Praxiteles

Two Late Nineteenth-century Roman Catholic
Churches in Toronto by Joseph Connolly: St Mary’s,
Bathurst Street and St Paul’s, Power Street

Malcolm Thurlby

Professor Malcolm Thurlby teaches art
and architectural history at
York University,Toronto

ST MARY’S, BATHURST STREET AT ADELAIDE
STREET, and St Paul’s, Power Street at Queen Street East (Figs
1-4, 8 and 9), are two Roman Catholic churches of the late 1880’s
in Toronto, designed by the eminent, Irish-trained architect,
Joseph Connolly (1840-1904).1 The difference in style between
the two buildings is striking, the one Gothic, the other variously
described as Italian Romanesque,2
Italian Renaissance and
Roman Renaissance. Why are they so different? What is
significant about the choice of style? The aims of the patrons, the
training of the architect, ethnic and religious associations, and the
historical situation in the late nineteenth-century Roman
Catholic church in Toronto help us understand.
Born in Limerick, Ireland, and trained in the Dublin office of
James Joseph McCarthy (1817-81), Connolly advanced to
become McCarthy’s chief assistant in the late 1860s.3 He
subsequently made a study tour in Europe and in 1871 he was in
practice for himself in Dublin but no records survive of any
commissions.4
By 13 August 1873 he had moved to Toronto
where he entered into partnership with the engineer, surveyor,
architect Silas James, an association that was dissolved by 23 April
1877, after which Connolly practised alone.5
In all he was
responsible for designing or remodelling twenty-eight Roman
Catholic churches and chapels in the Gothic style in the province,
plus the Roman Catholic cathedral in Sault-Sainte-Marie,
Michigan (1881), and James Street Baptist church in Hamilton
(1879). Moreover, his churches of Holy Cross at Kemptville
(1887-89),6
St John the Evangelist at Gananoque (1891),7
and St
Dismas at Portsmouth (1894-94),8 were inspired by the roundarched Hiberno-Romanesque style introduced by Augustus
Welby Pugin at St Michael’s, Gorey (Co. Wexford) (1838-39).9
This style was also adopted by J.J. McCarthy in St Laurence at
Ballitore (Co. Kildare) (1860) and elsewhere, and enjoyed
considerable popularity in late nineteenth-century Ireland.10
Connolly also completed many other commissions for the
Roman Catholics in Ontario, including convents, schools,
orphanages and rectories, and two classicizing churches including
St Paul’s,Toronto. His last commission was in 1897 and he died of
bronchial asthma in 1904.

Connolly has been designated the ‘Irish-Canadian Pugin’,11
a label that at once reflects his association with J.J. McCarthy, the
‘Irish Pugin’, and Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin (1812-52),
the great champion of Pointed or Christian architecture.12 Two
of McCarthy’s early churches, St Kevin at Glendalough (Co.
Wicklow) (1846-49), and St Alphonsus Liguori, Kilskyre (Co.
Meath) (1847-54), received the rare distinction of a positive
review in The Ecclesiologist, not least because they ‘imitate ancient
models’.13 McCarthy soon assimilated the rudiments of Irish
medieval Gothic design and, in so doing, began to interpret, rather
than simply imitate, his models.This is well illustrated in his 1853
design for St Patrick’s, St John’s, Newfoundland, in which he
demonstrated both a command of Irish medieval sources and a
thorough knowledge of A.W. Pugin’s Irish churches.14

By the 1860s, in keeping with contemporary progressive architects in
England and Ireland, he was attracted by the early Gothic of
northern France, and included such references in his work.15 This
was to have a profound impact on Connolly’s Gothic churches.

ST MARY’S, BATHURST STREET, TORONTO.
The cornerstone of St Mary’s,Toronto, was laid on 15 August
1884, and the dedication performed on 17 February 1889.16 The
spire was not completed until 1905 by Arthur Holmes, Connolly’s
former assistant in the 1880s, to the original design. The
incumbent at the time was the Very Reverend Francis Patrick
Rooney, Vicar-General of the Diocese of Toronto, who was
appointed at St Mary’s in 1870 and continued in office until his
death on 27 December 1894.17 The church served a largely
working-class Irish Catholic community in the late nineteenth
century.18 It is this Irish heritage that is clearly reflected in the
architecture.

St Mary’s is a fine example of Connolly’s Gothic churchdesign repertoire.The three-aisled basilican plan, with a polygonalapsidal sanctuary, transepts slightly lower than the nave, and a
morning chapel to the liturgical north (geographical south), was
used earlier by Connolly at St Patrick’s in Hamilton (1875).The
repertoire is inherited from McCarthy who incorporated a
morning chapel at St Brigid’s, Kilcullen (Co. Kildare) (1869), at
the very time Connolly was chief assistant in McCarthy’s office.
The polygonal apse and lower transepts are adapted from St
Macartan’s cathedral, Monaghan (1861-83).19 The tower at St
Mary’s is placed centrally in the façade, in contrast to most of
Connolly’s other large churches (Figs 1 and 2). He used twin
towers at Our Lady at Guelph (1876) and St Peter’s Basilica
(1880), London, while single angle towers graced St Patrick’s,
Kinkora (1882); St Michael’s, Belleville (1886); St Mary’s, Grafton
(1875); St Patrick’s at Hamilton, and Sault-Sainte-Marie (MI)
(1881).

The design of the St Mary’s, Toronto, façade accords happily
with the location of the church at the head of Adelaide Street
(Fig. 1).The centrally placed tower aligns perfectly with Adelaide
Street and stands proud as a monument to Roman Catholic
achievement that is visible for many blocks along Adelaide. The
basic concept of the central façade tower is allied to E.W Pugin
and G. C.Ashlin’s St Augustine’s, Dublin (1862) (Fig. 5), where we
also find a family resemblance in the low transept-like projections
to either side of the tower. Connolly later adapted this
arrangement for the façade of St Mary’s Cathedral, Kingston
(1889), where the details of the tower followed Bell Harry, the
crossing tower of Canterbury Cathedral. On a much smaller scale,
Connolly provided St Joseph’s, Macton (1886), with a central
façade tower and there followed the rectangular plan of Pugin and
Ashlin’s St Augustine’s tower.20
Connolly also seems to have adapted the idea of enclosing the
side portals and windows at St Mary’s, Toronto, within a giant
arch, from the central arch of Pugin and Ashlin’s St Augustine’s
Dublin (Figs 1 and 5). However, the majority of the façade
detailing is inherited from J.J. McCarthy, in particular the south
transept and west facades of Monaghan (Figs 1, 2 and 7).They all
share a central rose window enclosed in a moulded pointed arch
on columns and capitals, with recessed roundels above and below
the rose.The blind arcade beneath the rose at St Mary’s is a plain
version of that on the south transept at Monaghan, while the gable
with a roundel above the central doorway at St Mary’s reflects the
central west portal at Monaghan.The design of the spire with the
corner niches is also related to Monaghan Cathedral (Figs 1, 2
and. 7), although the angled placement of the niches on
Connolly’s tower is closer to McCarthy’s original scheme at
Monaghan.21 The gables that rise above the belfry openings
between the angle turrets recall McCarthy’s unexecuted design for
the south-west tower of St Brigid’s, Kilcullen, and other nearcontemporary major churches in Ireland.22 One may cite thesouth-west tower of Pugin and Ashlin’s St Colman’s cathedral,
Cobh (Co. Cork) (1869) and, most interestingly, the crossing
tower of William Burges’s St Fin Barre’s cathedral at Cork (1865).
Burges’s design reveals an intimate knowledge of the early Gothic
of Laon Cathedral, a building that supplies a precise analogue for
Connolly’s turrets.23
Inside St Mary’s, Toronto, the two-storey elevation, larger
arches to the transepts carried on piers rather than columns, the
rich acanthus capitals of the main arcades, and the apse vault, all
follow McCarthy’s Monaghan Cathedral (Figs 4 and 6). In
contrast to Monaghan, Connolly introduces polished granite
shafts in the nave arcades at St Mary’s and opts for simple,
chamfered arches rather than repeating the mouldings from
Monaghan. The proportions of the St Mary’s elevation are
squatter, we may say less cathedral-like than at Monaghan. In this
regard they are more in keeping with McCarthy’s parish church
at Killorglin (Co. Kerry), where there are also polished grey
granite shafts and rich acanthus capitals.
The precise parallels cited for St Mary’s,Toronto, might lead to
the accusation that Connolly was a somewhat uninspired
architect. His design for St Paul’s church, Toronto, will clearly
demonstrate that this is not the case, so why does St Mary’s seem
so conservative? It makes sense that Connolly should have
emulated McCarthy and Pugin and Ashlin, the most successful
Roman Catholic Church designers in Ireland during Connolly’s
time there. Connolly’s Gothic also has much in common with the
work of his contemporary architects in Ireland. William Hague
(1840-1900), another pupil of J.J. McCarthy, perpetuated Gothic
according to his mentor and, for example, in the Church of the
Sacred Heart at Omagh (Tyrone) (1893-99), he used polished
granite shafts and rich acanthus capitals in the arcade columns
similar to those at St Mary’s Toronto.24 Nor was such detailing
confined to McCarthy and his students in that O’Neill and Byrne
used these very same motifs in the nave of St Patrick, Killygordon
(Donegal) (1893-95), in which the proportions of the nave
elevation are close to St Mary’s,Toronto.25 Connolly’s church was
at once up to date and yet reflective of a well-established tradition
of Irish Roman Catholic church building. It is this very Irish-ness
that was so important for the Irish priest and his predominantly
Irish congregation at St Mary’s.While we have no record of the
patron’s demands at St Mary’s, the building speaks clearly of its
Irish heritage. Moreover, for McCarthy’s St Patrick’s in St John’s,
Newfoundland, and Connolly’s St Patrick’s, Hamilton,
contemporary accounts specifically mention that the churches
served as reminders of those in the homeland.26

ST PAUL’S, POWER STREET, TORONTO

At St Paul’s,Toronto (Figs 8 and 9) the foundation stone was
laid on 9 October 1887, and the dedication performed on 22
December 1889.27 A contemporary account of St Joseph’s at
Chatham, virtually an architectural twin of St Paul’s, Toronto,
describes the church as being built in the ‘Roman Renaissance’
style. This label is derived from the second chapter of the third
volume of John Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice.28 Ruskin initially
discussed the Casa Grimani in Venice as an example of this style
‘because it is founded, both in its principles of superimposition,
and in the style of its ornament, upon the architecture of classic
Rome at its best period’. He listed St Peter’s Basilica in Rome as
an example of the style ‘in its purest and fullest form’. In its
external form Ruskin observed that the Roman Renaissance style
‘differs from Romanesque work in attaching great importance to
the horizontal lintel or architrave above the arch’.This is used in
Connolly’s internal elevations above the main arcade, and on his
façades, although in the Toronto façade vertical elements penetrate
the entablature above the first storey.
The interior of St Paul’s, Toronto (Fig. 8), has been
convincingly compared with the great Roman basilica of St Paul’s
outside the Walls.29 The association might also be extended to S.
Clemente, Rome, the church of the Irish Dominicans in the city
since 1667. However, both these Roman churches are woodroofed and Connolly’s churches are vaulted in the manner of
Roman Baroque churches as in Carlo Maderno’s extension to the
nave of St Peter’s Basilica (1606-1612). There, the two-storey
elevation, in which the clerestory lunettes are cut into the high
barrel vault, is derived from the nave of Il Gesù Rome, begun in
1568 by Vignola.30 The massive, compound piers of Il Gesù and
Roman Baroque churches were not suitable for Connolly’s St
Paul’s where there needed to be greater openness between the
nave and aisles. It is thus possible to read Connolly’s churches as a
fusion of the main arcades of an Early Christian basilica with the
high barrel vault and clerestorey windows from the Roman
Baroque tradition.
Be that as it may, Connolly’s terms of reference were
significantly broader.The immediate inspiration for the nave, the
low transepts and the apse articulation, seems to have been St
Mel’s cathedral, Longford (1840-56), by J.B. Keane (Figs 8 and
9).31 The churches share the same Ionic order for the main arcade
columns and, in particular, the same arrangement of the low
transepts, except that they are of three bays at Longford. At
Longford the vault is based on Palladian principles, as in his
churches of Il Redentore (1576-91) and San Giorgio Maggiore
(1560-80),Venice, in which the clerestorey windows are cut into
the high barrel vault that springs from the entablature above the
main arcade.32 However, Connolly chose not to adopt this
scheme, or that of most Roman Baroque churches, in which
lunettes cut directly into the high barrel vault. Rather than
springing the high vault immediately above the entablature,
Connolly provided a more fully articulated upper storey in which
the shallow pilasters that carry the transverse arches of the vault
provide an illusion of height far greater than their actual scale.This
is an arrangement encountered in eighteenth-century France in
the churches of Contant d’Ivry, as in the nave of Saint-Vaast at
Arras, begun in 1755, and in La Madeleine in Paris, begun in
1764.33
A Venetian association may be suggested for the east end of St
Paul’s where the three-apse east end is paralleled at Torcello
Cathedral. Ruskin gives a plan of this church, which may be
pertinent in that it has ten-bay arcades like St Paul’s.34
In this
connection it is interesting that in Connolly’s obituary in the
Canadian Architect and Builder, St Pauls’s is labelled as ‘Italian
Romanesque’, an association that best fits aspects of the façade
and the campanile.35
The façade of St Paul’s (fig. 10) is an brilliant amalgam of the
Tuscan Romanesque San Miniato al Monte in Florence and
Venetian church façades of Andrea Palladio (1508-1580): San
Giorgio Maggiore, Sant’ Andrea della Vigne (1570) and Il
Redentore.36 The roundels in the spandrels of the façade also
recall Venice and Ruskin – the Fondaco della Turchi and the
Palazzo Dario37
are good parallels – while the coloured marble
insets may derive from the ‘Decoration by Discs’, on the Palazzo
Badoari Particiazzi, illustrated in colour by Ruskin.38
Be that as
it may, the setting of the roundels adjacent to the capitals of the
main pilasters recalls the Arch of Augustus at Rimini, which may
also have supplied the inspiration for the continuation of the
vertical articulation into the entablature. Alberti’s façade of San
Francesco, Rimini (1450), itself modelled on the Arch of
Augustus, may also have been a point of reference here.39 The
superimposition of the Corinthian over the Ionic order follows
Vitruvian principles as discussed in Joseph Gwilt’s 1867
Encyclopedia of Architecture.40 The bell tower is set off to the side in
the tradition of the Italian Romanesque campanile, as at Santa
Maria in Cosmedin, and San Giorgio in Velabro, in Rome, to cite
just two examples.
J.J. McCarthy’s Thurles cathedral (Co. Tipperary) (1865-72)
may have played an intermediary role for the Italian
Romanesque-style campanile offset to the left of the St Paul’s,
Toronto, façade.41 The division of the ground floor of the Thurles
façade is also related to St Paul’s. In both, there are three round-
headed doorways with carved tympana, one in the centre to the
nave and one each to the aisles, separated by slightly narrower
blind arches. At Thurles, there is no clear separation between the
nave and aisle façades whereas Connolly provided this with bold
Ionic pilasters, a motif that he also used at the outside angles of
the front. Moreover, Connolly incorporated a full entablature
between the lower and upper sections of the façade, a feature
entirely lacking at Thurles.
The architectural confessionals that project from the aisle walls
in St Paul’s, Toronto, are taken neither from a Roman, nor a
classicizing, tradition but are adapted from A.W. Pugin and his
followers. In an account of St George’s, Lambeth (Southwark),The
Ecclesiologist records that ‘Mr Pugin has ingeniously met with the
question of confessionals, which are indispensible to a modern
Roman Catholic church, by making them constructional, and
placing them between the buttresses, approached of course by a
series of doors from the nave. This was an afterthought, but is
more felicitous than architectural afterthoughts generally are’.42
They are used by J.J. McCarthy at St Saviour, Dublin (1852-61),43
and St Ignatius, Galway (1860),44
and subsequently by Pugin and
Ashlin in St Augustine’s, Dublin, and Cobh Cathedral.45
Connolly included them in a number of his Gothic churches,
including the chapel of St John that he added to the north-east of
St Michael’s Cathedral, Toronto (1890). There, a small pointed
gable is placed above the window in the middle of the
confessional while at St Paul’s the walls of the confessional are
built somewhat higher and it is topped with a pediment in the
tradition of a Greco-Roman temple.
For St Paul’s, Toronto, the choice of style for the church
concerns specific personalities, Archbishop Lynch and the Right
Reverend Timothy O’Mahony, the pastor of St Paul’s. O’Mahony
was born in Ireland in 1825 and had completed his priestly
training in Rome.46
In 1879 he met Archbishop Lynch in Rome
and he was invited to Canada to become Lynch’s auxilliary.
Bishop O’Mahony was made pastor of St Paul’s and he
determined to replace the small brick church of 1823.47 As at St
Mary’s,Toronto, there is no written documentation that pertains
to discussions between patron and architect at St Paul’s. However,
a letter from Kennedy, McVittie & Holland, Architects, Barrie,
Ont., 9 May 1883, preserved in the Archives of the Roman
Catholic Archdiocese of Toronto, records that Archbishop Lynch
preferred the ‘Italian Style of Church Architecture’.48 This
architectural ultramontanism is further witnessed in Toronto in
the church of Our Lady of Lourdes, Sherbourne Street (1885-
1886), which was built for Archbishop Lynch by Commander
F. C . L a w.49 Here, the narthex of the original façade recalls S.
Lorenzo fuori le mura, Rome, while the articulation of the
aisleless interior with a barrel vault carried on a full entablature
and stepped Ionic pilasters, plus the ribbed dome on a drum and
pendentives, proudly proclaim Roman Baroque connections.The
entrance and transept facades adapted elements from classical
temple façades, and like St Paul’s,Toronto, a campanile projected
to the left of the west (east) front.
Loretto abbey church, located on Wellington Street near
Spadina, Toronto, built by Beaumont Jarvis in 1897 and
demolished in 1961, continued this Romanizing theme.50
It had
a single-storey elevation with coffered barrel vaults over the
chancel, transepts and nave, and a ribbed dome on pendentives
over the crossing. The walls of the chancel and transepts were
articulated with Corinthian pilasters.The lower, single-bay chapels
in the angles of the transepts and chancel communicated with the
main spaces through a trabeation on plain Ionic pilasters.The slim
Ionic columns that separated the nave and aisles may have been
inspired by Connolly’s nave at St Paul’s.

