reorganisation and destruction of irish catholic churches
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Pugin might well have not become a particularly strident supporter of any of the movements and forms that the decorative arts took in Britain during the mid-nineteenth century. He might well have voiced a counter-argument against reform, that would have been his prerogative of course, and probably within his nature to be deliberately both antagonistic and contrary in equal measures. However, if the imagery of the motifs of these simplified and clutter free wallpapers were to continue, Pugin may well have found himself alongside Henry Cole and Owen Jones amongst others, perhaps even championing the causes and ideals that called for some form of tempering and plain speaking within the decorative arts world.
Although there is a decidedly thin line between some of the aspects of Pugin’s work, the Reform movement, William Morris and the Arts & Crafts movement, the line is there and Pugin was an inspiration, at least partially, to a number of designers in the decades following his death in 1852. It is these designers who were to take elements of Pugin, along with other examples and influences, and were able to transform British decoration and pattern work into a truly unique phenomenon that was to influence and mould much of the rest of the Victorian era in both Britain and indeed much further afield.
St.Mary’s Catholic Church, Uttoxeter
withSacred Heart, Abbots BromleyThe first stone of the church was laid on the 4th. Oct. 1838 and the building was opened with great solemnity on 22nd. August 1839. The church was the work of Fr. Morgan who obtained many backers amongst them the principal benefactor, John, 16th. Earl of Shrewsbury. The architect was Augustus Welby Pugin who carried out work on Alton Towers and later worked on the Houses of Parliament. The Catholic Church at Cheadle was also his work.
The church has undergone a number of alterations since it’s opening. In the late 1870’s Pugin’s church had become too small for the congregation and it was decided to lengthen it by the addition of a chancel. A Lady Chapel was also added on the left side of the chancel – now the organ chamber – in which stood the confessional: also an upper floor, as marked by the over-arches, was made for worshippers. The three lancet windows were moved to the end of the chancel and stained glass installed. A choir gallery was added beneath the Rose Window, at the west end of the church, in which a new organ was installed. The church re-opened in 1879. The first picture shows the Balance Street elevation prior to 1913 and the second the nave and chancel in the same period.
In 1912 thought was given to enlarging the church again, a task made difficult due to the very narrow building resulting from the 1870’s changes. However in 1913 work started on the addition of two side aisles, the narthex, Lady Chapel and sacristy as well as linking up the Presbytery with the Church by a long passage leading to the sacristy. The choir gallery was taken down, the organ removed to the old Lady Chapel and the pulpit was moved from the right hand side of the altar to the left. Recent work carried out in 1998/99 saw the altar rails removed, the chancel steps brought forward a little into the nave and the pulpit replaced in its original position.
Few Catholic churches of comparable size have such a wealth of stained glass as St. Mary’s. The Rose Window at the west end of the church dates back to 1839 and is by Messrs. Wailes stained glass workshops. The three lancet windows above the main altar contain glass by Mayer and Co. of Munich and London and were inserted in 1887. In the Lady Chapel are to be found windows by Hardman Studios commemorating the 150th. Anniversary of the church in 1988. The south aisle has windows by Woodroffe erected in the period 1915 to 1938; the War memorial window in the narthex is also his work. In the north aisle is a window by Hardman commemorating the son of a parishioner killed in action in 1940.
St. Kevin’s, Harrington Street, Dublin
This set of photographs has some good shots of the newly restored sanctuary of teh church:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/johnbriody/sets/72157638276048783/
The College Chapel, Maynooth
This set of photographs shows some pictures of the splendid sanctuary of the College Chapel at Maynooth – which, by some miracle, escaped the vandalism almost untouched:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/johnbriody/sets/72157625234804898/
From the Ecclesiological Society
Conference on Medieval Bridge Chapels
The Ecclesiological Society
Bridge Chapels
Saturday 1 Feburary 2014, Central LondonThis afternoon conference will explore bridge chapels and other religious buildings associated with bridges in the Middle Ages in Britain.
It will be held on Saturday 1 February 2014, from 14.30 to 17.00, in central London.
The cost of the day is £17.50 for members of the Society, £19.50 for non-members, £15.00 for under- and post-graduate students. This includes refreshments at the interval.
The conference will be Queens’s College, 43-49 Harley Street, London, W1G 8BT
You can download details and an application form here (pdf) or here (Word, large file).
