitant and that nothing, not even human society rises, or may rise, that shall not fall again.”
In 1930 at the age of 67, Cram was at a personal peak of success. With the depression deepening around him, he wrote a book that offered a solution to the problems that were manifesting themselves nationally and internationally.
In Walled Towns, Cram envisioned a new social order based on simplicity and a revolt against materialistic industrialism. “The impulse and incentive towards walled towns, whenever it comes, will be primarily social, the revolt of man against the imperial scale, against a life of false values impregnably entrenched behind custom, superstition and self-interest, against the quantitative standard, the tyranny of bulk, the gross oppression of majorities.”
Cram was living through a time of social and economic chaos that proved far worse than the one we have experienced in the last year or two.
Then, as now, far-sighted thinkers such as Cram saw that there was an alternative. A deepening crisis and worsening conditions were one possible result of the situation, but the other solution Cram posited in Walled Towns was a more sustainable society based on simplicity and sustainability. His vision of sustainability rested on reducing dependence on industrialism and materialism. This remains one part of the solution today.
The other part of the solution is improving through technology and knowledge our utilization of resources to embrace sustainability as a design value. This was always a part of the approach of the traditionalists, and particularly the Arts-and-Crafts architects, the most notable of which was Cram. Today we are faced with a similar turning point. Will we continue to depend on oil and a materialistic definition of progress and the certain conflict that will bring, or will we learn from Cram and history and choose the road of simplicity and sustainability?
History alone can tell which road we take, but I think 80 years ago Ralph Adams Cram pointed out the best road for us. May history show we chose his direction. TB
Ethan Anthony, AIA, is president of Cram and Ferguson Architects of Boston, MA. He is also the author of The Architecture of Ralph Adams Cram and His Office (W.W. Norton, 2007), and a contributor to The Venice Charter Revisited (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008).And here we have a useful compendium of documents put together by the Adoremus Bulletin on Church architecture which may be of help to those having to deal with wreckovations:
Longford Cathedral
Two renowned stained glass windows from Saint Mel’s Cathedral in Longford, which were extensively damaged in the fire that consumed the building at Christmas 2009, were returned this week to the Diocese of Ardagh and Clonmacnois after a year’s restoration.
The windows, by one of Ireland’s leading stained glass artists Harry Clarke, were restored by skilled craftsman at Abbey Stained Glass Windows in Dublin.
Company spokesperson Ken Ryan said, “The windows were extensively damaged and buckled in the fire. Our craftsmen had to go down to Longford and take them out very gingerly and get them back to Dublin. They had to be painstakingly taken apart to be repaired and our craftsmen had to work with photographs taken in the cathedral in 1997 to get the restoration work completely correct.”
“We have now turned our attention to restoring other windows in the cathedral but the restoration of the Harry Clarke painted windows, because of their huge historical importance, was the most urgent.”
He added that the Christ and the Majestic window had in particular suffered a fair amount of damage and artist Brendan Mullins, with the help of rubbings and photographs, was able to recreate the missing pieces.
He explained that the windows are divided up into seven sections or panels that allows them to be moved together and when installed the artwork should flow naturally.
Each of the windows will now be stored until the diocese is ready to use them.
Dublin born artist Harry Clarke was one of the leading 20th century stained glass artists in Ireland.
Some of his most famous works include in the Honan Chapel in UCC, the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin and of course Bewley’s Cafe in Dublin.
In an interesting connection to Longford, one of the first awards he won as a painter was in 1910 for a depiction of Saint Mel being ordained as Bishop of the diocese by Saint Patrick
[align=:shyyffl6]The Ecclesiological Society
Pews, benches & chairs:church seating in England from the fourteenth century to the present[/align:shyyffl6]The Society is preparing a book entitled Pews, benches & chairs: church seating in England from the fourteenth century to the present.
The likely (though not guaranteed) publication date is February 2010.The book covers the history and archaeology of church seating, its use, and current pressures and trends. It provides viewpoints and guidance on process.
There are more than a dozen case studies.Members will receive a free copy through the post.
If you are not a member and would like to be sent full details (without obligation) when the book is published,
send an email to info@ecclsoc.org putting ‘pews book’ in the subject line.