CHURCHES OF OTHER DENOMINATIONS IN LATE
NINETEENTH-CENTURY TORONTO

While Connolly’s churches of St Mary and St Paul, Toronto,
are stylistically quite different, they are both emphatically
Catholic, the one emphasizing an Irish heritage, the other, a
ultramontane link with Rome.The latter is obviously specific to
the Roman Catholics but what of the Gothic of St Mary’s? It is
here that the Irish-ness of the design sets it apart from
contemporary churches of other denominations in Toronto and
elsewhere in Ontario.Two Anglican churches, St Matthew and St
John (1889) on First Avenue by Strickland and Symons, and St
Thomas on Huron Street by Eden Smith (1892), conform to
English High Victorian Gothic principles. In accordance with the
liturgical tradition of the high church, they are both fitted with a
rood screen, and a piscina and sedilia. The 1875 split in the
Presbyterian congregation of St Andrew’s,Toronto, resulted in the
construction of two new churches; New Old St Andrew’s by
Langley, Langley and Burke, was Gothic, while New St Andrew’s
by William George Storm, was Romanesque.51 This was not the
contemporary Romanesque of Henry Hobson Richardson but
Romanesque intended to reflect the style of Norman Scotland
and thereby provide a geographical, if not a temporal, association
with the home of Presbyterianism.52 At the same time, the Baptist
congregation of Jarvis Street adhered to the Gothic style for their
new church by Langley, Langley and Burke (1874-5). However,
the amphitheatrical seating plan in the sanctuary of their church
was quite distinct from either Anglican or Catholic medievalinspired basilicas, and was the first use of this plan in the city.53
In
1886/7 Langley and Burke used a similar plan for the Sherbourne
Street Methodist,Toronto, but on this occasion Gothic gave way
to their interpretation of Richardsonian Romanesque. This
stylistic choice eradicated any possible association between
Methodism and either the ‘Papists’ or the Anglicans that might be
implied by a Gothic church.54
CONCLUSION
With the heightening of stylistic self-consciousness in church
design in Toronto and Ontario in the late nineteenth century,
Joseph Connolly succeeded in providing his patrons with two
quite specifically Catholic churches. The Irish association was
emphatically articulated at St Mary’s, while the ultramontane
preferences of Archbishop Lynch and Bishop O’Mahony were
boldly announced at St Paul’s. In the design of St Paul’s Connolly’s
eclectic use of sources comes as some surprise in the oeuvre of an
architect so thoroughly grounded in Gothic. His selection and
adaptation of motifs from Rome and Venice,Tuscan Romanesque,
French neo-classicism and Irish Romanesque and Baroque revival
styles, plus the adaptation of Gothic confessionals, show
Connolly’s impressive command of historical styles and his
remarkable talent in fusing such diverse elements into an elegant
new design.

Notes
1 On Connolly, see Canadian Architect and Builder, 17, issue 12 (1904), p. 205; Malcolm
Thurlby, ‘The Irish-Canadian Pugin: Joseph Connolly’, Irish Arts Review, 3, no. 1
(1986), pp. 16-21; Christopher A. Thomas, ‘A High Sense of Calling: Joseph
Connolly,A.W. Holmes, and their Buildings for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese
of Toronto, 1885-1935’, RACAR, XIII/2 (1986), pp. 97-120; Malcolm Thurlby,
‘The Church of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception at Guelph: Puginian
Principles in the Gothic Revival Architecture of Joseph Connolly’, Society for the
Study of Architecture in Canada Bulletin, 15 (1990), pp. 32-40; idem, ‘Joseph
Connolly’s Roman Catholic Churches in Wellington County’, Historic Guelph,
XXXI (1992), pp. 4-31; idem,‘Joseph Connolly and St Joseph’s Roman Catholic
Church, Macton’, Historic Guelph, XXXII (1993), pp. 71-72.
2 Canadian Architect and Builder, 17, (1904), p. 205, gives Italian Romanesque. Italian
Renaissance is used by Eric Arthur,Toronto: No Mean City, 3rd edition, revised by
Stephen A. Otto (Toronto, 1986), p. 186.‘Roman Renaissance’ is used to describe
St Joseph’s, Chatham, Ontario, virtually an architectural twin of St Paul’s,Toronto,
Catholic Record [London, ON], 30 Oct. 1886, p. 4, illus. & descrip.; 29 Oct. 1887,
p. 5, illus. & descrip.).
3 Canadian Architect and Builder, 17, (1904), p. 205.
4 Canadian Architect and Builder, 17 (1904), p. 205. Joseph Connolly is listed as an
architect in Thom’s Irish Almanac and Official Directory for the year 1871, pp. 1596
and 1806.
5 An advertisement for the James and Connolly practice appears in The Irish
Canadian, August 13, 1873, p. 5. A tender call in The Globe, April 23, 1877, p.7,
names Connolly alone.
6 Catholic Record, 6 Oct., 1888, p. 1; Louis J. Flynn, Built on a Rock:The Story of the
Roman Catholic Church in Kingston 1826-1976, (Kingston, ON, 1976), p. 256.
7 Contract Record, ii, 1 Aug. 1891, p. 2; Flynn, Built On A Rock, pp. 78, 266-68.
8 Flynn, Built On A Rock, pp. 322-24.
9 Phoebe Stanton, Pugin, (London, 1970), figs 36-41; Malcolm Thurlby,‘NineteenthCentury Churches in Ontario:A Study in the Meaning of Style’,Historic Kingston,
35 (1986), pp. 96-118 at 104; Thurlby, ‘The Irish-Canadian Pugin: Joseph
Connolly’, pp. 20-21.
10 Jeanne Sheehy, J.J. McCarthy and the Gothic Revival in Ireland (Belfast, 1977) p. 55;
idem,The Rediscovery of Ireland’s Past: the Celtic Revival 1830-1930 (London, 1980),
p.131, pl. 107.
11 Thurlby,‘The Irish-Canadian Pugin: Joseph Connolly’.
12 Sheehy, J.J. McCarthy; Douglas Scott Richardson, Gothic Revival Architecture in
Ireland, 2 vols (New York, 1983), pp. 488-492. Stanton, Pugin; Roderick
O’Donnell,‘The Pugins in Ireland’, in A.W.N. Pugin, Master of Gothic Revival, ed.
Paul Atterbury (New Haven and London, 1995), pp. 136-59.Also see remarks on
Pugin in Malcolm Thurlby, ‘St. Patrick’s Roman Catholic Church, School and
Convent in St John’s, Newfoundland: J.J. McCarthy and Irish Gothic Revival in
Newfoundland’, Journal of the Society for the Study of Architecture in Canada, 28 no.
3 (2003), pp. 13-20.
13 The Ecclesiologist,VIII (1848), p. 62.
14 Thurlby,‘St. Patrick’s Roman Catholic Church, School and Convent in St John’s,
Newfoundland’, pp. 13-20.
15 J. Mordaunt Crook,‘Early French Gothic’, in Sarah Macready and F.H.Thompson
(ed.), Influences in Victorian Art and Architecture, Society of Antiquaries of London
Occasional Paper (New Series),VII (London, 1985), pp. 49-58.
16 John Ross Robertson, Landmarks of Toronto, iv (Toronto, 1904), p. 321.
17 Robertson, Landmarks of Toronto, iv, pp. 322-323.
18 Mark McGowan, The Waning of the Green: Catholics, the Irish and Identity in Toronto,
1887-1922 (Montreal and Kingston, 1999), pp. 26, 29.
19 Sheehy, J.J. McCarthy, ill. 51, from The Builder, 12 September 1868, p. 675.
20 Thurlby,‘Joseph Connolly’s Roman Catholic Churches in Wellington County’, pp.
4-31; idem,‘Joseph Connolly and St Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church, Macton’,
pp. 71-72.
21 Sheehy, J.J. McCarthy, ill. 51.
22 Kilcullen is illustrated in Sheehy, J.J. McCarthy, ill. 49.
23 Laon cathedral towers are illustrated in W. Eden Nesfield, Specimens of Medieval
Architecture chiefly selected from examples of the 12th and 13th Centuries in France and
Italy (London, 1862), pls 36 and 37.
24 Alistair Rowan, The Buildings of Ireland, North West Ulster (Harmondsworth, 1979),
pl. 122.
25 Rowan, The Buildings of Ireland, North West Ulster, pl. 123.
26 Thurlby,‘St. Patrick’s Roman Catholic Church, School and Convent in St John’s,
Newfoundland’, pp. 13-14; Irish Canadian, 7 July 1875, p. 2, cols. 1-4 (from
Hamilton Times, 28 June).
27 Catholic Weekly Review [Toronto], 15 Oct. 1887, pp. 410-11, illus. & descrip.;Toronto
World, 25 Aug. 1888, p. 3, descrip.; Catholic Record [London, ON], 28 Dec. 1889, p.
5, descrip.; Robertson, Landmarks of Toronto, iv, pp. 315-20, illus. & descrip.; Harold
Kalman, History of Canadian Architecture (Toronto, 1994), pp. 587-8, illus. &
descrip.). The building accounts are preserved in Archives of the Archdiocese of
Toronto.
28 John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, 3 vols (London, 1851).
29 Thomas,‘A High Sense of Calling’, p. 102.The nave of St Paul’s outside the walls
is illustrated in Joseph Gwilt, The Encyclopedia of Architecture, Historical,Theoretical,
and Practical, revised by Wyatt Papworth (London, 1867, reprinted New York,
1980), p. 110, fig. 142.
30 Peter Murray, The Architecture of the Italian Renaissance (New York, 1963), fig. 137.
31 I owe this comparison to Eddie McParland.
32 James Ackerman, Palladio (Harmondsworth, 1966), ills 70, 72 and 73 (Il
Redentore), and 84 and 85 (S. Giorgio Maggiore).
33 Wend von Kalnein,Architecture in France in the Eighteenth Century (New Haven and
London, 1995), pls 218 and 220.
34 Ruskin, Stones of Venice, I, pl. I, opp. p.16.
35 Canadian Architect and Builder, 17, (1904), p. 205.
36 Rudolf Wittkower,Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism, 4th edn (London,
1973), pp. 89-97.
37 The Builder (1851), p. 202.
38 Ruskin, Stones of Venice, I, pl.VI, opp. p. 250.
39 On S. Francesco, Rimini, see Murray,Architecture of the Italian Renaissance, pp. 48-
50.
40 Gwilt, The Encyclopedia of Architecture, pp. 850-853.
41 Sheehy, J.J. McCarthy, p. 63;Thomas,‘A High Sense of Calling’, pp. 102-103.
42 The Ecclesiologist, IX (1849), p. 155.
43 Sheehy, J.J. McCarthy, pp. 43-44.
44 Sheehy, J.J. McCarthy, pp. 55-56.
45 Douglas Scott Richardson, Gothic Revival Architecture in Ireland, 2 vols (New York,
1983), pp. 500-502; O’Donnell,‘The Pugins in Ireland’, p. 155.
46 Thomas,‘A High Sense of Calling’, pp. 101-102.
47 Thomas,‘A High Sense of Calling’, p. 102.
48 Kennedy and Holland were supervising architects of St Ann’s (formerly Martyr’s)
Memorial church in Penetanguishine, Ontario.
49 Robertson, Landmarks, iv, ill. opp. p. 330. Patricia McHugh, Toronto Architecture:A
City Guide (Toronto, 1985) p. 159, illustrates the church before the remodelling of
the church in 1910 when a nave was constructed to the liturgical north
(geographical south) of the church by James P. Hynes.
50 Arthur, Toronto: No Mean City, ills 338 and 341.
51 William Westfall, Two Worlds:The Protestant Culture of Nineteenth-Century Ontario,
Kingston and Montreal (1989), p. 132, figs 7-9; Janine Butler, ‘St. Andrew’s
Presbyterian Church, Toronto’s “Cathedral of Presbyterianism”’, Ontario History,
LXXXIII, Number 3 (1991), pp. 170-92.
52 Specific mention is made of Kirkwall Cathedral although, other than both
buildings being Romanesque, the link is far from obvious; see, Butler,‘St.Andrew’s
Presbyterian Church, Toronto’s “Cathedral of Presbyterianism”’, pp. 173-75. On
Kirkwall Cathedral, see Malcolm Thurlby, ‘Aspects of the architectural history of
Kirkwall Cathedral’, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 127 (1997),
pp. 855-888.
53 Robertson, Landmarks of Toronto, iv, pp. 42-43; William Westfall and Malcolm
Thurlby, ‘The Church in the Town: The Adaptation of Sacred Architecture to
Urban Settings in Ontario’, Etudes Canadiennes/Canadian Studies (Association
Française d’Etudes Canadiennes), 20 (1986), pp. 49-59 at 53-54;William Westfall
and Malcolm Thurlby,‘Church Architecture and Urban Space:The Development
of Ecclesiastical Forms in Nineteenth-Century Ontario’, in Old Ontario: Essays in
Honour of J.M.S. Careless, ed. David Keene and Colin Read (Toronto and London,
1990), pp. 118-147 at pp. 128-29; Euthalia Lisa Panayotidis, 1991, ‘Gothic and
Romanesque:A Question of Style.The Arrangement of Protestant Churches and
School Houses in 19th-Century Ontario: The Work of Henry Langley’,
unpublished MA thesis,York University, pp. 59-74; Angela Carr, Toronto Architect,
Edmund Burke (Montreal and Kingston, 1995) pp. 26-29.
54 Carr, Toronto Architect, Edmund Burke, pp. 34-35, fig. 3.28.

