apelles

@Praxiteles wrote:

Paddington bear believes that the semicircular steps are quite incongruous and even more so by the upper step being rectangular! 😉

@Praxiteles wrote:

looking at this again, I am inclined to think that it might be possible to take the three verses from the Hymn from vespers and put them on the thee central panels. The first verse is addressed to Our LAdy, the second to St. Joseph and the thid to Our Lord.

It might then be possible to take two of the verses or responsories or antiphons cited abouve and use those at both ends.

Just a thought!!

That sounds like a good plan. . definite potential there. .everything for a reason. .😉

Sorry Praxiteles, I’m in need of your mentoring skills once again.:o I’m probably wrecking your poor head with more questions about Latin quotations. I’m currently undertaking the decoration of another sanctuary in a Church dedicated to the ‘Familiae sanctae’
The Chancel is a five sided apse in shape, with each of the three central walls having representations in stained glass windows with stories of the Holy family. Each wall measures approximately three meters in length & I’m looking to create a Latin worded decorative frieze (300mm deep) along the complete length of the upper wall area with five relevant quotations along the top of each 3m section.

*SANCTÆ FAMILIÆ IESU, MARIÆ, IOSEPH* might be one i could use.
*sanctum sanctorum* or *Credo in Unum Deum* would be to short to adequately fill the space’s & are not particularly relevant.
Alternatively one continuous Hymn would suffice but I’m not having much luck here either. .

This one is just to long;
Domine Iesu Christe, qui Mariae et Ioseph subditus, domesticam vitam ineffabilibus virtutibus consecrasti: fac nos, utriusque auxilio, Familiae sanctae tuae exemplis instrui; et consortium consequi sempiternum: Qui vivis et regnas cum Deo Patri in unitate Spiritus Sancti Deus, per omnia saecula saeculorum.

O Lord Jesus Christ, who, being subject to Mary and Joseph, didst sanctify home life with unspeakable virtues: grant, that, by the aid of both, we may be taught by the example of Thy Holy Family, and attain to eternal fellowship with it: Who livest and reign-est, with God the Father, in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end.

Any thoughts or input would be greatly appreciated.:)

Some images of the exquisite detail of the gilded bosses to the Chapter & vaulted ceilings in York Minister. . You would need binoculars to view much of the imagery.

My parents took me there as child. . I’ve never forgotten that excursion. . must take my own kids there some day!

Start of St Mel’s restoration works imminent.

Assessor estimates five years to complete refurbishment.

14 April 2010
By Liam Cosgrove
A lot done, more to do. It may be a term more readily identified on the national political stage, but it was a message which equally applied to last weekend’s specially convened meeting concerning the restoration of St Mel’s Cathedral.
In the days and weeks following the devastating Christmas Day fire, which left large parts of the historic nineteenth century cathedral effectively destroyed, many question marks surrounding its eventual restoration emerged.

Issues like, the extent of the damage, could the fire have been prevented, the rebuilding project’s time-frame and all-round costs were challenges that had largely remained unanswered.

That was until last Saturday morning when around 100 interested observers took their place inside the college’s spacious assembly room to hear at first hand just how restoration plans were shaping up.

Danny Donohoe, a leading member of Dublin-based property loss adjusting firm, OSG, said any hopes of commencing rebuilding works were still some way off.

“There is a lot more work needed in terms of surveying the actual damage and what is left. There will be both photographic and dimensional surveys (needed).

“It will be a long time before we know what we are dealing with here and what can be achieved. All the making safe measures have all been carried out through, conservation, architects and local authority requirements.

“There is a project committee now in place to look at representations to oversee the restoration of the cathedral and a design team selection process is now underway and that’s advanced. These actions we reckon will be finished by the end of this month or into early May at the earliest,” he said.

In reiterating the fire’s origin had begun in the cathedral’s central heating network, Mr Donohoe said the fire was largely the result of the building’s heating system being left on for 17 hours, almost 12 hours above normally accepted guidelines due to sub zero temperatures and the need to heat the cathedral ahead of Midnight Mass.

