I apologise to any readers who have been frustrated at my previous post, which illustrates a notable Norman church but discusses the flowers in the churchyard. If that’s a little perverse for an architecture blog, I’d argue that a building’s context is often as important as the building itself. However, as St Mary’s, Kirkburn, is a Norman churches with some memorable carvings, I’m not going to let it pass without a few words, and a couple of pictures, of its memorable entrance.
This is the south doorway of the church, and it’s a star example of the kind of entrance that the builders and sculptors of 12th century England liked to produce when they had the time and money to do so. The overall design will be familiar to many people who like to visit old churches: a semi-circular opening featuring several more or less concentric bands of decoration, known as orders because they sit on a series of miniature columns (known in the business as shafts). The inner orders are recessed, leading the eye towards the door and the interior of the church. The capitals at the heads of the shafts and carved with scrolls, which give a distant hint of the Roman Ionic or Corinthian, reminding us that the style of architecture in Britain known as Norman is also termed Romanesque.
Kirkburn’s south doorway has three orders, the inner one decorated with chevron ornament, the second also of chevrons, with some carved decoration on each triangular outer surface, and the third of beakheads. There’s a fourth, outermost, band that has no shafts supporting it. This is known as the label and this one is unusual in that it bears quite striking figurative carving – labels are often quite plain.
My second photograph shows the central part of each ornamental band, so that you can see them in detail. The first, innermost, band has multiple rows of finely cut chevrons, both on the front face of the arch and the underside. This is high quality work by someone at home with mallet and chisel – and it’s a standard pattern of this period so you’d expect it to be done competently. Before the next order comes a band of stones carved with mostly abstract patterns (chevrons, squares, scrolls and one crudely cut head); this band tapers towards the sides, to accommodate the difference in curvature between the lower order (segmental, to fit the door) and the upper orders (semicircular). The carving here is much less assured, almost as if it had been left blank and a less skilled mason had later decided to decorate it.
The next order up is again made of chevrons, but exceptional ones because there are carved motifs on the upper surfaces. These motifs range from stylised stars, leaves and spirals to beasts – on the far left there’s what looks to be a serpent. Next comes the outer order of beakheads, crisply carved, with the usual features of these creatures: pointed beaks and furrowed brows. With both these orders, we are back to more confident work.
Finally, there are the carved stones of the outer band or label. It’s mostly difficult for the 21st-century eye to identify the subjects of these. The excellent website of The Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture in Britain and Ireland (CRSBI) tries hard.* This site is compiled by people who are used to looking at and studying Romanesque sculpture, so if their conclusions are surprising, they’re at least based on knowledge of the subject that spreads broad and goes deep. From left to right they identify the subjects in the close-up picture as: a sheep; two serpents with foliage sprays in their mouths; two lions; a horse; a woman holding a torch (sideways on to fit the stone); a dragon among stars; three birds with their eggs; and two animals with foliate tails and tongues.
If one could be sure of the animal identification, one could no doubt draw conclusions about the moral or spiritual lessons to be drawn from the creatures illustrated. But I hold back from trying to do this when the ‘sheep’ is so elongated and stylised, when the ‘lions’ have tufted tails but not a lot else lionish about them, and when some animals are not identified at all. I prefer to marvel at the skill of the carvers (even work we might describe as ‘crude’† is graphic and effective), at the good state of preservation (apart from the odd chipped beak) and the strong sense of design. There’s plenty here to scratch one’s head about, but much to give pleasure too.
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* I cannot stress enough what a useful resource this site is. It’s here.
† If, looking at the ‘sheep’, you’re tempted to say that a child could have done it, remember Picasso’s remark when accused of a similar lack of sophistication: ‘Once I drew like Raphael, but it has taken me a whole lifetime to draw like children.’ There are various variations on this remark of Picasso’s online, but the one I give is the one I believe to be most accurate.
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