The article as published in Ecclesiology Today 33 2004

http://www.ecclsoc.org/ET.33.pdf

Joseph Connolly

List of 18 of Connolly’s 35 churches in Ontario:

http://www.heritagetrust.on.ca/Ontario-s-Places-of-Worship/Inventory/Search-results.aspx?searchtext=r&Type=Architect&ShowID=114

Joseph Connolly’s Hiberno-Romanesque in Ontario

3. Holy Cross in Kemptville, Ontario (1888)

This beautiful church, clearly influenced by St. Michael’s in Gorey, unfortunately has been wrecked internally:

http://www.ecclesiasticalgroup.com/projects/Holy_Cross_Church/holycross.html

2. Portsmouth, Ontario, St Dismas

http://www.flickr.com/photos/greying_geezer/2143627337/sizes/m/in/photostream/

Kent Pugin Conference part II

KOCYBA, Kate
is a doctoral candidate at the University of Missouri. She is completing a dissertation on the
Episcopal Church use and dissemination of Neo-Gothic architecture in the United States.
Neo-Gothic Moves Inland: Episcopalians & the Wisconsin Frontier 1835 – 1865
If A.W.N. Pugin established the Christian moral tone for Neo-Gothic architecture, it was the
Ecclesiologists and High Churchmen on both sides of the Atlantic who developed an
ideology for ecclesiastical architecture. This paper examines one case of how these ideas
moved from England to the United States, where they took form, among other places, in the
remote regions of the upper Midwest. The power of the published word is critical to our
understanding this architecture. Without publications such as New York Ecclesiologist and
The Churchmen, the Gothic Revival of the mid-nineteenth century would not have existed,
not in New York or Philadelphia, and certainly not in rural Wisconsin. This research,
therefore, reveals how and how quickly ideas about Gothic architecture promulgated in
England spread throughout the world including the United States, and how those ideas were
adapted to substantially different circumstances, illustrating powerfully the flexibility of the
Gothic as always ascribed.
Prior to Wisconsin’s statehood in 1848, Episcopalians were seeking a foothold on the
Wisconsin Frontier and they used Gothic Revival architecture to express their doctrine and
solidify their status. Ecclesiastical ideas from England – such as those of Pugin and the
Cambridge Camden Society – and America were well known to Episcopal clergy and
architects in this period. Architects with ecclesiological backgrounds created pattern books to
promote and establish a ‘correct’ church type for Episcopalians on the frontier. Since the establishment of the Episcopal Church it had perceived itself as an extension of the ‘true
Catholic Church’. Thus since the early nineteenth century Episcopalians had established an
architectural association of ‘Catholic’ through the use of the Gothic. Episcopalians, especially
in Wisconsin, saw no other choice for their churches for it symbolised their theological
beliefs. Therefore by the 1850s ecclesiology was firmly rooted in the American mindset as
Episcopalian, and even in the wilderness, Episcopalians constructed churches that established
their presence and facilitated their liturgical practices.
LAWREY, Alex
is a film-maker and independent scholar specialising in the built environment and the history
of trades unions in the building and print industries. He graduated from the Masters of Civic
Design course at the University of Liverpool last September and is a member of the Utopian
Studies Society of Europe.
The (in) dignity of labour: craft, Contrasts and conflict in Pugin’s Gothic Revival
A.W.N. Pugin’s book Contrasts set out a manifesto for a future Gothic style matched with a
return to mediaeval Catholicism. The nineteenth-century Gothic Revivalists operated against
a background of strikes, trades unions, immigrant labour and the undercutting of prices and
wages. The celebration of the mythic ‘craftsman’ in Pugin, (and in John Ruskin and William
Morris) provides a stark contrast to the labour conditions of real building workers, and there
were concurrent changes in fraternities and trades unions, in industrial laws and in the
structures of the ‘building world’, notably the general contract system. Mediaevalism was
often built through the use of immigrant labour, such as the O’Sheas, with local craft control
effectively surrendered in the process.
However just as the Gothic style spread across the British Empire so too did the skilled-craft
trades unions, Pugin’s designs were exported to Australia, along with Owenite slogans and
demands for trades union control, with correspondence showing that craft unions influenced
patterns of emigration and the supply of skilled carpenters, masons and the like. Melbourne
University incorporates a Puginite Gothic sensibility in its architecture and also witnessed a
strike by stonemasons that won the world’s first eight-hour working day. Gothicism as a style
served varying purposes, from Pugin’s notion of a return to Rome, to the Church of England
supporting Commissioner’s churches built using industrial methods, exemplified by the iron
pillars of St George’s, Everton. Victorian trades unions were not trying to return to an
idealised version of the mediaeval guilds but rather revisiting conflicts between journeymen
and guild masters that were all too common in the Middle Ages.LEPINE, Ayla
is the Andrew W. Mellon Research Forum Postdoctoral Fellow at The Courtauld Institute of
Art, London. Her research focuses on both Victorian monasticism and the persistence of the
Gothic Revival in twentieth-century Anglo-American contexts.
Backward Glances or Profound Progress?: transatlantic Gothic’s ‘restrained power’ as
twentieth-Century avant-garde
In the 1880s, the British architect George Frederick Bodley advocated designs characterised
by ‘restrained power’ in which ornament and vivid colour could be tempered by simplicity
and light. Meanwhile, Anglican theologians such as R. M. Benson and Charles Gore offered
compelling studies on the nature of sacrifice, sacrament and discipline. These ideas were
carried forward by Bodley and a new generation of early twentieth-century architects in
Britain and the US; indeed, when Bodley wrote to the American Bishop Henry Satterlee in
1906 to accept the commission to design a national Episcopal cathedral for the United States
in Washington DC, he spoke of the future cathedral as a utopian Gothic Revival vision for a
new world.
This paper posits that in the early twentieth century, Gothic Revival architecture governed by
‘restrained power’ was synonymous with a specifically Anglo-Catholic sacramental theology
with a thoroughly transnational Anglican world-view. New research regarding contemporary
architectural and theological practices will underpin fresh interpretations of Cram, Goodhue
and Ferguson’s St Thomas in New York as a mediaevalist case study. Recent scholarship on
the significance of place and memory in architectural design will be invoked alongside
primary research to account for a crucially important aspect of Anglo-American Gothic
Revival impetus at the turn of the century. Historicist buildings like St Thomas constructed a
cultural memory of the Middle Ages through iterations of Britain’s Victorian Gothic Revival.
Figured in this way, America’s twentieth-century Gothic inhabited a productive paradox,
positioning itself as both traditionalist and robustly avant-garde in its engagement with the
stylistic and ideological priorities of modernity.
LINDFIELD-OTT, Peter N.
is a PhD student of architecture and furniture at the University of St Andrews. He is
completing his thesis, ‘Furnishing Britain: Gothic as a national aesthetic, 1740–1840’.
A.W.N. Pugin’s Gothic: evolutionary, revolutionary, reactionary?
This paper re-examines the place of A.W.N. Pugin in the ‘evolution’ of the Gothic Revival.
Pugin scholars have focused on his broad range of output, his achievements and, above all,
his revolutionary approach to reviving the mediaeval arts. Pugin’s importance in this regard is not disputed. Instead, this paper argues that his ‘reformation’ of the Gothic was part of a
wider movement in early nineteenth-century British architecture and furniture-making. Case
studies drawn from extensive and unpublished manuscript sources demonstrate that a number
of Pugin’s predecessors and contemporaries were deeply concerned with exploring mediaeval
architecture and woodwork, and applying this knowledge to the design of furniture and
interiors fit for modern convenience. Although their efforts were unilaterally dismissed by
Pugin in 1841, I argue that his ‘reformed’ Gothic was part of a bigger trend towards
understanding and interpreting the mediaeval architecture and woodwork. The True
Principles was evolutionary, not revolutionary
Unpublished manuscript correspondence, designs, extant architecture and furniture
are examined and provide the foundation for a number of case studies. All the buildings and
furniture presented are important examples of the Gothic Revival in the nineteenth century in
terms of patronage, status, cost or location, and demonstrate some level of antiquarian
preoccupation: Eaton Hall, Cheshire (1803-14, 1823-25); the Speaker’s House, Westminster
(1802-8); and the work of the antiquarian architect L.N. Cottingham (1787-1847). They
clearly demonstrate that architects and designers were scrutinising mediaeval output to
inform their work decades before, and whilst, Pugin was establishing the ‘true principles’, his
principles were reactionary, but not entirely revolutionary.
LOCHHEAD, Ian
is Associate Professor of Art History, School of Humanities, University of Canterbury,
Christchurch, New Zealand. He has a particular interest in the impact of the Gothic Revival
on New Zealand architecture.
A Gothic Revival City in a Seismic Zone: the rise and fall of Christchurch, New Zealand
Christchurch, founded in 1850, was the principal city of Canterbury, the last and most
ambitious of New Zealand Company’s settlements. With a bishop at its spiritual leader and a
cathedral at its centre, Canterbury was intended as an ideal cross section of English provincial
life at a time when traditional values were seen as threatened following the revolutions of
1848. The Canterbury Association, founded in 1848 to promote the colony, included many
prominent churchmen and it was assumed from the outset that Christchurch’s architecture
would be Gothic in style. Benjamin Mountfort, the Association’s chosen architect, was a
disciple of A.W.N. Pugin and his buildings shaped the character of the colonial settlement.
By 1900 Christchurch was one of the most complete Gothic Revival cities in the world,
illustrating the global extent of the movement.
This paper explores the architectural development of Christchurch from the modest timberGothic structures of the 1850s to the completion of G.G. Scott’s Christ Church Cathedral
in1901. The adaptation of British architectural forms and construction techniques to the
colonial environment is examined along with the strategies architects employed to counteract
the threat of earthquakes. The rejection of Scott’s initial cathedral proposal, with its internal timber structure enclosed by stone walls, is discussed along with its influence on subsequent
Christchurch buildings. The paper concludes by surveying the impact of the earthquakes of
September 2010 and February 2011 on Christchurch’s Gothic Revival buildings and offers an
assessment of the likely fate of Scott’s first cathedral proposal, based on the performance of
contemporary buildings which adopted his design concept.
MACDONELL, Cameron
is a doctoral candidate at McGill University’s School of Architecture. His thesis explores
Maury’s new discursive possibilities for Gothic architecture and literature through the works
of Ralph Adams Cram.
Phantom limbs: the Gothic storeys and stories of Ralph Adams Cram
There remains a shared assumption among scholars of modern Gothic architecture and
literature: their respective discourses parted company after the 1830s. This assumption is
based on two interrelated arguments: first, the Victorian Gothic novel evolved beyond the
distinctly mediaeval, whereas Victorian Gothic architects attended rigorously to mediaeval
structural principles; second, Gothic literature was interested in the domestic haunted house;
whereas Victorian architects concentrated their principles on the Church. The Victorian
church, as the true House of God, was supposed to have exorcised any confusion with the
domestic architecture of man, providing sanctuary from the haunting conditions of a secular,
urban-industrial world.
Ralph Adams Cram complicated this schismatic view. In the darkest moments of his despair,
Cram designed churches that were not resurrected Gothic beauties, but spectral remnants of a
murdered past beyond his powers to avenge. He wrote a book of Gothic ghost stories that
expressed his impotent horror, and he designed St Mary’s Anglican Church (1902–04) in
Walkerville, Ontario, to do the same. This paper investigates Cram’s phantom limb pain,
studying his Walkerville church through the correlation of sickness and the supernatural. He
designed it for Edward Walker, who was secretly dying of syphilis. Edward’s illness was
encrypted through the withered limb of a biblical leper; and his ‘hand’ became a phantom
limb haunting the structural body of the church. The House of Walker haunts the Walkerville
House of God in a way that opens new directions for modern Gothic architecture and
literature.
MACE, Jessica
is a PhD candidate in art and architectural history at York University, Toronto. Her
dissertation is titled ‘Nation-building: Gothic Revival Houses in Canada West, 1841-67’.Pugin versus pattern books: interpretations of the Gothic Revival for houses in Canada
West, 1841-67
In Canada’s formative years, a clear link between the colony and England was sought,
particularly in terms of the construction of a personal dwelling. A Gothic house, more than
simply responding to an international fashion, marked an alliance with the motherland and
marked its inhabitants as proud British citizens. The style as promoted by A.W.N. Pugin
arrived in English-speaking Canada through immigrating architects and British publications,
but was also filtered through America as eager pattern-book writers adopted his gospel. This
confluence of ideas ensured a unique interpretation of the Gothic Revival style for houses in
Canada West (Southern Ontario, as it was known from 1841-67), which will be examined in
this paper.
While Gothic was the preferred house style here in the years before Confederation, a purer,
more Puginian Gothic was typically adopted in major city centres where architects lived and
worked. American pattern books, such as those by Andrew Jackson Downing (1815-52),
were used for convenience in smaller towns and in the countryside, thus ensuring a wide
variety of manifestations of the style. This paper will examine select examples of architectbuilt houses, including clergy houses, as well as examples of houses that were built to the
specifications provided in pattern books, in order to highlight the diverse ways in which the
style was used. This investigation seeks to shed light on the application of the Gothic style to
houses in Canada West and the attempt to establish a house style uniquely adapted to the
Canadian situation.
MAURY, Gilles
is an architect and holds a doctorate in the history of architecture. He teaches history,
methodology, and has led a design studio in the Lille Architecture School (France) since
2002. He is also a member of the school research team LACTH.
The proselytism of a true disciple: Baron Bethune’s works in Roubaix, 1874-96
The relationship between A.W.N. Pugin and Jean-Baptiste Bethune (1821-96) was
undoubtedly one of master-follower, despite its very short length. All of Bethune’s works in
Belgium demonstrate his strict acceptance of Pugin’s convictions, or True Principles, to a
degree still to be explored in depth. Recent research has extended knowledge of his work, but
his influence in France, as a counterbalance to Viollet-le-Duc’s hegemony, remains largely
unknown.
Working in a context of complete revision of the Catholic faith, and encouraged by powerful
families from the Belgian ultramontane circles, Bethune tried to apply Gothic design to everything, drawing alone but trusting a network of gifted craftsmen. Around 1870, Bethune
met the very pious Desclée family, as yet unaware that these unparalleled patrons would help