We will send you details when the time comes. We will not use your email address for any other purpose.[align=:3s5iv3qo]The Ecclesiological Society
Pews, benches & chairs:church seating in England from the fourteenth century to the present[/align:3s5iv3qo]The Society is preparing a book entitled Pews, benches & chairs: church seating in England from the fourteenth century to the present.
The likely (though not guaranteed) publication date is February 2010.The book covers the history and archaeology of church seating, its use, and current pressures and trends. It provides viewpoints and guidance on process.
There are more than a dozen case studies.Members will receive a free copy through the post.
If you are not a member and would like to be sent full details (without obligation) when the book is published,
send an email to info@ecclsoc.org putting ‘pews book’ in the subject line.
We will send you details when the time comes. We will not use your email address for any other purpose.[align=:38zy33vo][align=]The European Policy Network for Places of Worship[/align:38zy33vo][/align]
New European Forum for Historic Places of Worship
Altarpieces and Iconographyby Meredith J. Gill
Since its founding by Constantine, the fabric of St. Peter’s underwent a series of strange metamorphoses through the early seventeenth century. While the designs of Renaissance architects were never fully realized as the Early Christian structure was gradually dwarfed by a capacious, modified central plan, those initiated under the Baroque popes met with more success, particularly those of Paul V (1605-1621) who demolished the ancient vessel, and Urban VIII (1623-1644), who largely transformed the interior. Following completion of construction in the 1620s, and reaching a peak in the first half of the 1630s, a dazzling array of artists worked side by side creating a series of some twenty-four works of art, primarily altarpieces, which, in their programmatic relationship to one another and to the hagiographic traditions of the Church, proclaimed the complex identity of the Papacy and the liturgical mission of “the cathedral of the world.”
Louise Rice considers this altarpiece program as a collective whole, “reconstructing the historical, physical, liturgical, and devotional contexts for which they were created” such that “the multiplicity of factors involved in realizing a project of such magnitude” (2) can be appreciated. And a multiplicity there is. Omitting Bernini’s baldacchino, which serves as a finale to the campaign, as well as the related altars under the crossing in the sacre grotte, she focuses on the altar program proper, including the important sopraporti, the six imposing paintings over the doors of the navi piccole which were planned and created simultaneously with the altarpieces and as their ideological extension. She divides her narrative into three parts: “The Early History of the Altars in St. Peter’s,” “The Altars Under Urban VIII,” and “The Commissions,” this last a fascinating account of the mechanisms of patronage under Urban VIII and of the working conditions of the artists. She concludes with an extensive catalogue, listing the altars individually, organized chronologically under the popes from Gregory XV (1621-1623) to Urban.
In Part One, Rice shows how, in a foundation for which private patronage was now tacitly barred, two committees could effect the commissions with remarkable, even improbable, collaborative success. Acting on behalf of the pope, there was, first, the Fabbrica of St. Peter’s, constituted under Julius II and to whom the architect was directly responsible. Eventually, in 1605, the successor to this entity evolved into the Congregation of the Fabbrica which by 1623 numbered ten cardinals led by one, the Prefect. This group assumed increasing control of the decoration of St. Peter’s as the building neared conclusion in the 1620s. The wealthy Chapter of St.Peter’s, the second group, had little to do with the Fabbrica. This committee comprised beneficed clergy who supervised all liturgical affairs, with the exception of the pontifical domains. It was they who had had to accommodate, in practical, conservative ways, the inconvenient conjunction of Old and New St. Peter’s.
The first permanent altars of St. Peter’s were those commissioned by Gregory XIII (1572-1585), located in the north-east corner of Michelangelo’s new, centralized east end and its navi piccole. Rice usefully explicates the dedication and function of these, as well as the activities of Clement VIII (1592-1605) in this ambient where episodes relating to the life of Peter were begun. She also delineates Clement’s neglected and incomplete projects for the tribune and transept altars of Michelangelo’s building, using the surviving evidence of the stuccos. While Clement’s ideals were programmatic ones, the Constantinian nave posed an awkward obstacle to their full expression, and it took Paul V’s dismantling of the venerable relic to free his successors of its shadow. Gregory, as his aged successor, managed to commission only one work, Guercino’s St. Petronilla altarpiece, but with it begins the new cycle.