Residual deposits or soot which had built up over many years effectively ignited, he said, before spreading to the sacristy area via corroded gaps in the cathedral’s chimney flu area.

In ruling out any culpability for the fire’s outbreak, Mr Donohoe added despite severe structural damage having been caused “over 200 artefacts” were salvaged, including a sixteenth century book shrine and a statue of St Mel.

That said, Mr Donohoe was up front as to where refurbishment works currently stood.

“We estimate it could take roughly five years to carry out this work. There is a conservation architect on site throughout all of this work so we can identify and preserve anything that can be salvaged.

“We needed to put in wind bracing to those external walls, because the roof is now gone, to provide support to the building. That is now just complete.

“A temporary roof for the cathedral has been designed and that will be fitted shortly. There will be protected site hoarding going up around the cathedral,” he said, adding that conservation efforts will switch to a restorative footing by the start of next month at the latest.

In fielding questions from those looking on, Mr Donohoe said it could take a full 12 months before the true extent and cost of the rebuilding works are known.

“We just don’t know. You are dealing with a very unique building. We don’t yet know the scale of what we are ultimately going to be left with or ultimately what can or can’t go back.

“We are confident that in time we will achieve a worthy restoration that will again see St Mel’s Cathedral take its place as a beautiful centre for prayer for the people of the diocese of Ardagh and Clonmacnoise,” he said.

Bishop Colm O’Reilly, who earlier provided an historical oversight of the cathedral’s rich heritage, maintained parishioners from every corner of the Diocese will be kept fully briefed over the coming weeks and months ahead.

“I have invited people to send in written comments about how the cathedral should look,” he said in response to a question tabled by the Leader.

“Inevitably, people nearer to Longford will have more interest and involvement.

“But on the other hand we don’t want to exclude people who maybe as far away as Clonmacnoise, Shannonbridge and places like that. One of my hopes is that this might be an opportunity to draw people in and increase interest (in St Mel’s Cathedral), tragic as all as it is.”

Tales from the crypt
Sunday, September 07, 2008 By Ruth O’Connor
Stephen Bird Flanagan’s job entails chasing angels and saints, but he says his pursuit of religious antiques is as much a calling as a career.
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In the crypt like cellar, lights glint on the curve of a chalice; on the stark relief of a monstrance; on the agony in the eye of the Christ at Calvary; on the seat of a church pew. The cool underground air and subdued lighting contrast sharply with the brassy brightness of the candelabra and a sanctuary lamp’s regal glow. You draw breath as you descend the stairs from the angel-bedecked doorway of the Dublin street above.

Stephen Bird Flanagan’s thirst for antiquities is in his blood. His grandfather, Christy Bird, founded Christy Bird Antiques on Dublin’s South Richmond Street in 1945. Bird Flanagan spent his youth running in and out of his grandfather’s shop, his attraction to the archaic and the odd growing all the while. Yet, in a curious twist, it took a trip to Australia to sow the seeds of the business Bird Flanagan now runs.

On his travels in the 1980s, Bird Flanagan was helping to restore a church when he met a glass restorer who enquired after the availability of stained glass from Irish churches. With a nose for antiques and an eye for art, Bird Flanagan’s interest was piqued.

While it may have been his work that led him to stained glass, it was his curiosity that enabled him to fashion a career out of all manner of churchware. For the past 15 years, the father-of-two has been salvaging and selling, repairing and restoring items of churchware, from hand-painted Stations of the Cross, to stained glass panels and ciboria (vessels used to hold the consecrated host for Communion).

He bought the building next door to Christy Bird Antiques (now run by his brother Christopher) and began to establish his reputation as a dealer in religious antiquities. The vast majority of his customers are clergy seeking items for churches. With the increasing sales of religious properties and the decrease in the number of clergy being ordained, the mid-90s was a time of acquisition for Bird Flanagan.