him to develop his practice in all of his master’s cherished domains until his death in 1896.
It was in Roubaix that Baron Bethune began to build a bridgehead in France for a second
Gothic Revival. Thanks to the Desclée family, Bethune built four exceptional buildings in the
town and the two most important still survive today. The lecture will show how Bethune’s
works and the repercussions in the Lille metropolis took shape as a little-known Gothic
revival proselytism, perhaps part of a wider plan for the diffusion of ultramontane ideas. This
paperr will detail, through some unexploited archives, how this tireless designer, this
champion of Pugin’s ideals, became involved in some of the Desclée family’s businesses, and
overwhelmed the Roubaix area with his creations that include buildings, liturgical ornaments,
stained-glass, lighting fixtures, publications and religious imagery…
MCNAIR, Stephen
is a PhD candidate in architectural history at the University of Edinburgh, focusing on
ecclesiology in the antebellum Deep South. Stephen holds a degree in History from the
University of Alabama and a Master’s degree in Historic Preservation from Tulane
University.
Richard Upjohn’s Gothic Revival in Antebellum Alabama
The mature Gothic Revival movement of the 1850s held multifarious associations ranging
from the picturesque to the sacred for the geographically dispersed and culturally diverse
population of the United States. For Episcopalians in antebellum rural Alabama, the Gothic
Revival provided a mien to demonstrate refinement, express piety, and instigate notions of
permanence. The Englishman Richard Upjohn served as the voice for rural ecclesiology in
Alabama, as demonstrated by the omnipresent influence of his plan-book, Upjohn’s Rural
Architecture. Through a close examination of the Upjohn-inspired churches, this paper will
examine how the interrelated agendas of English ecclesiology, regional aesthetics, Episcopal
tradition, and romanticism eventually coalesced into a denomination’s identification with and
conversion to the Gothic Revival.
The figurehead Rural Architecture was one of the most influential publications to broach the
cross-denominational desire for ecclesiastical architecture in America. Upjohn provided
designs for both a parish church and chapel that differed considerably in price, size, and
elaboration, but utilised board and batten construction as well as adopting mediaeval-inspired
forms and details. His unique board-and-batten carpenter Gothic designs allowed Alabama
congregations to draw upon carpentry tradition and the use of timber while meeting the
architectural and liturgical needs of the Church.
Ecclesiology in the American South was directly influenced by the relationships between
southern clergymen and their English contemporaries. Publications produced by the Oxford Architectural Society as well as the Cambridge Camden Society influenced promising
parishes that longed for a Gothic church in the spirit of the High Church Anglican tradition.
The result was ‘Upjohn Gothic’ churches combining English ecclesiology with an
understanding of local weather, materials, budgets, and social traditions creating a unique
form of vernacular ecclesiology.
MOONEY, Barbara Burlison
is Associate Professor in the School of Art and Art History at the University of Iowa. She is
writing a book on mediaeval revival churches on the American prairie.
Gothic Revival on the American Prairie: the churches of G.P. Stauduhar
The horizon line of the typical American prairie town is punctuated by three exclamation
points: a grain elevator, water tower, and Gothic spire. Gothic Revival churches abound on
the Midwest, yet scant scholarship addresses their history. Fortunately, the survival of more
than 60 churches designed by George P. Stauduhar, and the preservation of his office records
exemplify how this design mode became a dominant feature in American prairie towns, and
also reveal how this period fits into the larger historical trajectory of Gothic Revival
architecture.
Stauduhar (1863-1928) received his training in the late 1880s at the University of Illinois,
under the direction of Nathan C. Ricker, who was the first graduate of an American collegiate
architecture programme. Stauduhar promoted himself as a specialist in church architecture,
and his extant buildings can be found in Illinois, Iowa, Ohio, Indiana, Minnesota, North
Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas.
An examination of his clients, design practices, and the perception of his churches among
American Midwesterners undermine conventional paradigms about the evolution of Gothic
Revival architecture. First, Stauduhar’s Gothic Revival designs shifts the dominant historical
narrative about American Gothic Revival architecture from one concentrating on wealthy,
High Church Episcopalians to one focusing on working-class, German and Irish Catholics.
Stauduhar’s design practices also reveal how late Gothic Revival buildings relied on practices
that became associated with modern architecture, namely, standardisation and massproduction. Finally, an investigation of the context of Stauduhar’s churches reveals how
Gothic Revival on the prairie was steeped in deep-seated sectarian and ethnic antagonism.NAU, Anna
holds an MSc from the University of Edinburgh and an MA from the University of Virginia.
She is an architectural conservator with Ford, Powell & Carson Architects in San Antonio,
Texas.
Ecclesiological Gothic in America: the Episcopal churches of St James the Less and St
Mark’s, Philadelphia
The Episcopal churches of St James the Less and St Mark’s in Philadelphia introduced a new
form of Gothic revival architecture to 1840s America that was directly inspired by the
architectural movement of the Cambridge Camden (later Ecclesiological) Society of England.
While the place of these churches as two of the earliest ‘mature’ ecclesiological designs in
America has been well established by Phoebe Stanton, this paper examines their patronage to
investigate why they appeared in Philadelphia at this time. It was under the leadership of two
prominent Philadelphians, Robert Ralston and Henry Reed, that they were erected. While
both churches’ vestries embraced Ecclesiological Gothic as a means of expressing their
theological convictions, they also used the particularly English architectural character of their
churches as a way to visually set themselves apart from other religious groups in Philadelphia
as congregations with a distinctively English heritage.
Ralston’s and Reed’s personal connections to England and embracement of a specifically
Anglo-American sense of patriotism suggests that the ‘Englishness’ of the churches went
beyond religious concerns and was symptomatic of their desire to project an EnglishAmerican identity in an era of an increasingly diverse social, cultural and ethnic
Philadelphian population. St James the Less and St Mark’s are emblematic of the
dissemination of Gothic Revival aesthetics internationally to America and stand as a
testament to America’s past and present connection to England, a connection epitomised by
the relationship between the Anglican and Episcopal Churches.
NEALE, Anne
is an historian of architecture, gardens, and nineteenth-century art and design, and is an
honorary fellow in the School of Architecture and Design at the University of Tasmania.
Hyperborean Gothic Goes South: Pugin, Ecclesiology, and the timber churches of
Tasmania.
The remote island of Tasmania possesses many timber churches inspired by the mediaeval
architecture of northern Europe. Prominent among them is a group of expressed-frame timber
structures, dating from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While the influence
of Gothic Revival authorities upon the various timber-building traditions of Queensland, New Zealand, and North America has been examined by several authors, these Tasmanian
churches have received little attention.
Colonial Tasmania drew most of its senior administrators, including church leaders, from
Britain. These men often had excellent connections at ‘Home’, and remained up-to-date with
European developments. The architectural views of A.W.N. Pugin and the Ecclesiologists
were well-known to the leading Roman Catholic and Anglo-Catholic churchmen, not only
through publications, but often through close personal associations with the protagonists:
Pugin, R.C. Carpenter, G.E. Street, and G.F. Bodley all supplied designs for Tasmanian
churches.
Publications and masonry exemplars undoubtedly assisted in developing local architectural
taste and skill, but timber was the prevalent building material in much of Tasmania. Articles
on mediaeval timber architecture, such as those in the Ecclesiologist in 1849, and
Ecclesiologically-approved designs for new timber churches, prepared by Carpenter and G.G.
Scott c1850, were presumably eagerly perused by sympathetic churchmen. However, with
few exceptions, it was not until the later nineteenth century that Tasmania’s timber churches
moved beyond a naive, if often charming, ‘Carpenter’s Gothic’, and became sophisticated
pieces of architecture.
This paper examines the influence of leading figures in the English Gothic Revival upon
Tasmanian ecclesiastical architecture, and seeks to establish the design origins of the island’s
distinctive expressed-frame timber churches.
NETO, Maria João
is an Associate Professor in the History of Art Institute at University of Lisbon. She has
developed her studies in the area of the theory and practice of architectural restoration.
‘Beckford Hill’ or Monserrate Palace in Sintra, Portugal (1858-64): A Gothic Revival
project inspired by the sense of place
In 1858, the architect James Thomas Knowles (1806-84) initiated the renewal of Monserrate
Palace at the request of Francis Cook, a very rich English businessman and an important
artwork collector. This house, built around 1790, had been inhabited by the famous writer
William Beckford between 1793 and 1795. Mentioned by Byron in Childe Harold’s
Pilgrimage (1809), Monserrate became a place of reference for the Romantic Movement.
The original building, a Palladian Gothic structure, follows a longitudinal plan, marked by a
central body and turrets at the ends. Cook instructed Knowles to fully respect the pre-existing
building. The fact that he called the house ‘Beckford Hill’ shows the care he took in
exploring its sense of place. The architect responded with an intelligent design that
incorporated the original structure into a new decorative membrane, reminding us of the
attitude of Leon Battista Alberti at the temple of Rimini. Knowles, who at the time was already working with his son, had an ‘Italianate’ taste allied with the Gothic style and a lush
plant decoration, certainly influenced by John Ruskin. These inclinations were undoubtedly
appealing to Francis Cook. This wealthy businessman viewed himself as an Italian
Renaissance merchant, patron and collector, for whom the works of art were, along with the
aesthetic delight, a symbol of propaganda and power.
The curious Gothic Revival project of Monserrate is, therefore, the result of two ways of
thinking that complemented each other, valuing the sense of place with an array of timeless
structures and ornaments.
RAGUIN, Virginia Chieffo
Is Professor of Art History at the College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, Massachusetts, has
published on stained glass and architecture including Stained Glass from its Origins to the
Present (2003) and the American Corpus Vitrearum volumes.
The Gothic Revival in Stained Glass and the Practitioner’s Influence on Scholars and
Collectors
A.W.N. Pugin’s championing of the Gothic left an indelible mark on the history of collecting
as well as new work in stained glass. Earlier, love of the decorative by gentleman
connoisseurs such as Horace Walpole at Strawberry Hill or commitment to religious imagery
by Roman Catholic recusants such as Sir William Jerningham at Costessy Hall motivated
acquisitions of the medium. Pugin’s articulation of the criteria of style realigned the reception
of stained glass. Professionals such as William Warrington, who had worked with Pugin,
illustrated A History of Stained Glass with his own designs in period styles.
Such intervention of the contemporary practitioner in the evaluation and restoration of the
old, and in the promulgation of the modern Gothic, has been revealed through the work of the
Corpus Vitrearum in England, Germany, Belgium and France. High Gothic, as known
through the widely publicised restoration of the Sainte-Chapelle between 1848 and 1857,
emerged as the ideal. Gothic was revived in the United States in the early twentieth century;
the writer Henry Adams urged the collector Isabella Stewart Gardner to purchase Soissons
glass, downplaying previous Italian work. In 1924, the architect and theoretician Ralph
Adams Cram influenced the philanthropist John Nicholas Brown to found the Mediaeval
Academy of America. Collectors and museum directors would come to view the Gothic as
alone embodying ‘true principles’ of the medium, often purchasing fakes while ignoring
impressive later mediaeval and Renaissance panels. This was the style that they had heard
validated by practitioners and witnessed reappearing in the windows around them.REEVE, Matthew M.
is Associate Professor of Art History at Queen’s University and a Fellow of the Society of
Antiquaries. A mediaevalist by training, his current work explores the morphology of the
Gothic in eighteenth-century England and particularly in the circle of Horace Walpole.
Rereading the “Origins of the Gothic Revival”: Architecture and Sexuality in the Circle
of Horace Walpole
This paper considers the relationship between the idiomatic mode of architecture known as
“Strawberry Hil Gothic” and the history of sexuality. Patronized by members of Walpole’s
circle, the Gothic was understood by some in the eighteenth-century as a queer coterie taste
based upon a specific construction of the medieval, Catholic past. This was not only
perceived by contemporaries, but it was also understood by later commentators who elided
Walpole’s sexuality with his tastes in the Gothic. This may help us to understand that rather
ambivalent acceptance of Strawberry Hill and related buildings from the historiography of the
Gothic Revival; it also encourages a broader understanding of the status of religion and
sexuality in the morphology of the Gothic on either side of c. 1800. In this paper I will
present evidence for the patronage of architecture within Walpole’s Circle, and I will discuss
evidence that allows for a “queer” interpretation of these buildings, with particular reference
to Walpole’s own Strawberry Hill, and Dickie Bateman’s Gothicization of the “Priory” at Old
Windsor.
RENARD, Thomas
is an historian of art and architecture. He was recently awarded a PhD degree in joint
supervision between the university of Paris-Sorbonne and Ca’ Foscari University with a
thesis entitled Architecture et figures identitaires dans l’Italie unifiée (1861-1921).
Architectural Dantism and national building process in Italy
The sixth centenary of Dante’s death was celebrated in 1921 and was the occasion of
numerous restorations realised throughout Italy and specifically in Florence and Ravenna.
Enhancing the image of the architecture of the late Middle Ages, these celebrations belong to
a late and specific form of Gothic Revival. This paper will look at this event as a
paradigmatic case study – the last act in a broader movement that appeared during the 1880s,
and at the same time, the testing ground for a process of identity creation based on the
architectural forms of Dante’s time and which was to continue under Fascism.
The choice of the buildings that were subjected to restoration was strongly influenced by
what can be referred to as the ‘cult of Dante’, a cultural phenomenon that emerged in the
nineteenth century along with the Risorgimento. The poet became both the symbol of Italian
unification and a powerful mythological standard of the Italian people’s artistic genius. The national cult of Dante was able to give coherence to the multifaceted architecture and the
related genius loci of the Italian Commune.
Studying this ‘architectural Dantism’ may provide an interesting key to understanding a
turning point in the Italian national building process through heritage. At first, national
celebration was mainly pursued through the construction of monuments (such as the