Urban VIII is the dynamic author of the Baroque altar series. As a former member of the Congregation, he was in a good position to oversee and understand the results of fact-finding Apostolic Visitations. In his pontificate, as the smaller details of dedication and iconography asserted themselves, the Congregation and the Chapter began to disagree. Nevertheless, with the official completion of construction in 1626 and the consecration of St. Peter’s, the Congregation and Chapter settled on the dedications of all the altars in St. Peter’s in less than six months. How they came to do this makes for intriguing reading. Rice provides a richly-documented outline of the backand- forth between the Congregation and the canons: the first prizing time and money, as well as programmatic (especially Petrine) coherence, while desiring to flatter the pope’s personal predilection for St. Michael. The canons, on the other hand, favored architectural unity, the retention of as many older titles as possible, and the equitable distribution of relics in all chapels.
A compromise was even reached over these issues. The dedications of the altars clearly dictated the subject in some instances (as with the Baptist in the baptismal chapel). Elsewhere, the idea of program, that is, of an iconographic dialogue between altars, emerged. The north and south transepts, for example, were reserved for martyr saints (lower ranking, on the Epistle side) and apostle saints (on the Gospel side) respectively. The Chapter had a crucial role in defining the subject, iconography and even the composition of several altarpieces, while the Congregation, to whom the artist was directly answerable, inspected and approved the cartoons.
Only three of the original paintings remain in situ today, while there are mosaic reproductions of approximately six others. Yet the family of works that resulted from this grand initiative were paradigms for future artists—works such as Guercino’s St. Petronilla, Andrea Sacchi’s Miraculous Mass of St. Gregory, Poussin’s St. Erasmus, Valentin’s Martyrdom of Sts. Processus and Martinian, and Alessandro Algardi’s relief of St. Leo and Attila. The altarpieces made concrete not only the accretion of hagiographic and liturgical lore attending the sacred property of St. Peter’s but, equally, and as a now lost academy in its own right, the profoundly competitive and rhetorical bravura of seventeenth-century painting.
Meredith J. Gill is Visiting Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Notre Dame.
The Altars and Altarpieces of New St. Peter’s, Outfitting the Basilica, 1621-1666
by Louise Rice, New York:
1997 Cambridge University Press and the American Academy in Rome, 350 pages, $95.00Caruso St John Architects to redesign the chancel of the Cathedral of St Gallen
Caruso St John Architects has won the competition by beating entries from an invited international group of architects and artists, including Aires Mateus and Pipilotti Rist.
The 18th century structure is a Baroque cathedral that follows the usual form, with the altar set at its far eastern end, separated from the congregation by the choir and rood screen. Caruso St John has proposed the new design as a response to the building’s current use. The architect’s design includes a raised chancel at the crossing of the nave and transept, in an attempt to bring the liturgical rituals closer to the congregation. The design also features a sequence of concentric oval steps in white, polished, precast concrete that rises up to form a platform.
According to Adam Caruso, the symbolism of circles, arcs and rings is latent within the existing architecture, with its distorted domes above the aisles. The design team aimed to engage with this baroque geometry.
The steps are adorned with a winding painting of vines in dark terrazzo. This offers an optical depth to the plinth that mirrors the celestial rings in the ceiling painting above. A suspended gilded ring forms a delicate halo over the altar. The liturgical furniture is made in monolithic white concrete. Each piece is inlaid with a different precious material that responds to its status and use.
St. Gallen is both a canton and a city in the eastern part of Switzerland. In 610, an Irish monk called Gallus chose this spot for his hermitage. Later on, in 747, a Benedictine abbey was founded. With the addition of a library in the 9th century, it became a center of learning. The whole abbey precinct constituting the famous cathedral and abbey library, was declared a World Cultural Heritage in 1983.
@Paul Clerkin wrote:
Caruso St John Architects to redesign the chancel of the Cathedral of St Gallen
Caruso St John Architects has won the competition by beating entries from an invited international group of architects and artists, including Aires Mateus and Pipilotti Rist.
