Praxiteles

Erected by Pope Clement IX in 1669

@Fearg wrote:

On the subject of statues..

On a recent visit to Armagh Cathedral, I noticed some deterioration in the condition of the lady chapel reredos and the mosaics above, water ingress appears to be the problem with the mosaics.. not so sure that can explain the missing head on one of the statues though. Compare the 2 images below:

March 2007:
[ATTACH]8587[/ATTACH]

Last Week:
[ATTACH]8588[/ATTACH]

Just what is going on here?

Re the deterioration on the ribbing behind the altar: could this possible derive from having painted the ribs a nice glossy white?

Johnglas: Praxiteles was actually referring to the Sanctuary arrangement in the Noth Cathedral as it existed between 1827 and 1963/4. The original High Altar -also by Hogan- was replaced at some stage in the late 19th. or early 20th century with a marble altar which is now against one of the side walls – we have a HIgh Court action taken by one of the faithful at the time of the 1997 gutting to thank for that. Hurley’s original plan was to discard it totally.

The present sanctuary in Cork was inatalled in 1962/63 when the back wall of the 1827 Sanctuary was demolished – which explains the differemnce in ceiling levels between the present sanctuary and the nave. The 1828 Sanctuary did not have a window behind the High Altar. Rather, in a somewhat Spanish style- it had a Retablos which covered the entire back wall and was fitted with some 27 statues by Hogan. These disappeared when Boyd-Barrett hacked the place in 1962 but were “rediscovered” in the recent Hurley make over and have been placed on brackets around the Cathedral. We have a photograph of the 1827 arangement on this thread – in fact there are two photographs on the thread.

Here we have a further photograph of the sanctuary of the Oxford Oratory. The retablos of Saints behind the High Altar is evocative of a similar arrangement behind the High Altar in North Cathedral in Cork (statues by Hogan) which was willfully dismantkled and dumped by Boyd Barrett in a tremendous fit of lunacy. In common with Professor O’Neill, this firm too had the opportunity of destroying another Turnerelli masterpiece – this time, the funeral monument for Bishop Francis Moylan who died in 1815.

Just imagine, all the polychrome saints were painted cream in 1954!!

The Oxford Oratory otherwise the former Jesuit church of St. Aloysius is currently undergoing major restoration work the object of which is to recover the original paint scheme of the ceiling and walls.

It appears that in the 1950s, the Jesuites painted everything out in white, cream and brown. Thta also included the whitewashing of the marble revetment of the sanctuary.

At present, everything of the white, cream and brown is being striped off to reveal the splendour of the original stencil work. We shall keep an eye on this development. Perhaps James1852 might know something of it?

The Jesuit treatment of this church is just about as brutal as their vandalism at the Holy Name in Manchester – which also, mercifully, has passed into the hands of the Oratorians.

On the following, which appeared on the Irish Times on 25 October 2008, we observe the principle de mortuis nihil nisi bonum:

Dominican scholar and activist who stirred up controversy

AUSTIN Flannery OP, who has died aged 83, was one of the mildest-mannered persons ever to acquire a reputation as a revolutionary. He was a scholar who wore his learning lightly, and an editor whose role in making the Second Vatican Council a reality for Catholics in Ireland and elsewhere conferred on him a quiet but undisputed authority in religious matters.

In any sphere of life, his intellectual and personal gifts would have secured him undoubted rewards. That he chose to dedicate these gifts to his community, his church and his country was all of a piece with his selfless character, enlivened – as it generally was – by an infectious sense of humour, and grounded in a strong social conscience.

Born at Rear Cross in Co Tipperary in 1925, Liam Flannery – Austin was the name he took in religion – was educated at St Flannan’s in Ennis, where two of his contemporaries were Kevin McNamara, later archbishop of Dublin, and Tomás Mac Giolla, later president of Sinn Féin and two of its successor parties. He was not greatly enthusiastic about Flannan’s, however, and persuaded his parents to send him to Dominican College, Newbridge, where he completed his secondary education.

His vocation to the Dominicans in 1943 then led him to St Mary’s, Tallaght, and onward to Blackfriars, Oxford (where he formed a lasting friendship with that other troublesome Dominican, Fr Herbert McCabe), and to the Angelicum in Rome.

He was ordained in 1950, and subsequently taught theology for two years at Glenstal Abbey. In 1957, he became editor of the Dominican journal Doctrine and Life. The bare statement of the fact, however, hardly does justice to the subtlety and energy which informed his approach to this task, turning the magazine, of which he remained editor until 1988, into required reading for a whole generation of clergy and laity who came of age, intellectually speaking, in the era of Vatican II.