Vittoriano in Rome) and the search for a national style (Camillo Boito). Then, by the
beginning of the twentieth century, ancient buildings and their urban context increasingly
became markers of identity, whose form would eventually be reinvented through a particular
practice of Gothic Revival.
SCHOENEFELDT, Henrik
is a Lecturer at the Kent School of Architecture, University of Kent. After training as an
architect he specialised in the history of environmental design, and he holds an MPhil and
PhD from the University of Cambridge.
The integration of architectural and scientific principles in the design of the Palace of
Westminster.
This paper argues that the Palace of Westminster was the beginning of an inquiry into the
successful integration of architectural and scientific methods of design. This was later
continued in the 1851 Crystal Palace, the Sheepshank Gallery and the Natural History
Museum in London. The author’s research has revealed that scientific methods were
particularly important in resolving complex environmental design issues, the resolution of
which was considered an important requirement.
The design theories of the Gothic Revival played an important part in this process, since they
contributed towards the development of a concept of functionalism that emphasised the
environmental and biological requirements of public buildings. Using the Palace of
Westminster as a case study, this paper will explore this special relationship between the
scientific methods and the architectural principles of the Gothic Revival, with a particular
focus on the role of environmental experimentation. The paper is based on scientific,
architectural and engineering journals, parliamentary papers and transcripts of various
science lectures and interviews with consulting scientist. The first section discusses the
environmental design objectives and how scientists were involved to achieve them. The
second part shows that scientists were involved in the monitoring and recording of the
internal environment and that physicians were employed to study its effect on the mental and
physical condition of the building users. The final paragraph illustrates how these findings
were used to gradually improve the original design as more information about its actual
behaviour was gathered.SEGAL, Einat
see KENAAN-KEDAR, Nurith and SEGAL, Einat
SMITH, Elizabeth B.
is an Associate Professor of Art History at The Pennsylvania State University. She studies
mediaeval architectural design and American collecting of mediaeval art. In 1996 she curated
the exhibition: Mediaeval Art in America: patterns of collecting 1800–1940, at The Palmer
Museum of Art, The Pennsylvania State University.
Philadelphia and the First Gothic Revival Villa in America: new evidence for the
cultural context
The first Gothic Revival house known to have been built in America was Sedgeley, designed
in 1799 by English-trained Benjamin Latrobe for William Cramond of Philadelphia. For
decades, Latrobe’s house apparently stood alone, sole American example of the Gothic
Revival villa. It is not clear why Cramond chose Gothic rather than Classical, the style
popular in America at that time, and the one for which Latrobe was and is better known. A
parallel and initially unconnected line of research has led to a reconsideration of the cultural
context within which Cramond made his style decision.
In researching American collecting, I identified what is arguably the earliest purchase of
mediaeval art by an American. In 1803, the Philadelphian William Poyntell, a contemporary
of Cramond, purchased in Paris several panels of stained glass from King Louis IX’s SainteChapelle. The trouble and expense incurred in shipping the large, fragile panels across the
Atlantic suggests that Poyntell, a self-made businessman and one of Philadelphia’s mercantile
and civic leaders, may have planned to install them in an architectural setting.
By examining the striking contemporary example provided by Poyntell, this paper attempts to
enlarge and refocus the perspective through which we view Cramond and Sedgeley, and
suggests alternate roots for the Gothic Revival in America. Beginning around 1830, the
novels of Sir Walter Scott would inspire an American fashion for Gothic Revival that
continued throughout the century. Three decades earlier, however, c1800, some American
patrons and architects looked directly at Gothic Revival architecture in England and on the
Continent with keen interest and appreciation.SUNDT, Richard Alfred
is Associate Professor Emeritus at the University of Oregon, Eugene. His research focuses on
Gothic architecture in France; Maori churches in New Zealand; and the Gothic Revival in
Argentina.
From Late Gothic to Gothic Revival in Latin America
When the Spanish began colonising the Americas, the Late Gothic was still flourishing in
Spain and elsewhere in Europe. Not surprisingly, the first cathedral erected in the New
World, in Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic), took the form of a rib-vaulted hall-church.
Gothic-style churches were later erected in Mexico and Peru, but the classically inspired
Colonial styles soon displaced Gothic.
In the nineteenth century, Gothic again found favour in the Americas, thanks largely to the
influx of immigrants from northern and southern Europe. The earliest known manifestation of
the Revival in the Latin New World is the now-destroyed Protestant cemetery chapel erected
in Buenos Aires in 1834 for British residents. Its plan and elevation A.W.N. Pugin would not
have approved. Subsequently, Anglicans and other Protestants in Latin America built parish
churches, most of which were designed by British architects who generally adhered closely to
Pugin’s True Principles and the recommendations of the Ecclesiologists. Eventually, the
vogue for Gothic spread to Roman Catholics, and as the most numerous group of Christians,
they had the number and means to raise large-scale churches throughout Latin America.
Some, like La Plata Cathedral, in Argentina, rival Chartres in length and height, and most
were inspired either by French High Gothic or one of the various expressions of Italian
Gothic.
Since the study of the Gothic Revival in Latin America is still in its infancy, much research is
needed before scholars can assess the nature and extent of the region’s contribution to the
development of Neo-Gothic architecture.
TERZOGLOU, Nikolaos-Ion
holds a Diploma of Architecture (2000), an MSc (2001) and a PhD (2005: 2
nd
ICAR-CORA
Prize 2007) from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece.
A.W.N. Pugin and ‘Functionalism’: towards a new interpretation
For the last five decades, A.W.N. Pugin’s ‘functionalism’ has become a commonplace of
scholarship which is constantly reproduced without further analysis or critical examination.
This supposed ‘functionalism’ of Pugin’s architectural theory is used as the basic argument
for the construction of genealogies connecting the ideas of the protagonist of the Gothic Revival in the nineteenth century with the ideology of the Modern Movement in the
twentieth. Nikolaus Pevsner is a classic example of this line of reasoning. Pugin is thus
presented as a ‘source of modern architecture and design’.
This paper argues that statements such as the above may harbour possible misunderstandings
of the complex nuances within the history of ideas, often disregarding the cultural
environment and conceptual context from which they spring. Based on a systematic reading
of Pugin’s two major treatises, namely Contrasts (1836) and True Principles (1841), I will try
to show that Pevsner’s interpretation is not very well founded, simplifying the real content of
a sophisticated theory. Pugin never mentions the word ‘function’ to denote the use of a
building: instead he speaks of its ‘purpose’, ‘propriety’, ‘arrangement’, ‘destination’ and
‘meaning’.
Consequently, his ‘rationalism’ seems to transcend the materialistic ‘functionalism’ of certain
aspects of modernism and to encompass many social, cultural, ethical and aesthetic ‘roles’ of
architecture. The aim of the present paper is to argue that the term ‘functionalism’ is probably
inadequate to comprehend the different layers of meaning inherent in Pugin’s thought and to
propose a new interpretation of their possible theoretical sources.
THURLBY, Malcolm
is Professor in the Department of Visual Arts, York University, Toronto. His current research
is on English Romanesque and early Gothic architecture and sculpture; and Canadian
nineteenth-century architecture.
Joseph Connolly (1840-1904) and Irish identity in Roman Catholic churches in Ontario
In 1873 Joseph Connolly emigrated from Ireland to Toronto and established an architectural
practice with the architect/surveyor/engineer, Silas James. The partnership lasted until 1877
after which Connolly practised alone until 1896. Trained in Dublin by J.J. McCarthy, the
‘Irish Pugin’, Connolly soon established himself as the preferred architect for Roman
Catholic Church commissions in Ontario, especially for Irish patrons. Prior to his arrival in
Ontario, Roman Catholic churches usually took the form of three-aisled, rib-vaulted basilicas
which looked more like Santa Maria-sopra-Minerva, Rome, than any Irish churches.
Connolly’s designs were quite different and provided his patrons with reminders of the
motherland, churches that ranged from close copies of McCarthy’s works to brilliant, eclectic
creations that demonstrated his profound knowledge of A.W.N. and E.W. Pugin’s churches in
Ireland, Irish mediaeval Gothic, and antiquarian sources such as Francis Grose, Antiquities of
Ireland (1797).
Reference to specific Irish exemplars sets Connolly’s works apart from contemporary
Anglican and nonconformist Gothic churches. While most of his 35 churches are Gothic,
three patrons demanded something different. At Gananoque, Kemptville and Portsmouth,
Connolly created Hiberno-Romanesque designs with strong echoes of A.W.N. Pugin’s St Michael’s, Gorey (Co Wexford), and J.J. McCarthy’s St Mary and St Laurence, Ballitore (Co
Kildare). Our investigation of Connolly’s churches considers how Connolly interpreted
Pugin’s True Principles in association with patrons’ demands for architectural memories of
Ireland, and their place in the context of the Gothic revival internationally.
WALKER, Paul
is a Professor of Architecture at the University of Melbourne. His researches colonial
museum architecture in Australia, New Zealand and India, and twentieth-century architecture
in Australia and New Zealand.
Gothic principles and colonial style: Robert Chisholm and ‘Indian’ architecture
The colonial experience challenged the communitarian aspect of nineteenth-century English
architectural theory. A.W.N. Pugin’s writings projected an ideal English community based on
a return to shared religious faith and to institutions that reflected the values of that faith; the
writing of John Ruskin and William Morris developed this to project an ideal community
based on equitable socio-economic relations.
Writing on ‘Modern Architecture in India’ in The Builder in 1870, Lord Napier, Governor of
Madras, affirmed the Gothic Revival view, but argued that the ‘harmony’ that could be
achieved by the adoption of Gothic architecture applied only in England. For India, he
theorised, rather than there being one appropriate architecture, the multiplicity of its faiths
and communities would lead to several simultaneously extant styles. Mindful of this view,
Robert Fellowes Chisholm, architect to the Madras government during Napier’s
governorship, developed just such an architectural approach. Like Napier, he avowed his
commitment to Gothic principles, but these were realised in work done in several manners
according to the communities by whom it was intended to be used and by whom it would be
built.
Bearing in mind the narrative of communitarian singularity for England and multiplicity for
the colony, drawn from the Gothic principles to which Chisholm avowed allegiance even late
in his career, the paper will in particular examine apparent paradoxes in Chisholm’s last
known design. This was for a vast ‘Indian Museum’ in ‘Indo-Saracenic’ style, projected as a
memorial for King Edward VII, to be located in London on the south bank of the Thames
across from Whitehall.WEBSTER, Christopher
has published widely on English architecture from the period 1815-45. His main interests are
the period’s stylistic debates and the early work of the Cambridge Camden Society.
Post-Waterloo Church Building: the stylistic debate and its participants
The rise and eventual triumph of Gothic through the first half of the nineteenth century, and
A.W.N. Pugin’s seminal place in that stylistic revolution, now seems axiomatic; the stylistic
shift from the Inwoods’ St Pancras Chapel to Pugin’s chapel in the ‘Antient Poor House’ –
graphically revealed in Contrasts and confirmed in his later church designs – is compelling.
Yet the victory was far from inevitable and certainly not straightforward in the way that it has
so often been portrayed.
The paper draws on its author’s recent research into architectural literature published between
1815 and 1845 which has included works of architectural theory, pattern books, antiquarian
publications and guidebooks, and various periodicals. It will examine three issues: what was
being said about style; how stylistic judgements were justified; and the profession of those
engaged in these debates. Central to the last will be the contrasting opinions of architects,
antiquaries, clergy and laity.
Far from being an architecturally moribund decade, the 1830s emerges as a period of great
vitality. The Greek Revival might have run its course, but Classicism was far from
abandoned. There were those eager to see a Renaissance Revival; others – now almost
entirely forgotten – who believed that a Wren Revival would satisfy the needs of the
Establishment. Some architects – but not many – added the design of Gothic churches to their
repertoire, treading a careful path between antiquarian fidelity on the one hand, and rampant
anti-Roman Catholic sentiment on the other. And, outside the profession, the arrangements
and details of what we now disparagingly refer to as Commissioners’ Gothic was almost
universally accepted without question, especially among the Evangelicals.
The paper is intended to shed new light on the intellectual and architectural climate in which
Pugin launched his career.
YANNI, Carla
is Professor of Art History at Rutgers University. She is the author of The Architecture of
Madness: insane asylums in the US and Nature’s Museums: Victorian science and the
architecture of display.The Vestiges of Architectural Development? Toward a theory of transmutation in the
Gothic Revival
The concept of development dominated theory and practice in the Gothic Revival and, as
scholars have noted, bears some resemblance to scientific notions of transmutation. Part 1 of
this paper builds on the research of David Brownlee, Michael Hall, and Alex Bremner, by
asking more specifically how Robert Chambers’s Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation
pertains to architecture. Chambers proposed that ‘existing natural means’ produced “all the
existing organisms’; he also believed that ‘progressive change’ was evident in the way the
fossil record showed simple organisms becoming more complex. Architectural theorists like
Edward Freeman and G.E. Street argued that the history of architecture unfolded gradually,
using processes observable in the present-day. Gothic architecture began with Early English,
became more complex with Decorated, and then most complicated with Perpendicular,
demonstrating progressive change. Part 2 of the talk will ask how theorists who believed in
development explained supposedly backward periods of architecture.
By closely reading a particularly racist section of Vestiges, I will explain that, in Chambers’s
view, while progressive evolution was always moving forward by the hand of God,
degeneration occurred when the local environment impeded forward movement. This type of
argument could also be employed to explain the general tendency toward incremental
progress in architecture, even though some styles (the Renaissance, or even the
Perpendicular, depending on the author) seemed to be going in reverse. In this admittedly
speculative paper, I will suggest that Chambers’s idea of transmutation influenced Gothic
theorists in their presentation of architectural history to science-savvy Victorian audiences.