The 18th century structure is a Baroque cathedral that follows the usual form, with the altar set at its far eastern end, separated from the congregation by the choir and rood screen. Caruso St John has proposed the new design as a response to the building’s current use. The architect’s design includes a raised chancel at the crossing of the nave and transept, in an attempt to bring the liturgical rituals closer to the congregation. The design also features a sequence of concentric oval steps in white, polished, precast concrete that rises up to form a platform.
According to Adam Caruso, the symbolism of circles, arcs and rings is latent within the existing architecture, with its distorted domes above the aisles. The design team aimed to engage with this baroque geometry.
The steps are adorned with a winding painting of vines in dark terrazzo. This offers an optical depth to the plinth that mirrors the celestial rings in the ceiling painting above. A suspended gilded ring forms a delicate halo over the altar. The liturgical furniture is made in monolithic white concrete. Each piece is inlaid with a different precious material that responds to its status and use.
St. Gallen is both a canton and a city in the eastern part of Switzerland. In 610, an Irish monk called Gallus chose this spot for his hermitage. Later on, in 747, a Benedictine abbey was founded. With the addition of a library in the 9th century, it became a center of learning. The whole abbey precinct constituting the famous cathedral and abbey library, was declared a World Cultural Heritage in 1983.
This sound like the remarkable junk produced by Cathal O’Neill for Cobh Cathedral. Is there any chance they might have borrowed it from him?
Can you imagine how effectively pre-cast concrete can “engage” with the baroque and how the “delicate” suspended gilt rings will “engage” with the roccoco confessionals? The whole scheme sounds as daft as the sight of camels parading on the Gallusplatz just outside of the Cathedral – which Praxiteles saw last August. Then again, the camels may well presgae the future!!
I’d been looking for this for a long time; the original spire design for the unfinished James’s Street church:
From a 1994 publication commemorating 150 years of the Parish of St. James.
Apparently the project was initiated in 1842 and the foundation stone was laid by Daniel O’Connell on 4 April 1844. Patrick Byrne’s original design was in the prevailing version of the ‘English Perpendicular’ style, but we can see that simplifications began to appear at upper facade level with the omission of ornamentation detail and the intended battlements, before the spire project was completely abandoned, presumably reflecting the sombre mood in famine Ireland.
St Paul’s Cathedral, London
Here is an interesting link to a guide of teh Cathedral:
http://www.stpauls.co.uk/Cathedral-History/Explore-the-Cathedral-Floor
St Joseph & Etheldreda Church restored to original look
The interior at St Joseph & Etheldreda
The interior of at St Joseph & Etheldreda is now a work of art in itself
One of the foremost church restorers in the country says he is extremely proud of his latest achievement – the restoration of St Joseph & Etheldreda Church in Rugeley, south Staffordshire.
The Catholic Revival church, built in 1849, had been badly redecorated during its history.
Tony Skidmore, of Fisher Decorations, based in Stafford, works on restoring listed buildings in this country.
Much of the church’s gold-leafing is now back on view.
The tabernacle at St Joseph & Etheldreda
The tabernacle at the church is brilliantly-colouredThe Grade-II listed church, in Lichfield Street in Rugeley, is the work of Charles Hansom, who built it during the time of the Catholic Revival in England, when Catholics in this country were allowed to start worshipping openly again.
Like similar churches in the county, it has a vibrantly-coloured interior.
Tony Skidmore
Sixty-year-old Tony Skidmore, who started with Fisher Decorations in 1972, specialises in historic renovation. As a member of the National Heritage Training Group he also teaches other craftspeople in what he says are “disappearing” skills.
To restore churches such as St Joseph & Etheldreda he also has to employ history research techniques. He uses archives to discover what the original appearances of the buildings might have been.
“Many of our churches have suffered from years and years of unintentional neglect,” he explained.
“Walls that were once magnificent were painted over by people just wanting to keep things clean and tidy.
“People didn’t realise the beauty they were covering up; and when something had been painted over once there was good chance a second coat would be added in years to come, then another and another.”
Former glory
In Rugeley he has restored walls and ceilings as well as a major statue of Mary & Jesus and other religious works of art.
Using special tools and chemicals Tony peels away the layers to reveal small glimpses of what used to be.
“In some of the cases here we had to peel away ten coats of paint before we got to the original design. Once we discover that design we then have to work out how to replicate it on a wall or ceiling, using, whenever possible, the same materials that would have been used all those years ago,” said Tony.