‘‘The number of items available really rose in the late-1990s and early2000s with the property boom in Ireland,” says the 43-year-old. ‘‘It has slowed down now and it is becoming more difficult to source items, but people know me now from being in the business so long and will ring if they are looking for a religious artefact.”

The area around his shop has changed a lot since 1945, when Christy Bird opened his shop. Now, Irish Vestments nestles alongside Tassilli Halal Meats and Rico’s Flafel Shop. ‘‘When I bought this building we had to knock the whole thing down, so I was able to put this floor down – using lovely tiles from a convent. We bought the three buildings here in a row.”

Bird Flanagan has a wealth of knowledge on the subject of stained glass. ‘‘Much of the stained glass you see was mass-produced by companies such as Mayer’s of Munich. Then in the early 1900s, people began commissioning Irish stained glass artists to produce works. I always had an interest in that period.”

Mayers mass-produced stained glass in the 1870s and was responsible for the stained glass windows of at least nine Irish cathedrals, including Carlow, Waterford and Letterkenny] and was, therefore, cheaper.

Bird Flanagan goes on to tell stories of renowned stained glass artists such as Evie Hone and Harry Clarke from the 1920s, as well as his interest in members of An Túr Gloine, the Irish stained glass cooperative which was formed around that time.

However, despite his interest in religious artefacts, he has been careful to keep his work separate from his home life – at least after some gentle prompting. ‘‘I used to have a lot of items at home, but I’ve been told to minimalise. My wife told me to cut down on this sort of stuff as I have two children, so you can’t really have this sort of thing lying around,” he laughs.

Having spent many years travelling throughout Britain, Ireland and continental Europe sourcing items, Bird Flanagan now sources most of his stock in Ireland, travelling around the country on foraging missions at least twice a week.

The Dublin native has also become something of a curator of religious vestments and is keen to build upon his collection of ecclesiastical garments. ‘‘Having worked with a lot of churches and convents over the years, it was a natural progression to begin collecting the vestments of the religious who had worked there.

‘‘People used to donate their wedding dresses to the church and the nuns would make vestments of them, using the lace. These ‘patchwork’ vestments are generally of inferior quality to the vestments produced by specialist manufacturers such as Bull and Clerys. I collected them for years while I was going around acquiring different pieces; there were so many of them. Now the pieces I have are the most high-quality pieces.”

Bird Flanagan sells hand and machine-embroidered vestments in the Gothic (draped-style) and the Roman style (poncho-style chasuble).The vestments are stunning for the most part, featuring intricate hand-embroidered motifs in metallic threads, heavy fringing and beautiful antique fabrics.

‘‘You have to have good sets for priests to buy. People sometimes frame them, too, as they are of exquisite workmanship. You can make new vestments, but you’re never going to get the same quality as the old vestments, with their beautiful damask and handmade lace and embroidery,” he says.

The vestments sell for anything from €100 up to €2,000 for a high Mass set of impeccable quality used during the Tridentine or Traditional Latin Mass.

Despite having other business concerns, this is where Bird Flanagan is happiest, doing his job out of sheer love of the items, the craft that went into them and a deep respect for his customers. ‘‘This is my life as well as my job. Years ago, the arts weren’t funded, so talented artists, rather than working on their own projects, would have put a lot of time into religious art – sculpture, paintings and vestments.

‘‘The religious orders commissioned a lot of work and I believe that my collection is that of the best work carried out by the best unknown or unsung artists.”

Irish Vestments – Vestments, Religious and Ecclesiastical Items is at 31B South Richmond Street, Dublin 2. See http://www.irishvestments.com or tel:01-4784245

St. Francis Xavier, Upper Gardiner Street.