Details here: http://www.kent.ac.uk/architecture/gothicrevival2012/index.html

From the City Journal

CLAIRE BERLINSKI
Can’t Go Back to Constantinople

Istanbul’s history deserves preservation, but at what cost to development?
Anyone who has ever sat in one of Istanbul’s endless traffic jams, listening to a taxi driver blast his horn and curse the son-of-a-donkey unloading a moving van in front of him, will agree that the city’s transportation system leaves much to be desired. City planners meant to solve this problem when they began construction of a $4 billion subway tunnel beneath the Bosporus. Then, to the planners’ horror, the project’s engineers discovered the lost Byzantine port of Theodosius. Known to archaeologists only from ancient texts, the port had been sleeping peacefully since the fourth century AD—directly underneath the site of the proposed main transit station in Yenikapı.

The tunnel-digging halted, entailing untold millions in economic losses, and the artifact-digging began. An army of archaeologists descended upon the pit, working around the clock to preserve the ancient jetties and docks, while Istanbul’s traffic grew yet more snarled. Newspapers reported that Metin Gokcay, the dig’s chief archaeologist, was “rejecting all talk of deadlines.” It’s not difficult to imagine the hand-wringing that those words must have prompted among budget planners.

The planners no doubt considered throwing themselves into the Bosporus when the excavation then unearthed something even better—or worse, depending on your perspective—underneath those remains: 8,000-year-old human clothes, urns, ashes, and utensils. These artifacts stunned historians and forced them to revisit their understanding of the city’s age and origins. The discovery posed a fresh moral problem, too: excavating the top layer might damage the one above it—or vice versa. So the decision was no longer, “Should we conserve these remains?” It was, “Which remains should we conserve?”

The subway project, originally scheduled to be finished in May 2010, is now at least six years behind schedule. The route has been changed 11 times in response to new findings, driving everyone concerned to the brink of madness. The government is desperate to finish the project but well aware that the world is watching. No one wants to be known to future generations as the destroyer of 8,000 years’ worth of civilization.

Decisions like this are made on a smaller scale every day in every neighborhood of Istanbul. Istanbul’s population—by some estimates, as high as 20 million—has more than tripled since 1980, enlarged by decades of migration from Turkey’s poor rural regions. The city desperately needs better roads, subways, and housing. Its infrastructure is archaic, a problem illustrated in 2009 when flash floods gushed across the city’s arterial roads, killing scores. The catastrophe was widely ascribed to inadequate infrastructure, shoddy construction, and poor urban planning.

But building the city’s future will assuredly destroy its past. Thriving human settlements existed here thousands of years before the Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman Empires. If you look under the ground around Istanbul’s Golden Horn, it’s almost impossible not to find something archaeologically significant. Developers covet these sites today for precisely the geographic features—for example, natural ports—that made them equally desirable long ago. The more economically attractive the location, the more likely it is to have significant remains, and the more likely it is that someone will have an economic motivation to make those remains disappear.

Government-backed developers, for example, were determined to expand the Four Seasons Hotel in Sultanhamet, even though it sat atop relics from the Palatium Magnum built by Emperor Constantine I in the fourth century AD. Dogged local investigative journalism and the threat of international opprobrium put a halt to those plans. On the other side of the Golden Horn, when it became obvious that the construction of the Swiss and the Conrad Hotels in Beşiktaş would destroy significant archaeological artifacts, the local government objected, pointing to Turkey’s laws on historic preservation. The developers went over their heads to Ankara and appealed to the laws on promoting tourism. Parliament decided that Turkey needed foreign direct investment, and the tourism laws prevailed. There was an irony in the decision, of course: Istanbul’s heritage is precisely what attracts tourists. Then again, if there are no hotels, there’s nowhere for tourists to stay.

There is no way to resolve the tension between letting this megacity develop economically and protecting its priceless archaeological treasures. Obviously, you can’t turn an entire city into a museum where no new construction is allowed. According to some archaeologists, that’s exactly what you’d have to do to protect Turkish historic artifacts—leave them all in the ground, untouched, since even careful excavation might destroy them. But Turkey is not a wealthy country. It’s hard to feel morally confident in saying that Turkish citizens need Neolithic hairbrushes more than they need houses, factories, ports, dams, mines, and roads—especially when they’re dying in flash floods.

So something has to be destroyed. But who decides which part of the city’s past is most important? Legally, Turkey’s monument board has the authority to decide what to save: in principle, if more than 60 percent of a neighborhood is more than 100 years old, it cannot be touched without the board’s permission. The board deals daily with a massive number of requests and decisions, but it has neither the time nor the resources to ensure that its decisions are upheld. For example, it reviews all plans for development in sensitive areas. The plans then get sent to municipal government offices for approval—but often, the plans submitted to the board are different from the ones that go to the local government, and the board is none the wiser.

Further, the process of evaluating a preservation claim is often slow and bureaucratic. Sara Nur Yildiz, a historian at Istanbul’s Bilgi University, recalls noticing a distinctive earthen mound at the edge of a construction site in her upscale neighborhood in Cihangir. She suspected immediately that it was an archaeologically significant well. “I told them to stop digging,” she says, “but they ignored me.” She filed a petition with the monument board. Ultimately, the board agreed with her and halted the construction. But by the time the board finished studying the case and relaying its verdict to the workers, half of the structure had been demolished.

In general, Ottoman Empire relics fare better than Byzantine ruins. In the minds of certain officials, the latter sound a bit too much like Greek ruins, which aren’t, after all, part of their history. Archaeologists associated with TAY—the Archaeological Settlements of Turkey Project—have compiled inventories of priceless endangered sites. They report a “persistent and intense threat” to Byzantine remains throughout the city from the construction of roads and modern housing. The Edirnekapı and Topkapı sections of the historic city walls, they lament, vanished during the construction of Adnan Menderes Boulevard and Millet Street. Another problem: there is “almost no coordination,” say archaeologists with TAY, between the government departments charged with preserving cultural heritage and those responsible for public works.

Many academics have worked to draw up conservation plans for the city. So has UNESCO. But they don’t have the power to enforce them. UNESCO, claiming that the Turkish government has disregarded its reports, has threatened to embarrass Istanbul by putting its cultural treasures on its endangered list. But on the historic peninsula, rates of return on investment in development are among the highest in the world—exceeded only by those in Moscow. For developers, the amount of money at stake is phantasmagoric. They’re willing to spend a lot to make legal and political obstacles go away. Archaeologists can’t compete.

So come visit now, while it’s all still here.

Claire Berlinski, a City Journal contributing editor, is an American journalist who lives in Istanbul.

From the Journal of Sacred Architecture, no 20

An Architectural and Theological Interface
THE DOMINICAN COMPLEX AT MAGNANAPOLI
by Christopher Longhurst, appearing in Volume 20

[18]

The Dominican Complex at Magnanapoli, Rome, is an architectural composite from the mid sixteenth century in the heart of the ancient city currently housing the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas, Angelicum, along with the adjacent monastery, convent and adjoining gardens, and the church of Saints Dominic and Sixtus. Looking purposefully at the Magnanapoli complex and recognizing within it the spiritual impetus of architecture in light of the Thomistic aesthetic theory will demonstrate how architecture can provide a simultaneously theological and aesthetic reading. It will also demonstrate how sound architectural development and organization is, in essence, always inspired by the desire to find a solution to the most important questions of purpose and fulfillment in life.

Santi Domenico e Sisto, Rome, part of the Angelicum complex (Photo: eng.archinform.net)

The Aesthetic Theory of St. Thomas Aquinas

In the thought of St. Thomas it seems that beauty is primarily a transcendental quality, that is, there must be a metaphysical ground for its existence. St. Thomas’ Summa Theologica expounds his definition of beauty in an expression that has become the essence of his aesthetic theory: “Ad pulchritudinem tria requiruntur: Primo quidem integritas sive perfectio: quae enim diminuta sunt, hoc ipso turpia sunt. Et debita proportio sive consonantia. Et iterum claritas.” 1 These three properties—integrity, due proportion, and clarity—are therefore the qualities that make an object beautiful. St. Thomas explicates, however, that he is not referring to mere abstractions, or what is known simply on the conceptual level, or disconnected from experience, but rather to the physical world around him and to his empirical experience in and of that world. St. Thomas’ beauty, therefore, does not exist by any theoretical means only. It is a quality of being that is transcendent yet it pertains to things in the world, to created things.

One of the key concepts in his aesthetic theory is the idea of form. St. Thomas explains that the form of an object is in fact its beauty—that which “properly belongs to the nature of a formal cause.”2 In the mind of St. Thomas form also is not something static or crystallized but rather coextensive with being. It is the structural principle in things and when it is experienced on account of the subsisting properties of integrity, due proportion and clarity, then the object is said to be beautiful.

Despite such an over-simplification of St. Thomas’ aesthetic theory it suffices to say that the beauty of any existent thing is based on the vital reality of its form. In architecture, according to this theory, the beauty of a building, or composite of buildings, is determined by the complete realization of what the work should be—the proper organization of material, a correspondence among all its parts, and the consequent splendor formae (splendor of form)—as St. Thomas would call it.3 The Magnanapoli site is an ideal example of architectural beauty according to Thomistic system of ideas because it presents an array of architectural elements, planning, design and construction processes and results that all contribute to the complex’s overall splendor formae.

The Architectural Type of the Ordinis Praedicatorum

Before looking at the Magnanapoli complex in detail it is worth considering the particular conception of beauty that characterizes Dominican architecture in general. During its foundational years in the early thirteenth century, the Order of St. Dominic took strict measures to avoid anything suggestive of luxury or affluence in its buildings. In the Order’s churches a distinct seminal feature of the Dominican style resulted from the friar’s own sumptuary legislation which originally excluded decorative architectural works except for in the choir. This architectural austerity, which often went as far as the suppression of capitals on columns and panels under windows, gave great lightness and elegance to the new style of Dominican churches.

[19]

Santa Anastasia, Verona, has side altars at the walls of the nave. (Photo: David Carillo)

Dominican architecture also acquired its distinction from the aspirations of the members’ foundational communities who turned away from the cloistered regula of early monasticism and embarked upon a more active apostolate of preaching and parochial work. Their verve thus extended outside the monastic center and impacted the social and urban currents of its time. The Dominican style of building came to reflect the community’s socio-religious ideals and fundamental values. Subsequently, on account of the Dominicans’ active apostolate and establishment in large urban areas, a practice that significantly influenced the cultural milieu of the time, and also on account of the rise of churches and convents known as opus sumptuosum, the Dominican attitude towards suppressing richness of expression in its architectural designs subsided. In the chief towns throughout Italy, by the end of the thirteenth century the Dominicans were in possession of the most splendid religious buildings, magnificent monasteries and some of the finest churches with exquisite artworks. This was undoubtedly a consequence of the Order’s increasing importance in the socio-political arena at the time. In point of fact, in the past as in the present-day the Dominicans have occupied some of the finest and most important church buildings and religious spaces across the world.

The Dominicans projected their apostolic zeal and theological erudition into transforming buildings in their possession into structures to accommodate serious scholarship and even to inspire, thereby creating a fusion of aesthetic qualities and religious ideals in a certain architectural type. Such a practice was typical of the Dominicans in general throughout the course of their history. They adopted various styles of architecture and assisted in their diffusion and assimilation for new means and ends. The Order even accepted the style of the Renaissance when it had supplanted the medieval forms and incorporated it into its own. Every architectural medium capable of giving expression to religious beauty was used by the Dominicans to further the ends and needs of their apostolate, for the motto of the Dominican Order is Veritas and as their Angelic Doctor explains, truth and beauty are exchangeable and analogous terms.4 Aspects of the Dominican apostolate, which is characterized by dedication to preaching, the study of theology, the safeguarding of Christian doctrine, and the profession of total fidelity to tradition, conjure a conviction that is concretely expressed in the abstract values of truthfulness, beauty, apostolicity, magnificence, splendor and love. These values become tangible in the physical manifestations of unity, spatial economy, order, grandiosity, practicality, hospitality and even solemn ceremony in the liturgical expression of the Dominican Rite.