Skills
Gold-leafing is a dying art, but Tony has two men on his team who are experts. It is the same with the application of lead paint, distemper and lime washes – skills that he says are being left behind, but skills however that are essential for perfect restoration work.
“It is all very time-consuming and expensive work. Nowadays people running the churches are very aware of the hidden treasures they are holding but many just can’t find the money needed to bring them back to life.”
Safeguard
Mark Robinson and Tony Skidmore
Mark Robinson and Tony Skidmore admire the workAs historic homes and churches start to cut back on expenditure in the current climate, restoration businesses like Fisher are affected in turn.
Earlier this year, another West Midlands decorating company stepped in to take over Fisher Decorations – though keeping Mr Skidmore at the head of the company, and safeguarding the jobs of his team for the foreseeable future.
The head of D&R Contract Services, based in Aldridge, Mark Robinson, said he was anxious to see a firm like Fisher continue: “More and more places need this type of work doing and there are fewer and fewer people with the skills to carry it out. Tony and his team are leaders in their field.”
Staffordshire Catholic Revival
Other Catholic churches of the period in Staffordshire include St Giles at Cheadle which was built by the movement’s foremost architect, Augustus Pugin. The style was based on the Gothic buildings of the Middle Ages, so was often called the Gothic Revival.
It’s said that the 19th Century Catholic writer, Ethelred Taunton, who was born in Rugeley in 1857, worshipped at St Joseph & Etheldreda.
St Etheldreda, or Alfreda, is an Anglo-Saxon saint, said to be one the daughters of King Cenwulf of Mercia. The kingdom of Mercia stretched across much of middle England including Staffordshire.
From to-day’s Irish Times:
ARMINTA WALLACE
A Christmas conflagration in 2009 appeared to have destroyed the magical Harry Clarke stained-glass windows at St Mel’s Cathedral in Longford – until a miracle of restoration got underway
WE ARE, belatedly, beginning to realise just what a treasure trove is contained in the stained-glass windows of churches all over Ireland – especially those which bear the magical signature of Harry Clarke Studios. These are to stained glass what Lalique is to ordinary glass; and when you look closely at one, you’ll never see any piece of glass – never mind the windows of churches – in quite the same way again. The jewel-like colours, the intricate details, the startlingly contemporary feel, the impish sense of humour – with their huge eyes and elaborate outfits, these saints are startlingly reminiscent of the heroes and heroines of computer games and graphic novels.
But sometimes it takes a catastrophe to make us sit up and pay attention. In the early hours of Christmas Day 2009, fire broke out at St Mel’s Cathedral in Longford. By the time the blaze was extinguished, the church was completely destroyed. In Dublin, Ken Ryan of Abbey Stained Glass Studios was horrified by the television images of the devastation. His company had carried out a full restoration of all of the stained glass at St Mel’s in 1997, so he knew what was likely to be lost forever if something wasn’t done, and quickly.
Ryan and one of his colleagues decided to drive to Longford on St Stephen’s Day. “I called ahead to one of the priests and he said: ‘Don’t come.’ I said: ‘Just tell me, are the Harry Clarke windows intact or not?’ And he said: ‘Everything’s destroyed.’”
They drove on through heavy snow, but when they got to Longford the cathedral was cordoned off for forensic investigation. With the aid of long-distance lenses, Ryan was able to get some idea of what had happened to the windows. “One of the Harry Clarke windows had collapsed, pretty well on to the ground, but there were still pieces of it suspended in the window opening,” he says. “That was the right-hand transept gable as you face the altar. It was Christ in Majesty. On the opposite transept was the Blessed Virgin and the Child Jesus. Every other window was completely gone.”
Glass, when it’s created, is fired at extremely high temperatures – 600 degrees or more – in a kiln. Why, then, is fire damage to stained glass so devastating? “The bed of the window is held together by solder joints,” Ryan explains. “And when the solder gets warm in a fire it melts and runs down to the bottom of the window. So there’s nothing to keep it together. Any gentle breeze or vibration will cause the whole lot to come crashing down.