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The Jesuit Church of St. Francis Xavier, Upper Gardiner Street, was the first Catholic Church erected in Dublin following the passing of the Catholic Emancipation Act in 1829. Its predecessor at 30 Hardwicke Street was opened in 1816 by Fr. Charles Aylmer SJ, the first public chapel of the restored Society of Jesus. The four founders of the Church of SFX – Peter Kenny, Bartholomew Esmonde, Charles Aylmer and Archbishop Daniel Murray – received their early education in the school for the classics founded in 1750 by the Jesuits in Saul’s Court, off Fishamble St.With a design based on that of the church of the Gesu in Rome, the mother church of the Jesuits, Gardiner St church opened to the faithful on 3 May 1832, when Archbishop Murray celebrated the first Mass on a temporary altar. The foundation stone had been laid on 2 July 1829 by Fr. Charles Aylmer. On 12 February 1835, the church was solemnly blessed by the Archbishop in presence of 14 bishops and large congregation. The church when opened was 135’ long. It was extended in 1838 (at which time new High Altar was under construction in Rome), and in 1850 the sanctuary was extended by 25’, and a semicircular apse built which moved High Altar further back. The High Altar, 25’ high, is of an enriched classical Corinthian Order with 4 green scagliola columns. It was designed and assembled in Rome by Fr. B. Esmonde, while he was based at the Gesu, and who with Mr John B Keane was the architect of the church. It consists of many precious stones and marbles which include lapis lazuli in the drum over tabernacle with malachite inlay.

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St Francis Xavier preaching in Japan ( oil on canvas) Over the high altar, by Bernardo Celantano. It is strange that the figrue of St Francis is over the high altar, as the crucifix is always the altar centre piece. however the Jesuits in the community overcame the dilemma by having Xavier pointing to the crucifix, thus appeasing the liturgists and allowing Fr Esmonde, the architect of the church and Superior, to have his way!

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Furnishings:

· Italinate portico is of Portland stone.

· Pediment sculptures placed over portico in Fr. Nicholas Walsh’s time (1877-84) – Sacred Heart, St. Ignatius and St. Francis Xavier – attributed to Terence Farrell RHA

· Pulpit of cast-iron with monogram of the Society of Jesus ‘HIS’ and gilded portrait heads of ‘Christ Crowned with Thorns’ and ‘Sorrowful Mother of Christ’

· The organ has been rebuilt several times, always in original organ case. Theoriginal instrument was made by Flight & Robson (London) 1836. Jesuits purchased it for 800 guineas.

· Sculptures in Transepts: ‘Jesus in Garden of Olives’, made by French sculptor Jacques Augustin Dieudonne in 1848

· ‘Madonna and Child’ by Roman sculptor Ignazio Jacometti in 1881.

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· Four oil paintings in nave attributed to Pietro Gagliardi (Rome) and were hung in church in Fr. Nicholas Walsh’s time as Rector (1877-84)

Restorations 1877 (new roof); 1896 electricity installed (lit by gaslight before); 1932 redecorated. 1970 – extensive redecoration under Brendan Ellis, to comply with the liturgical norms and spirit of Vatican II, and a new altar table was erected in Cuban mahogany by William Hicks.

Other minor restorations and structural works done in 1974, 1983,1989 and 1990s.

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Review of ‘The Sacred Made Real’ at the National Gallery of Art. Sunday, February 28, 2010
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Before he started work on a religious piece, the Spanish sculptor Gregorio Fernández would pray, fast and repent for his sins — and practice some self-flagellation. When his statue of a naked, beaten Jesus was put up in a parish church around 1621, it was agreed that 15 masses would mention the artist’s name each year, forever, to cut his time in purgatory. Working on the piece, the artist made sure that every inch of it, even the parts in back no one might ever see, did an equally good job of capturing Christ’s bruised and bloodied skin. Fernández so cherished the reality and truth of Christ’s embodiment in flesh that he made his naked Jesus anatomically correct, even though he immediately hid that correctness, forever, under a glue-hardened loincloth.
Fernández must have believed in the worth of his art, as art. But it was the things his art pointed to that made it worth making at all. A sculpture could never grant you a parole from limbo; only the divinity it showed could do you that favor.
When we modern museum-goers admire a certain kind of old religious art for what it looks like, I think we get it wrong. Its look only helps it point to a reality beyond its surfaces, which counted as infinitely more important than the work of art itself.
“The Sacred Made Real: Spanish Painting and Sculpture, 1600-1700,” a groundbreaking exhibition that just touched down at the National Gallery of Art, should help us get back to this older and very different artistic understanding. If it does, this touring show, organized by curator Xavier Bray of the National Gallery in London, will turn out to have been one of the most substantial, important events our Washington museum has hosted. (In London, the show was a sleeper hit. Bray says they were expecting something like 25,000 aficionados. Instead they got four times that many visitors, including at one point “four punks and 50 nuns, intermingling.”)