Dominican architecture may be described as theocentric, contemplative, monastic and didactic. The last two qualities set it apart from the architecture of almost any other kind as Dominican architecture has a strong overtone of “educational space” befitting rigorous scholarship in the context of a spiritual environment. This scholastic quality is the essence of the Order’s charism and it is reflected in the arrangement of its architectural structures as conducive to serious research, learning and teaching. On account of the Order’s emphasis on study, practical elements such as large windows in the buildings’ spacious study halls allow for more light to enter and to accommodate the contemplative aspect of its apostolate, wide hallways were built to create an atmosphere conducive to prayer and silence. In general Dominican churches have large naves because of the importance of public preaching, and oftentimes they are without side aisles. Lateral altars were usually at the walls of the nave instead of in chapels. The church of Santa Anastasia in Verona is a prime example.

One of the most innovative aspects of Dominican architecture was the orientation of the buildings towards the exterior by means of façades, porticoes, staircases and fountains. A greater involvement in the life of its urban surroundings evolved. Extended to all of its building designs, this architectural dynamic has produced an expression of the ideals of Dominican religious life and has gone on to assume its own unique style, which may be called the architectural type of the Ordinis Praedicatorum. Its prototype is recognizable in the Dominican complex at Magnanapoli, Rome.

The Dominican Complex at Magnanapoli Rome

It is no coincidence that Blessed Pope John Paul II writes in his Letter to Artists: “[…] where theology produced the Summa of Saint Thomas, church art molded matter in a way which led to adoration of the mystery.”5 Conforming to the principal idea of categorization of St. Thomas’ theological discourse on God, man and nature, the Magnanapoli complex is an architectural manifestation of the Thomistic system of ideas by extension of those same categories into its external architectural designs. In the words of the Pope: “the functional is always wedded to the creative impulse inspired by a sense of the beautiful and an intuition of the mystery.”6 The architectural arrangement of the Magnanapoli complex is therefore designed towards creating a single environment conducive to both religious life through prayer and community, and to academic scholarship through study and education. The two modes of human activity―to praise God and love Him and each other in the spirit of Christian charity, and to know God and understand Him through the truths of the Christian faith―are characteristics of one spirit. To achieve these goals in architecture the Magnanapoli complex is unified, in proportion, and above all directional, that is, it has purpose: making space holy—building to uplift the mind and the heart to spiritual matters.

Courtyard of the Magnanapoli complex

Like the scope of both the Order’s theological purpose and academic goals, the architecture of this complex does not conform to any one particular age or style but rather unites the legitimate styles of its respective ages into a comprehensive whole. On account of the Dominican friars’ capacity to unify diverse architectural designs to supplement religious ends and ideals, the complex comprises an interplay of architectural morphemes that combine into more inclusive forms. While the Magnanapoli complex can be used for a variety of purposes such as communal living, religious formation, and educational development, the unified composite surpasses each one of these purposes. It thus expresses a correlation in time and space of the physical, intellectual and spiritual strengths of what it means to be fully human. One may describe it as a microcosm of the civitatis Dei—the peaceful dwelling place of all believers.

The Magnanapoli complex also achieves its purpose by a harmonious relationship with the natural surroundings of its physical environs. It conforms architecture to nature by taking nature as its inspiration, or rather, as its solution to the complexity of its building projects. In nature the Dominicans find the answers to life in general and from a translation of the language of nature they find value in architectural designs. In fact the emulation of nature is the goal of Dominican architecture, for from nature is taken the material and from nature is learned the systems, processes and aesthetics by which the buildings are integrated to create a sound and healthy environment. Nature reveals an underlying order and the entire aesthetic theory of St. Thomas is said to be based on the principles of nature which display an ordered hierarchy of structures. In architecture, as the Dominican architectural typology displays, this order is combined with functional properties and aesthetic expressions, a kind of reliance on self-assembly, fitting form to function.

The architecture of the Magnanapoli complex not only reveals the character of a spiritual force, it also elicits a reaction to this force. Prescinding from St. Thomas’ system of ideas, the complex demonstrates how the human intellect perceives the attributes of form, in this case an architectural composite, which satisfies the senses upon being seen due to its inherent properties of integrity, due proportion and clarity constituting the splendor formae contained within. The faculties of the human mind then sense the quality of these properties and the observer is drawn into the space by the beauty of the integral structure. This process is achieved by the aesthetic appeal of the building being appreciated upon being perceived and its image impressed upon the external sensory receptors of the observer. The properties intuited by the mind then arouse visual appreciation that is passed to the interior intellectual senses. The observer subsequently enjoys their reception in the internal sensory faculties and this is why the human spirit finds itself simultaneously at peace and inspired in such a space.

The entire environment becomes fully enjoyable, and one in which thought, feeling, and the transcendence of the human spirit is expressed. Thus St. Thomas’s definition of beauty as “pulchra dicuntur quae visa placent” is fulfilled. This experience approaches a movement which is both natural and supernatural. An emergent and interconnected encounter between material and nonmaterial properties is experienced. Moreover, given the unifying characteristics of this Magnanapoli complex, it is no surprise that one feels at peace in this environment for peace is “the tranquility of order” as St. Augustine expressed.

Arcade at the courtyard of the Angelicum (Photo: athomeinromewithmonicastiles.blogspot.com

The Dominican complex at Magnanapoli is also an example of the splendor veri in architecture. Splendor veri is a platonic term referring to the relational qualities among material things. It was revisited by the Schoolmen and upheld by St. Thomas in his goal of presenting a methodology to consider the relationships among all things, however, primarily between form and matter on the one hand, and idea and truth on the other. In relation to the Magnanapoli complex, beyond the exterior appearances of its buildings the concepts of truth and beauty united with knowledge and space are brought together through an intimate association between architecture and theology. Behind its walls these two disciplines transcend the rational confines of the human mind penetrating to the sensitive and emotional appetites of the human soul. A spiritual and material communication is achieved through the converging and interacting of architecture and theology, an experiencing of how both depend substantially on the deeper meanings of a reality envisioned in and above the material limitations of physical space and the immaterial limitations of the human mind. The Magnanapoli complex thus possesses the conditions of beauty that make it attract the observer when attention is concentrated on the complex’s formal structure. The architecture itself does not “create” this beauty, for the objective conditions of beauty really only subsist in things, though it is reasonable to confirm that it manifests beauty on account of the equilibrium between a formal perfection and the intellect’s apprehension of its physical forms.

[21]

The undergirding theological impetus of the architecture is founded in a mind-based knowledge of God, a rationalistic logic, and in the human person “ad imaginem Dei” as the center of human existence. This impresses upon the physical surroundings the criterion for a religious ideal, incorporating into the environs the architectural homogeneity of form and matter where the characteristics of order and unity dominate over variety. It thereby offers a source of architectural wealth and organization that is relevant in the context of a religious vision.

Scholastic and monastic activity are so well unified in a reciprocal relationship of studying and learning on the one hand and sanctification and preaching on the other, that one does not exist without the other. In this harmony a material, intellectual and spiritual formation unfolds, exposing an insightful occupation with the notions of beauty, order, unity and integrity. In the architecture, beauty is experienced in the congruency of buildings and their parts, and through the perception of order and unity, while in the theology beauty is seen through the radiance of the truth on its subject matter. In both contexts, unity is upheld in the cohesion of the relational quality of practical and theoretical contexts, that is, in the form and matter, while integrity is maintained through the uncompromising adherence of each discipline to the values of their respective canons. Each of these properties—beauty, order, unity and integrity, become inseparable and, while remaining interdependent, form unique manifestations of the dynamism of one spirit.

Aerial view of the Magnanapoli buildings and gardens (Photo: bing.com)

The Magnanapoli complex thus serves as a prototype to respond to questions about the spiritual vitality of architecture, and to understand architecture’s structural methods as a model for, or conformity with, sound theological principles. It is the ideal form of architecture functioning for theological purposes and of theology providing the language for the structural design of its buildings; thereby it affords a profoundly religious and architectural interface. What can be seen here is how architecture “lives” in a religious body and how its religious message is incarnate in masonry. As such, the Magnanapoli complex is an example of an encounter between the science of theology and the art of architecture, and a theological ideal inspiring an architectural design. This is the embodiment of the Dominican ideal of truth and beauty simultaneously identifying the one subject.

The integral structure, from the potency of its architectural forms to the dynamism of its pedagogical and religious functions, inspires not only those who live within its walls and the students who partake of the instruction afforded by its professors, but even the ordinary passer-by who has the opportunity to see the beauty of its buildings with magnificent panoramas, or walk within its halls and gardens. The grandness of scale, the harmony of layout, the attractiveness of the grounds, and the overall sense of relational order, with an integration of the visible and invisible, the spiritual and material, generate a sense of assimilation into both the natural and supernatural spheres.

Conclusion

Characterized by an emphasis on cohesive unity among variety, the Magnanapoli complex achieves a harmony between form and matter in which they are brought together in spatial relationships and striking sensory effects to contribute in a meaningful way to the overall message of a theological dialogue with contemporary culture. It is a remarkable testimony to how architecture reflects theology and how theology inspires architectural beauty. In the end this complex celebrates the evidence of a tradition and a history of faith that points to the conviction that the human person is a partaker of something grand, engaged, as it were, in a dialogue between creation and the divine, and this dialogue is well seen in an encounter between theology and architecture. The Dominican Complex at Magnanapoli Rome provides that encounter.

Christopher Longhurst, born in New Zealand, received his doctorate in Sacred Theology from the Pontifical Angelicum University, Rome, with a specialization in theological aesthetics. He was a member of the faculty at the Marymount International School in Rome starting in 2004, and currently writes on the intersections of art and religion and works as a docent at the Papal Galleries at the Vatican Museums.

1 Summa Theologica, I, 39, 8
2 Ibid, I, 5, 4, ad 1
3 Cf. Umberto Eco, The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, 1988, pp 45, 234
4 Summa Theologica, I, 12, 4
5 John Paul II, Letter to Artists (1999), 8
6 Ibid.

Living Stone: The Beauty of the Liturgical Altar

by Randy L. Stice, appearing in Volume 21 Journal of Sacred Architecture

You are beauty…You are beauty! exclaimed St. Francis of Assisi of God.1 God who is beauty is also Being, the source and sustainer of all that is (cf. Col 1:16-17). Beauty, then, is a category of being, and all beauty participates to some degree in the beauty of God, as the Second Vatican Council taught: “Of their nature the arts are directed toward expressing in some way the infinite beauty of God in works made by human hands.”2 Since beauty is a category of being, in determining the beauty of something one must first know its essential nature. Jacques Maritain called this its “ontological secret,” which he defined as its “innermost being” and “spiritual essence.”3 The ontological secret of things is “the invisible spiritual reality of their being as objects of understanding.”4

The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy offers the key to the ontological secret of things used in the sacred liturgy: “all things set apart for use in divine worship should be worthy, becoming, and beautiful, signs and symbols of things supernatural.”5 This is their ontological secret—they are “signs and symbols of things supernatural.” For this reason, the ultimate goal is “noble beauty rather than sumptuous display.”6 Thus, in order to judge the beauty of the liturgical altar, we must determine how it is a sign and symbol of supernatural realities, which in turn requires that we first determine this for the church building.

Before we consider the question of ontology, however, we first need to outline our aesthetic methodology. For this we will turn to Saint Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas taught that beautiful things possess three qualities: integritas, consonantia, and claritas. Integritas refers to completeness and perfection—nothing essential is lacking, nothing extraneous is present. Consonantia is the quality of proportionality in relation to an end, “the goal that God had in mind for it.”7 Claritas, the third element, is the power of an object to reveal its ontological reality. Umberto Eco describes it as “the fundamental communicability of form, which is made actual in relation to someone’s looking at or seeing of the object. The rationality that belongs to every form is the ‘light’ which manifests itself to aesthetic seeing.”8 Something that is truly beautiful has all of its constituent elements (integrates), is proportional to its ultimate purpose (consonantia), and manifests its essential reality (clarets).

In his discussion of consonant, Eco also describes the important relationship of different but interconnected things, forming what he calls “a dense network of relations….In fact we are free to consider the relation of three, four, or an infinity of things, proportionate among themselves and proportioned also in respect of some unifying whole.”9 “In brief, what is involved is a twofold relation of parts to one another and to the whole of which they are parts.”10 Applied to a church building and its furnishings, this describes a multitude of relations: sanctuary to nave, altar to sanctuary, altar to tabernacle, ambo to presider’s chair, and so on.

Having established our methodology, we can now turn to the question of the ontological secret of the church building and the altar. The ontology of the church building is derived from the ontology of the Church. Lumen Gentium described the Church in the following words:

This edifice has many names to describe it: the house of God in which dwells His family; household of God in the Spirit; the dwelling place of God among men; and, especially, the holy temple. This Temple, symbolized in places of worship built out of stone, is praised by the Holy Fathers and, not without reason, is compared in the liturgy to the Holy City, the New Jerusalem.11

Notice how this passage moves from the nature of the Church to the nature of the church building, from biblical images descriptive of God’s dwelling with his people to “places of worship built out of stone” that are“compared in the liturgy to the Holy City, the New Jerusalem.12 Ontologically, then, the church building is an image of the Temple, and the Holy City, an image of the New Jerusalem described in the Book of Revelation.

The central figure in the New Jerusalem is the Lamb (cf. Rev 21:22-23; 22:1, 3), which provides the context for the ontology of the liturgical altar. It is a symbol of Christ, the center of the thanksgiving made present through the Eucharist, the altar of sacrifice, and “the table of the Lord.”13 First and foremost, the altar is a symbol of Christ, as St. Ambrose asserted in the fourth century: “The altar represents the body [of Christ] and the Body of Christ is the altar.”14 The Catechism summarizes this important symbolism: “the Christian altar is the symbol of Christ himself, present in the midst of the assembly of his faithful, both as the victim offered for our reconciliation and as food from heaven who is giving himself to us.”15

Church as Heavenly City mosaic, Santa Prassede, Rome (Photo: Father Lawrence OP).

If the altar is the symbol of Christ, then it must perforce also be “the center of the assembly, to which the greatest reverence is due.”16 The General Instruction reaffirms this teaching of Eucharisticum Mysterium, describing it as “the center of the thanksgiving that is accomplished through the Eucharist.”17 Third, the altar is “the place at which the saving mysteries are carried out,” the altar of sacrifice.18 It is the place, says the GIRM: “on which is effected the Sacrifice of the Cross made present under sacramental signs.”19 Fourth, it is the table of the sacrificial meal, “the table of the Lord to which the People of God is convoked to participate in the Mass.”20 Drawing together the last two aspects, the Catechism says, “The altar, around which the Church is gathered in the celebration of the Eucharist, represents the two aspects of the same mystery: the altar of the sacrifice and the table of the Lord.”21 An altar that “worthily and beautifully serve the dignity of worship”22 will reveal this fourfold ontology.