“Another problem is, of course, that the firemen come along and they’re doing their best to put out the fire, so they train the hoses on the window openings. The cold water hitting against the extremely hot glass causes the glass to shatter. After a fire you could look at a piece of stained glass and say: ‘Oh, yeah, that’s fine.’ But if you were to tap it with your fingernail it would collapse into the equivalent of a bowl of sugar.”
Which is, pretty much, what had befallen the windows of St Mel’s. Most people would have looked at the jigsaw of broken glass and given the whole thing up as a bad job. After all, how would it be possible to reconstruct such elaborate works of art from memory, or even from photographs? Having carried out restoration work at the cathedral in 1997, however, Ken Ryan knew that Abbey Stained Glass Studios was in a unique position with regard to these windows.
“When we do a restoration job, we begin by taking what we call a rubbing or a tracing,” he says. “This gives us an impression of all the various lead running through the glass – and then we can work out the shape of every piece of glass in that particular window. Normally, after about 10 years or so, we have too much paperwork in our studios and, for space reasons, we just have to get rid of it all. But by a sheer stroke of good fortune we hadn’t disposed of the rubbings from St Mel’s. In addition to the tracings we also had highly detailed photographs of the windows. So we had a huge amount of technical information.”
Even so, the sheer scale of this reconstruction beggars belief. “Our craftsmen went around the base of every window, and we collected bucketfuls of stained glass. We had them in big plastic boxes in the studio, one for each window, all numbered,” says Ryan. “Out of tens of thousands of pieces of glass we can tell you the exact shape and depth of colour that’s in each piece.”
The craftsmen then had to remove whatever was left from the shell of the church. “We had to take them [the pieces] out very, very gingerly by placing a contact adhesive on either side of the glass to prevent it from collapsing completely. And all of this is against the background of very heavy snow and ice, similar to the conditions we experienced a couple of weeks ago.”
Once back at Abbey’s studios in Dublin, the painstakingly detailed work could begin. “Garrett O’Grady and William Malone were supervising the work on a day-to-day basis and our stained-glass artist, Brendan Mullins, would have been working on replacement glass,” Ryan says. “Where possible, we use as much as we can of the old glass; where it’s impossible, we have to make it new. To get the three-dimensional effect you might have to fire glass three times. And some has to be acid-etched – that’s where you might have a ruby colour on one side and a colourless glass on the other. You’d have to etch out parts of the ruby colour to get a particular spot of glass that you want highlighted in the window. It’s technically difficult and it has to be spot-on.”
With a window from Harry Clarke Studios, the difficulties are compounded by the complexity of the designs, the intensity of the colours and, in many cases, the unusual quality of the glass. Clarke was known to have a fondness for thick, irregular glass, which he said resulted in more vibrant and subtle colours. The windows at St Mel’s, installed in 1932, were not designed by Clarke himself – he died of TB in Switzerland in 1931, just short of his 42nd birthday – but by his highly talented younger colleague, Richard King.
Ryan’s word for them is “masterpieces”. And he has a bit of advice for any church, in Ireland or abroad, which values its stained-glass windows.
“Normally,” he says, “they’ll have photographs of weddings with the stained glass in the background and so forth – but they don’t have detailed photographs of the windows themselves. Some of the churches are beginning to get that done, and I think it should be done as a matter of some urgency.”
The fully restored windows have now been shipped back to Longford, where they will be stored until the cathedral is rebuilt, a process which is likely to take at least three years. And one day – barring meteorite strikes, terrorist attacks or tsunamis – their serene beauty will once again grace the windows of St Mel’s, and Longford itself.
Design disciple Richard King
OVER THE past quarter of a century the name of Harry Clarke has become synonymous with stained glass in Ireland. But many of the windows we know as “Harry Clarkes” are actually the work of his younger colleagues at Harry Clarke Studios, among them the windows at St Mel’s in Longford, designed by Richard King.
King was born in Castlebar, Co Mayo, in 1907. He became the chief designer for Harry Clarke Studios after Clarke’s death in 1931. His style clearly owes much to Clarke’s tutelage, but his own artistic stamp is also evident. He admired modernist contemporaries such as Evie Hone and Mainie Jellett, and he was also well versed in contemporary spirituality, drawing inspiration from the scientist-theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
The windows from St Mel’s will probably be in crates for quite some time, but there are many examples of King’s work to be seen around Ireland as well as in the UK and even Australia.