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“The Sacred Made Real” gives us an important push away from our modern tendency to value painting over any other medium. Well into the Middle Ages and beyond, painting was the poor stepchild of deluxe, more durable materials such as tapestry or metal or marble. In 17th-century Spain, the balance had already shifted to make 3-D and 2-D art about equal, but while Spanish painters such as Diego Velázquez and Francisco de Zurbarán are now famous figures, before this show, their sculptor colleagues have never got equal time.
The exhibition also gets us away from our strange notion that great Old Master paintings should be fully colored and highly realistic, whereas classic sculpture, to count as art rather than kitsch, needs to be all white or wood- or bronze-colored, like statues from ancient Greece and Rome. (Which were once fully colored, anyway, but lost their paint over the millennia.) In fact, until quite recent times, uncolored sculpture has been the exception rather than the rule in Western art. In baroque Spain, specialist “polychromers” were still paid to take a sculptor’s carvings and meticulously paint them to resemble scenes from life. Putting the color back into sculpture, says Bray, is “one of the big aims of this show.”

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This show’s colorful art includes hideous gore, heart-wrenching pathos and lots of frankly histrionic emotion. Yet the problem isn’t that these works press too many buttons, too hard. It’s that for your average secular art lover, their subjects themselves don’t have the heft that they once did, and that risks leaving us distracted by aesthetics. In fact, however, this is a moment when the features that we modern aesthetes count as most “artistic” in a figurative work, such as medium, scale, finish and pose, could count as almost incidental.
In 17th-century Spain, a single saint or holy man could, for instance, be equally well commemorated in carved wood or painted canvas. In this show, there’s a highly realistic sculpture of a Jesuit named Francis Borgia, made to celebrate the priest’s beatification in 1624. It was carved by the master sculptor Juan Martínez Montañés and then colored by the painter Francisco Pacheco, who taught Velázquez and others. And that sculpture is almost perfectly matched by a deluxe painting of the same figure, from the same year, at the same size, by a talented Pacheco student named Alonso Cano. If a work of art brings viewers close to their hero, it’s almost as though it doesn’t matter what material it’s made from.
Scale could also matter much less than it does now. In this show, Zurbarán’s boldly painted canvas of a standing Saint Francis of Assisi, from around 1640, shows the friar large as life. Twenty years later, Pedro de Mena made a fastidiously carved and colored version of the same figure in precisely the same pose but at about half-size, crafted with a hobby-shop accuracy that includes glass eyeballs and real human hair for eyelashes. The similarities between the painting and the sculpture — the shared access that they give us to the holy man — might once have mattered infinitely more than their differences in size and technique. All this is hard to grasp for 21st-century art lovers, trained to believe that the God of art is in the smallest of observable details.