Main altar at the Basilica of Saint Louis, Saint Louis, MO (Photo: Jeff Geerling).

Although Church documents do not use Aquinas’ terminology, they do show an implicit awareness of his three elements. In discussing the specifications of the altar, the Church documents address several elements of its integrates, its wholeness or completeness. The GIRM refers to the centrality of the altar: “the altar should occupy a place where it is truly the center toward which the attention of the whole congregation of the faithful naturally turns.”23 Built of Living Stones makes reference to two other elements, the altar of sacrifice and the table of the sacrificial meal: “The shape and size should reflect the nature of the altar as the place of sacrifice and the table around which Christ gathers the community to nourish them.”24 Each of these passages is addressing what Aquinas termed integrates.

St. Michael’s Church, Creeslough, Ireland (Photo: Steve Cadman).

The concept of consonantia, proportionality to an end, is also referred to in ecclesial documents. The Introduction to the Order of the Mass states that the altar’s “size and proportions should be appropriate to the normal Sunday Eucharistic celebration, and it should be able to accommodate the patens, ciboria, and chalices for the Communion of the faithful.”25 Consonantia as “a dense network of relations”26 is also implied. Take for example the exhortation in Eucharisticum Mysterium: “Pastors must realize that the way the church is arranged greatly contributes to a worthy celebration and to the active participation of the people.”27 This is echoed by Built of Living Stones:

In considering the dimensions of the altar, parishes will also want to insure that the other major furnishings in the sanctuary are in harmony and proportion to the altar….Impact and focal quality are not only related to placement, size, or shape, but also especially to the quality of the altar’s design and worthiness of its construction. The altar should be centrally located in the sanctuary and the center of attention in the church.28

An altar possessing consonantia will be appropriate to its liturgical function and harmonious with the other sacred furnishings.

[img]http://www.sacredarchitecture.org/images/uploads/IMG_3979.jpg[/url]

Main altar at the Cathedral of Saints Peter & Paul, Philadelphia, PA (Photo: parkwaymuseumdistrictphiladelphia.org).

Aquinas’ third element, claritas, refers to the power of an object to reveal its ontological reality. Something may possess consonantia and integrates, but if these are not perceivable then it will not be beautiful. This is what the GIRM is saying when it specifies that “the nature and beauty of the place and all its furnishings should foster devotion and express visually the holiness of the mysteries celebrated there.”29 According to Eucharisticum Mysterium, the altar should be “so placed and constructed that it is always seen to be the sign of Christ himself.”30 A key aspect of the altar as a symbol of Christ is a fixed stone altar. The GIRM urges “a fixed altar in every church, since it more clearly and permanently signifies Christ Jesus, the living stone (1 Pt. 2:4; cf. Eph 2:20).”31 Although in the United States altars made from wood are permitted32, an altar “with a table or mensa made of natural stone” will strengthen the claritas of the altar, “since it represents Christ Jesus, the Living Stone (1 Pt 2:4).”33 As these references make clear, the altar must clearly show forth its ontological reality.

Beautiful things reveal most easily and completely their ontological reality and convey the attractive power of the Truth. The beauty of a church building will reflect its ontology as the Temple and New Jerusalem and a beautiful altar will manifest its reality as the image of Christ himself, the altar of sacrifice, the table of the heavenly banquet, and the table of thanksgiving. Saint Thomas Aquinas’ three constituent elements of beauty—integritas, consonantia, and claritas—provide a useful methodology for ensuring that all things destined for the sacred liturgy are worthy, beautiful and able to turn men’s minds devoutly toward God. Fidelity to ontological realities will produce a church building that is “a vehicle for carrying the presence of the Transcendent One”34 in which “every altar…from the greatest to the least, is lit from that golden altar in heaven [Rev 8:3], and becomes its replica on earth, the representation of Our Lord Himself.”35

Father Randy Stice is a priest of the Diocese of Knoxville, TN, where he serves as the Director of the Office of Worship and Liturgy, the Diocesan Master of Ceremonies, and Associate Pastor of the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. He holds an STL in Systematic Theology from the University of St. Mary of the Lake/Mundelein Seminary and an MA in Liturgy from The Liturgical Institute.

1. John Paul II, Letter to Artists, n. 6.
2. Second Vatican Council, “Sacrosanctum Concilium,” in Vatican Council II: The Conciliar and Post Conciliar Documents, ed. Austin Flannery (Northport, NY: Costello Publishing, 1996, n. 122. Henceforth SC. Italics added.
3. Jacques Maritain, Art and Scholasticism with Other Essays, trans. J. F. Scanlan (North Stratford, NH: Ayer Coompany Publishers, 1930), 20.
4. Denis McNamara, Catholic Church Architecture and the Spirit of the Liturgy (Mundelein, IL: Hillenbrand Books, 2009), 22.
5. SC, 122.
6. Ibid., art. 124.
7. McNamara, 26.
8. Umberto Eco, The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, trans. Steven Hugh Bredin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 119. Italics original.
9. Ibid., 89.
10. Ibid., 90.
11. Second Vatican Council, “Lumen Gentium,” in Vatican Council II: The Conciliar and Post Conciliar Documents, ed. Austin Flannery (Northport, NY: Costello Publishing, 1996), art. 6. Henceforth, LG.
12. Ibid.
13. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: United States Catholic Conference, 2000), 1383. Henceforth CCC.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. Second Vatican Council, “Eucharisticum Mysterium, ” in Vatican Council II: The Conciliar and Post Conciliar Documents, ed. Austin Flannery (Northport, NY: Costello Publishing, 1996), art. 24. Henceforth, EM.
17. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, General Instruction of the Roman Missal (Washington, D.C.: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2011), 296. Henceforth GIRM.
18. EM, 24.
19. GIRM, 296.
20. GIRM, 296.
21. CCC, 1383.
22. SC, art. 122.
23. GIRM, 299. Italics added.
24. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Built of Living Stones: Art, Architecture, and Worship (Washington, D.C.: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2000), art.58. Henceforth BLS. Italics added.
25. Bishops’ Committee on the Liturgy, Introduction to the Order of Mass (Washington, D.C.: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2003), art. 52. Henceforth ITTOM.
26. Eco, 119.
27. EM, 24. Italics added.
28. BLS, art. 58. Italics added.
29. GIRM, 294. Italics added.
30. EM, 24. Italics added.
31. GIRM, art. 298.
32. GIRM, 301.
33. BLS, art. 57. Italics added. See also GIRM, no. 298 and RDCA, art. 9
34. Evdokimov, 147.
35. Geoffrey Webb, The Liturgical Altar (Westminster, MD: The Newman Press, 1949): 100.

The Virgin of Chartres: Making History through Liturgy and the Arts
by Margot E. Fassler
2010 New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 612 pages, $55.00

The Throne of Wisdom
by Stephen Murray

Each great cathedral gathers around itself a group of amateurs—lovers, really—who take upon themselves the task of interpreting and creating the meanings of the great multi-media work: an architectural envelope that leads us to the sublime; luminous multi-colored images that hang, suspended in the darkness; three-dimensional life-like sculptured figures—originally brightly painted—that provided the “virtual reality” of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and, most important, the living, human, performative dimensions: song, procession, pilgrimage, liturgical performance. In the Middle Ages such liturgical performances provided the interface between the resident body of clergy (bishop and seventy-two canons, plus ancillary personnel at Chartres) and different kinds of lay participant: patron; pilgrim; bourgeois; rustics. Margot Fassler opens her magnificent new book, The Virgin of Chartres, by locating herself and her work within the context of such Chartrephiles (if I may coin the term), past and present; in the pages that follow, she allows us to excavate layer upon layer of stories that have been told about this, the most-beloved cathedral of all. This is the construction of history.

Ecclesiastical institutions in the Middle Ages competed with each other to establish apostolic roots: the cult of saints and the liturgical arts, as well as the writing of chronicles provided the means by which such “histories” might be constructed. The story-tellers of Chartres took the narrative even further back in time with the myth of a pre-Christian female deity served by a community of priests, a Virgin about to bear (paritura). The cult with its pilgrimage was served by a sacred site: a miracle-working well, identified by eighteenth-century antiquarians as the well in the crypt of Chartres Cathedral. Margot Fassler strips away this layer of story-telling, documenting the relatively late origins of the myth in the fourteenth-century Vieille chronique, and its dramatic post-medieval embellishment.

The Marian dedication of Chartres Cathedral can be documented as early as the eighth century. During the episcopacy of Bishop Giselbert (858-879/85) the cathedral received from Emperor Charles the Bald (reg. 840-877) the gift of the great relic—the Virgin’s tunic—that would provide the essential mechanism for so much subsequent history-making. The author passes over this momentous acquisition with very few words: it is certainly true that the full implication of the event was only realized later through subsequent stories about miracles. The most famous early miracle came in 911 when a Viking band, led by Rollo, attempted to capture Chartres: “When suddenly Bishop Walter charged out of the city, robed as if to celebrate Mass, and bearing the cross and the tunic of the Holy Virgin Mary in his hands…” (17). Rollo, discomforted, withdrew and soon afterwards was baptized—Mary of Chartres had engineered his transformation. Fassler provides the reader with a fascinating account of the way this story was told and retold in subsequent writings; similarly, how the myth of the miracle-working well was fabricated and the story of the ignominious death of Bishop Frotbald during a Viking attack was turned into a glorious victory. Such stories were created and recreated in the tenth and eleventh centuries largely through the liturgy: they certainly helped establish the reputation of this city and bolster the status of counts and bishops at a time (the tenth century) of great instability and struggles between the family of the counts of Champagne/Blois (who controlled Chartres) and the Angevins, Capetians, and Anglo-Normans.

Bishop Odo (967-1003) appears to have been the first to systematically promote the Marian cult with the sancta camisa as its focal point—a major incentive was the need to raise money for the reconstruction of the cathedral, which had burned in 962. And it is from the tenth century that we first begin to hear of the sumptuous châsse that contained the chemise and of custom-designed chants like the Hac clara die sequence added to solemnize the cult of the Virgin.

The principal liturgical development of the tenth-to-eleventh centuries was the assembly of a coherent liturgical book on Advent. Advent is about arrival: advents. Originating in the ceremony for the reception of a ruler into his kingdom, a key text was found in Psalm 23: “Lift up your gates, O ye princes and be ye lifted up, O eternal gates: and the King of Glory shall enter in. Who is this King of Glory? The Lord who is strong and mighty: the Lord, mighty in battle.” The Church transformed the idea and the ceremony to mark the period of the year (four weeks) when the darkest days turned to light announcing the arrival of the Messiah. Margot Fassler repeatedly finds the sources of inspiration for the extraordinary sculptural program of the western portals in the same modes of thought and in ceremonial practices that lay behind the advents ritual as the column figures that populate the portals line up in a ceremony of greeting.

A devastating fire destroyed most of the cathedral on September 7, 1020, the vigil of Mary’s Nativity. The massive work of reconstruction and the continuing development and propagation of the cult of the Virgin went hand in hand during the episcopacy of Bishop Fulbert (1006-1028). New tropes and sequences were added and sermons preached to develop the theme of Mary’s lineage (prophetic and royal) and the story of her life. Bishop Fulbert’s preaching did much to propagate the metaphor of the strips Jesse—the Tree of Jesse—an image that was to enjoy a fabulous later life in Gothic art, while the “Book of the Cult,” attributed to Fulbert, provided a narrative for the life of the Virgin—and inspiration for the famous “capital frieze” that is such an important feature of the portal program of the western frontispiece.

The vibrancy of Fulbert’s episcopacy was later matched by Bishop Ivo (1090-1115). Ivo was a reforming bishop, whose sermons were intended to propagate Christian mysteries to a wide audience: he focused particularly on the story of Mary, seeing the Virgin’s tunic as a metaphor for the entire Church. Like Bernard of Clairvaux, he found inspiration in the Song of Songs.

In 1134 just before the feast of the Nativity of the Virgin Mary when the town blazed with the light of candles, another fire damaged the cathedral. Margot Fassler links the work of reconstructing the western frontispiece with its three portals squeezed tightly together between two towers, with the endowment of choral offices and the production of stained glass windows: critical to her thesis is the notion that portals and glass need to be understood as part of the same program as singing and processions. Particularly important is the way that the ideas developed in liturgy and preaching from Bishops Odo to Ivo found expression in the portal program, which is a vast speculation upon time, especially focussing upon Advent. The passage from Old to New is marked by the emphatic horizontal line of capitals that bring the story of the Virgin and the Nativity and Passion of Christ into present time. The figures lining the portals: kings, queens, prophets, and priests form part of the Old and belong to the lineage of Mary. The three tympana provide glimpses of the New and the yet-to-be. Particularly important is the presence of the Virgin Mary on the right (southern) tympanum as the Throne of Wisdom: the Wisdom of Solomon has been transformed into a new Logos with the incarnation of Christ. The Virgin’s body is the new Temple that is the Church, to be reunited with Christ at the end of time.

There is little not to like about this book. It tends at times to be repetitive and could have been a little shorter. This reviewer, an art historian, would have liked a more systematic description and visual documentation of the portals and windows. We may retain some skepticism about the extent that the non-clerical user of the building would actually be able to “see and understand” all, as the author suggests.

But, finally, The Virgin of Chartres is, I believe, destined to find its place amongst the classic works on the great cathedrals of the Middle Ages. It appears at a time when much of the work of many of the scholars of a previous generation who attempted to unscramble the meanings of the great church has been questioned: I think of the writings of Otto von Simson, Erwin Panofsky, and Emile Mâle. Scholarship of the past three decades has sought to establish new ways to unlock the meaning of the cathedral. This book, with its sweeping historical overview coupled with detailed analysis and transcriptions of the liturgical sources and investigation of the images, sets a new standard of excellence.
Stephen Murray, PhD, was educated at Oxford and the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. He has been teaching Art History at Columbia University since 1986. His publications include books on the cathedrals at Amiens, Beauvais, and Troyes; his current work is on medieval sermons, story-telling in Gothic, and the Romanesque architecture of the Bourbonnais.