Check out St Elizabeth of Hungary, roses spilling from a spectacular blue dress (which wouldn’t be out of place on a Eurovision stage), at St Anthony’s Church in the Franciscan friary in Athlone, where St Bonaventure is also to be found, his chiselled jaw straight from Hollywood central casting, his youthful figure clad in Star Wars red.
@apelles wrote:
St Joseph & Etheldreda Church restored to original look
The interior at St Joseph & EtheldredaThe interior of at St Joseph & Etheldreda is now a work of art in itself
One of the foremost church restorers in the country says he is extremely proud of his latest achievement – the restoration of St Joseph & Etheldreda Church in Rugeley, south Staffordshire.
The Catholic Revival church, built in 1849, had been badly redecorated during its history.
Tony Skidmore, of Fisher Decorations, based in Stafford, works on restoring listed buildings in this country.
Much of the church’s gold-leafing is now back on view.
The tabernacle at St Joseph & Etheldreda
The tabernacle at the church is brilliantly-colouredThe Grade-II listed church, in Lichfield Street in Rugeley, is the work of Charles Hansom, who built it during the time of the Catholic Revival in England, when Catholics in this country were allowed to start worshipping openly again.
Like similar churches in the county, it has a vibrantly-coloured interior.
Tony Skidmore
Sixty-year-old Tony Skidmore, who started with Fisher Decorations in 1972, specialises in historic renovation. As a member of the National Heritage Training Group he also teaches other craftspeople in what he says are “disappearing” skills.
To restore churches such as St Joseph & Etheldreda he also has to employ history research techniques. He uses archives to discover what the original appearances of the buildings might have been.
“Many of our churches have suffered from years and years of unintentional neglect,” he explained.
“Walls that were once magnificent were painted over by people just wanting to keep things clean and tidy.
“People didn’t realise the beauty they were covering up; and when something had been painted over once there was good chance a second coat would be added in years to come, then another and another.”
Former glory
In Rugeley he has restored walls and ceilings as well as a major statue of Mary & Jesus and other religious works of art.
Using special tools and chemicals Tony peels away the layers to reveal small glimpses of what used to be.
“In some of the cases here we had to peel away ten coats of paint before we got to the original design. Once we discover that design we then have to work out how to replicate it on a wall or ceiling, using, whenever possible, the same materials that would have been used all those years ago,” said Tony.
Skills
Gold-leafing is a dying art, but Tony has two men on his team who are experts. It is the same with the application of lead paint, distemper and lime washes – skills that he says are being left behind, but skills however that are essential for perfect restoration work.
“It is all very time-consuming and expensive work. Nowadays people running the churches are very aware of the hidden treasures they are holding but many just can’t find the money needed to bring them back to life.”
Safeguard
Mark Robinson and Tony Skidmore
Mark Robinson and Tony Skidmore admire the workAs historic homes and churches start to cut back on expenditure in the current climate, restoration businesses like Fisher are affected in turn.
Earlier this year, another West Midlands decorating company stepped in to take over Fisher Decorations – though keeping Mr Skidmore at the head of the company, and safeguarding the jobs of his team for the foreseeable future.
The head of D&R Contract Services, based in Aldridge, Mark Robinson, said he was anxious to see a firm like Fisher continue: “More and more places need this type of work doing and there are fewer and fewer people with the skills to carry it out. Tony and his team are leaders in their field.”
Staffordshire Catholic Revival
Other Catholic churches of the period in Staffordshire include St Giles at Cheadle which was built by the movement’s foremost architect, Augustus Pugin. The style was based on the Gothic buildings of the Middle Ages, so was often called the Gothic Revival.
It’s said that the 19th Century Catholic writer, Ethelred Taunton, who was born in Rugeley in 1857, worshipped at St Joseph & Etheldreda.
St Etheldreda, or Alfreda, is an Anglo-Saxon saint, said to be one the daughters of King Cenwulf of Mercia. The kingdom of Mercia stretched across much of middle England including Staffordshire.
Looks like an excellent restoration of an original colour scheme. And the statue mentioned in the article looks very like something produced by Mayer of Munich.
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