SPEAKERS
Chair: Tim Tatton Brown
Speakers:
David Harrison (author of The bridges of Medieval England): Religious buildings and institutions associated with medieval bridgesPeter McKeague (The Bridges of Bedfordshire): A national survey of bridge chapels
Bruce Watson (London Bridge): Medieval bridge chapels: an introduction to their form
Beauvais Cathedral
Medieval Stained Glass – with a seasonal topic.
The visitation (right) and Nativity of Our Lord
La Vierge de la Belle Verrière
Created in 1140 it was one of the few survivals from the fire of 1194 and one 175 representation of Our Lady in the the Cathedral.
The book held by the Christ child bears the inscription from St. Luke’s Gospel referring to the preaching of St John teh Baptist: omnis vallis implebitur and every valley shall be fill in.
This is the interpretative key to reading everything about the Cathedral at Chartres.
In the Liturgy proper to Chartres Cathedral, this antiphon was used psecifically for the Benedictus at the Matins of Saturday in the Embers of Advent (third Saturday in Advent). The full text runs: Omnis vallis implebitur et omnis mons humiliabitur et videbit omnis caro salutare Dei. (Every vally shall be filled in and every hill shall be brought low. And all flesh shall see the salvation of God.
This particular liturgy was developed by Fulbert of Chartres (c.950-1028) and was designed to offer special homage to Mary as the Mother of God. The Marian emphesis in teh Advent liturgy began on the Wednesday of Ember week whose Gospel is the story of the Annuntiation. The readings of Matins are taken from bede and his commentary on the Annunciation. The accompanying responseries all contain Old Testament prophesies (especially from Isaiah) of the birth of the Messiah. On the Saturday of Ember week, the antiphon texts of Matins focus on the Davidic lineage of Mary. The readings of the Matins was taken from Gregory the Greath’s 20th homily on the Redemptoris Praecursor (i.e. John the Baptist). The Gospel of the same day is from St Luke 3.1-6 (John the Baptist preaching in the wilderness). “The combination of the readings from scripture, the commentary of Gregory teh Great, and the chant texts advances the idea of the root of Jesse, that the Christian Messiah, is teh new king and priest, a person who will supplant the old order of both kings and priests. The new king will sit on the thorne of David, and action that demonstartes his lineage and fullfills prophecy…Ths iturgy, first shaped in the Carolingian era, prsented materials adapted later in the eleventh and twelfth centuries through the interpretations of liturgical scholars [real ones] like Fulbert of Chartres and reshaped by men who designed the west facade of Chartres in the twelfth century….. Of special importance to the visual arts in twelfth century Chartres was the antiphon sung at the Benedictus of Lauds on Ember Saturday, “Omnis vallis implebitur”. …Ember Saturday was a solemn festival in the eleventh century, and the antiphon would not have been truncated in any way. This presentation would joing with teh apocryphal gospel related to the Virgin to make Mary the house of David, a tyheme central to the development of her cult at the cathedral of Chartres. – Margot Fassler op. cit.
“In this antiphon text, the act of seeing is emphasized (‘and all flesh shall see’), and the Virgin becomes the vehicle of revelation through lending her Davidic flesh back to its creator. This theme became of major importance to liturgy, exegesis, history marking, and the arts at Chartres in the central Middle Ages” – Margot E. Fassler, The Virgin of Chartres: Making History through Liturgy, and the Arts.
The Tree of Jesse at Soisson Cathedral showing the descent of Christ from Jesse through KIng David through Our Lady.
From The Spectator:
When soldiers have golden helmets and the wounded have wings
Stanley Spencer infused his war paintings with images of resurrection, as the exhibition Heaven in a Hell of War showsLaura Gascoigne 14 December 2013
‘Map Reading’, by Stanley Spencer, at Sandham Memorial Chapel
Stanley Spencer: Heaven in a Hell of War
Somerset House, until 26 January 2014‘If I go to war, I go on condition I can have Giotto, the Basilica of Assisi book, Fra Angelico in one pocket, and Masaccio, Masolino and Giorgione in the other,’ Stanley Spencer wrote to the artist Henry Lamb in 1914. The sixpenny Gowans & Gray edition of the Masterpieces of Giotto now in a glass case in Somerset House’s exhibition Stanley Spencer: Heaven in a Hell of War is the one that travelled with him two years later to the Macedonian front, where its imagery fused with his memories of war.