Seventeenth-century thinkers and mystics such as John of the Cross, a Spaniard who was himself apprenticed in a sculptor’s shop, emphasized the importance of realistic art in encouraging religion — but only so long as it was very clear that all worth resided in the subject of the image, not in the object itself.
One canvas by Zurbarán is almost an illustration of the equivalence of painting and sculpture — as though by deliberately confusing the two mediums, it can force us to fall back on the reality behind them both. The small oil we now call “Saint Luke Contemplating the Crucifixion” shows a painter equipped with palette and brushes — is he in fact Saint Luke, who was said to have been a painter, or Zurbarán himself? — gazing at Jesus hanging on the cross. Or is the artist contemplating a colored sculpture of that subject, perhaps one that he’s just polychromed? The National Gallery has hung a real polychromed crucifix beside Zurbarán’s picture; it is so nearly identical in scale and look to the cross in the painting that you have to imagine that Spanish viewers, surrounded by such objects in their daily lives, would have seen one in this painting. Or maybe what Zurbaran is actually showing us is a proud artist standing in front of a painting of his crucified Lord — there are hints that the head of Zurbarán’s brush-wielding figure is casting shadows onto the skyscape behind him, as though it’s a painted surface right nearby rather than an open space in the distance. It certainly makes more sense to imagine a painter holding paint-filled brushes in front of one of his works than outside on Mount Golgotha. I don’t think Zurbaran wants us to choose between one or another of these readings. He wants us to acknowledge how fraught art is, compared to the certainties of religious truth and faith that are the real subject of his work.
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In Spain circa 1650, two works might present a single sacred subject in quite different ways, with the same figures shown in varied poses or viewed from one side rather than another, and yet these different versions might count as being pretty much the same, and as equally successful art. In this show, look at how the painting that Velázquez did around 1628 of Christ collapsed after his flagellation seems to give Jesus precisely the same face as Fernández did, at the start of that decade, in his gory sculpture of the beaten, nearly naked Jesus standing. It’s almost as though we’re seeing the same scene, but at a slightly different moment, from a somewhat different angle, and just by chance in two dimensions rather than three. (The angel and Christian child that Velázquez shows looking at their tortured savior could almost be us, contemplating Fernández’s statue. As Bray points out in his informative catalogue, Velázquez decorously allows them to see a bleeding back that the art of painting lets him turn away from us. A sculptor didn’t have that option for controlling our viewpoint.)
Sometimes the details with the least artistic significance might make the biggest difference between two works. Today, we might be tempted to see a stunningly three-dimensional painting of the crucified Christ, done by Zurbarán in 1627 and praised in its day for looking so much like a sculpture, as very close kin to a quite similarly posed and colored carving of the same subject, made by the great master Montañés in 1617, which hangs beside it in this show. In fact, however, for an observer who cared, one tiny detail might have made them count as almost contradictory images: The painting shows Christ’s feet crucified with separate nails, while the sculpture drives a single nail through both, an issue of “accuracy” fiercely debated at the time among both artists and priests.

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As evidence for the one-nail-per-foot thesis, the painter Pacheco himself cited a 9th-century silver crucifix that had once belonged to Charlemagne, as well as a medieval Italian image that in Pacheco’s day was still thought to have been carved around the time of Christ, by the artist-apostle Saint Luke. That means that we might want to think of Zurbarán’s fine painting as having more in common, in important ways, with those crude and vastly older objects than it had with an almost look-alike sculpture done just a few years earlier. Though separated by centuries, three very different looking works point to the same “reality” of a savior crucified using four nails, rather than to a different, perhaps faulty, version of the truth where three nails were all he got.

The Sacred Made Real: Spanish Painting and Sculpture, 1600-1700 runs through May 31 in the East Building of the National Gallery of Art, on the north side of the Mall at Fourth Street NW.

St. Henry, Ohio. Architect J. Anton Decurtins. Construction was finished in 1897.

Then the disaster struck. . The seventies, a seriously bad decade for Church makeovers & hairstyles.:eek:

I know, lets just dump this organ where the reredos used to be. . no one ‘ll notice.

There’s lots of excellent photographs of Aschaffenburg & the cloisters on this database.http://rubens.anu.edu.au/raid4/europe.0602/germany/aschaffenburg/stiftskirche/

I recognized the door surround instantly from gunters sketch. Problem is when you use the insert image URL here it brings in a massive full size file so I re-sized this one, so as not to block up the page.