The ferment that this event produced in Irish Catholicism in the late 1960s was often distilled skilfully in the pages of his magazine, where clergy and laity contributed to a debate characterised by charity as well as by intellectual rigour.

It was similar in some respects to The Furrow, which had been founded by Fr JG McGarry at Maynooth in 1950, but also complementary to that extraordinary journal. Both publications were, in their own way, pillars of ecclesial renewal.

Austin Flannery’s contributions, however, were not limited to the pages of the magazine. Encouraged by his friend Romuald Dodd OP, at that time religious adviser to RTÉ, he presented a series of late-night mini-programmes on that station in the Outlook slot, which changed it from a sleepy, pious, end-of-day moment into a storm-centre of controversy. One programme in 1968 in particular – in which he had the temerity, as it were, to invite the secretary of the Communist Party of Ireland, Michael O’Riordan, to discuss the then current housing crisis with him – provoked uproar in the Dáil.

The minister for local government, Kevin Boland, described him as a “so-called cleric”, and the minister for finance, Charles Haughey, castigated him as a “gullible cleric”. He affected surprise that anyone should have taken offence but – as was often the case – the twinkle in his eye gave the game away. It was not that the programme set out deliberately to outrage anyone – although it was the first time, in seven years of Irish television, that a member of that party had been given an opportunity to appear on the medium.

The bedrock value of his approach was its inclusive character: nobody who had something worthwhile to say should be excluded from public debate because they had been stereotyped or labelled as a member of a minority.

Public controversies like these rolled lightly off his broad shoulders. More privately, he was involved with others – people like Seán Mac Réamoinn, Canon Charles Gray-Stack of the Church of Ireland, Jack Dowling, and James White (in whose flat above the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art many meetings were held) – in a discussion group known colloquially as Flannery’s Harriers.

This group, at which brief papers would be read, followed by a discussion, was noted for its broad reach into all the Christian denominations, and for the ferocity with which the theological and intellectual points raised were sometimes pursued.

Ten years after the end of the Vatican council, his major work Vatican Council ll: The Conciliar and Post-Conciliar Documents, was issued simultaneously by six publishing houses in Ireland, the UK and the USA: it was immediately to become the standard work for use by scholars dealing with these momentous events.

But his scholarship was always complemented by an active engagement in contemporary events. He had been involved for many years in the Irish Anti-Apartheid Movement, of which he became successively chairman and, in 1981, president. In 1983 he was involved with many others in opposition to the Criminal Justice Bill of that year, an issue which was closely linked to his constant concern for civil liberties in a number of other important areas – prisons, social justice, and the powers being given to the police.

Characteristically, his departure from Doctrine and Life did not mean the end of his work in this field. Other magazines like Spirituality, and Religious Life Review were developed to meet new needs, and became as successful as the one whose fortunes he had guided for three decades.

Dominican Publications, of which he was in a special sense the progenitor, is a monument to his work. For those who knew him well – and he had an enormous circle of friends, not least in the media and communications – he was a man of many parts, but through all of them could be discerned the lineaments of the Tipperary in which he had spent his childhood, and the network of family and social relationships which remained central to his life.

He is survived by his brothers Paul and Jim, sisters Phyllis and Sadie, sisters-in-law and brothers-in-law, a niece, Sister Edel OP, and nieces and nephews.

Fr Austin Flannery: born January 10th, 1925; died October 21st, 2008

© 2008 The Irish Times

I do believe this thread has featured a number of moodern churches and contemloraroy churches that have been well designed and built and which quite obviously form lart of the western liturgical and ecclesiastical/architectural tradition.

I do not think that you will ever have a definitive list as the devotion develoled over a leriod with different aslects being emlhasised in different llaces.

And try this also:

http://images.google.it/imgres?imgurl=http://www.biblical-art.com/A%255Cangelico%255Cangel0133.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.biblical-art.com/biblicalsubject.asp%3Fid_biblicalsubject%3D988%26pagenum%3D1&h=68&w=53&sz=3&hl=it&start=161&um=1&usg=__LNUjX0eGq8-r24woDd3pD9EypUs=&tbnid=DsZGOV00v_SrPM:&tbnh=67&tbnw=52&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dfra%2Bangelico%2Bsymbols%2Bof%2Bthe%2Bpassion%26start%3D160%26ndsp%3D20%26um%3D1%26hl%3Dit%26sa%3DN

And for th INstruments of the Passion see this:

http://collecties.meermanno.nl/handschriften/showillu?id=12216

a follower of Smon Bening, Low Countries