Although the idea of a fresco cycle of war paintings began incubating in Spencer’s mind in Salonika — ‘If I don’t do this on earth,’ he wrote to his sister Florence during a bout of malaria, ‘I’ll do it in Heaven’ — it wasn’t until 1927 that he was able to begin his visionary series of paintings for Sandham Memorial Chapel, 16 of which are temporarily billeted on Somerset House while the National Trust restores the building.
Washing Lockers by Stanley Spencer on the south wall at Sandham Memorial Chapel, Burghclere, Hampshire
The dream of a chapel of one’s own to decorate was easier to realise in Giotto’s day than Spencer’s, but Spencer got lucky. A pair of extraordinarily generous patrons, John Louis and Mary Behrend, commissioned a cycle of paintings and a purpose-built chapel in their home village of Burghclere, Hampshire. ‘What ho, Giotto!’ was Spencer’s response to the news. His patrons had wanted a secular memorial, but Spencer held out for the full Scrovegni works: a chantry chapel consecrated to All Souls and eventually dedicated to the memory of Mary’s brother Harry Sandham, a casualty of Macedonia. In the five years it took to complete the project, its spiralling costs almost cleaned the Behrends out. When a woman visitor to the chapel made the snide comment: ‘It smells of money here, doesn’t it?’ the artist replied: ‘No, only courage.’
Spencer’s art was never anything but personal, and his war paintings record his own experiences as a medical orderly with the Royal Army Medical Corps, first in Bristol and later in Salonika. Rather than commemorating war they celebrate peace, those rare interludes of it that could be snatched amidst the relentless bustle of army life — the forty winks grabbed on a grassy bank while an officer consults a map and other soldiers raid the bilberry bushes, or the halt at a water fountain around which soldiers flit like angels, rain capes flapping. Only Spencer could turn army regulation mackintoshes into wings and upended water bottles into heavenly trumpets.
At 5ft 2in tall, Spencer escaped transfer to an infantry unit until 1918, but as a medical orderly he picked up the pieces. ‘I had buried so many people and saw so many dead bodies,’ he told a reporter at the start of the project, ‘that I felt that death could not be the end of everything.’ Incapable of looking on the dark side like Nevinson or Nash, he infused his war paintings with images of resurrection, from the morning routine of Reveille to the ultimate miracle of ‘The Resurrection of the Soldiers’ in the chapel’s altarpiece, projected on to the exhibition’s end wall.
Detail from Bedmaking by Stanley Spencer on the south wall at Sandham Memorial Chapel, Burghclere, Hampshire. This detail shows the bedmaker and the pin-ups above the bed, one of which is Hilda, the artist’s wife. Another is of the artist’s father at the door of Hedsor Church
It was a bitty sort of resurrection for the wounded soldiers patched up at Bristol’s Beaufort War Hospital, the heaven in a hell of antiseptic where Spencer started his RAMC service in 1916. His first impressions of the place were grim — ‘Had someone been around in the morning & dusted them with a duster?’ he wondered about the regimented laurels lining the drive — but in his vision of a ‘Convoy Arriving with the Wounded’ the laurels are banks of flowering rhododendrons and the wounded in their white slings and golden helmets have become a busload of angels with clipped wings. Inside the hospital walls we follow the artist on an endless round of floor-mopping, bed-stripping, laundry-sorting and tea-urn-filling that kept the orderlies busy 15 hours a day, with the odd ‘moment of peace’ where they could find it. Spencer found it, typically, ‘in the most unlikely places’, sneaking into a gap between the baths while his fellow orderlies scrubbed down lockers.
If there’s an opposite of machismo, Spencer embodies it. His war art looks for peace in army routine and homeliness in institutional domesticity. A sponge, a stack of buttered bread, a crumpled page torn from the Balkan News, are rendered in hallucinatory detail: ‘At the most important moments in my life,’ he noted, ‘I generally remember the least important facts.’ These are the details modern novelists record, not modern painters, but he wanted people to ‘read’ his pictures.
Spencer’s forms were significant in the wrong way for Roger Fry, but his paintings remain lucidly legible to us.
The exhibition tours to Pallant House, Chichester from 15 February to June 2014.
This article first appeared in the print edition of The Spectator magazine, dated 14 December 2013
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