Crowcombe, Somerset

Monsters!

I am always on the lookout for monsters in churches. I live in an area – the Cotswolds – where a long tradition of stone carving made it easy for masons and parishioners alike to indulge a fascination with gargoyles and grotesques of many kinds. Most of these carvings are on the outsides of churches, where they range from the oddest of Norman corbels to the most amusing of late-medieval grotesques. No one really knows what they are doing there, but an answer connected to the notion of ritual protection (from evil spirits for example) is probably not too far from the mark. Grotesques and monsters carved on the walls of a church, especially around or near the doorway, may have been put there to protect the sacred space within from malign interference.

Sometimes, though, grotesques and monsters get inside the church too. In areas of the country where a lot of medieval woodwork has survived (Somerset and Devon spring to mind), foliate heads, grotesques, and other such images were sometimes carved on the ends of the benches or pews. The church at Crowcombe has an impressive set of late-medieval bench ends and one of the most striking of all features this remarkable scene of two naked men fighting a bizarre two-headed creature. It seems to be not quite a classical chimera, not quite a medieval amphisbema. I turned to my copy of M. W. Tisdall’s book, God’s Beasts,* a lavishly illustrated catalogue of animal carvings in churches. The author seems to agree, placing this carving in a chapter on dragons, but e glossing it as a ‘twin-headed monster’. Dragons generally are seen in Christian iconography as a symbol of evil, making these two human antagonists brave fighters for good. There’s also a sense though, that medieval woodworkers simply liked carving this sot of thing: images of evil overcome could be enjoyable to portray and behold.†

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* M. W. Tisdall, God’s Beasts (Charlefort Press, 1998)

† For a scholarly account of grotesques and similar images in medieval art, see Michael Camille, Image on the Edge (Reaktion Books, 2019)

Daglingworth, Gloucestershire

Under snow and in hiding

The heading above could be about me. Gloucestershire has been snowbound for days, the temperatures have dipped to new lows, and I’m hardly venturing out at all, let alone looking at buildings. So I thought I’d find an appropriately chilly photograph: one from some years ago of the church at Daglingworth, near Cirencester, seems to fit the bill.

Looked at in passing, there seems to be nothing unusual about this little building. Apparently it’s a medieval church with a short version of the plain and simple west tower so common in the Cotswolds, and a later chancel, which turns out to be a Victorian rebuild of 1850–51. Look closer, however: long and short quoins and a doorway with a semi-circular arch of great simplicity suggest that the nave is Anglo-Saxon. Inside is a Saxon chancel arch and a group of four carved reliefs – two Crucifixions, a Christ in Majesty, and a St Peter – that also look pre-conquest.

The better preserved of the Crucifixions is the most striking of all. Set in the nave very close to a south-facing window, it’s difficult to photograph at all well, but the image above will give you the general idea. The crucified Christ wears a loincloth and his head is surrounded by a circular nimbus with a cross. On either side stand two Roman soldiers, one with the spear that pierced Jesus’ side, one with the vinegar-soaked sponge. Scholars argue about when and where it was carved – the late-10th or early-11th century seems to be the most likely guess for its date.

What’s certain, however, is that this relief and two of the others spent years hidden from view. They were only discovered when Victorian workers took apart the nave’s east wall during the rebuilding of the chancel. They found the stones reused in the masonry, their carved faces turned inwards so that they could not be seen. Were they hidden during the iconoclastic period of the Reformation, their images concealed by someone who revered them too much to destroy them? The Victorians had other ideas, removed them from their hiding place and displayed them on the walls. Although damaged, the carvings are still strong and moving images and although the church has been empty whenever I’ve visited, I’m sure people come many miles to see them. Historians of early medieval art and church-crawlers certainly know about them. Others should too.

Piccadilly, London

Interlude  

My obsession with the unregarded aspects of English architecture often brings me up against a small detail on a very famous building, a detail that seems to be unnoticed by most people. I’ve posted before about the unique telephone box in the entrance way to Burlington House, the grand home of London’s Royal Academy in Piccadilly. When I enter the building’s courtyard I also often pause at a place close by, to admire a set of relief carvings that encrust the stonework of the entrance arches. No one is ever looking at these when I go through – there is, after all, usually something else inside in the form of a major loan exhibition that’s waiting for their attention. But I think the carvings are worth more than a glance, even if the combination of animal and plant life with urns and ornament, plus cameo-like heads (not to mention classical draped figures in the spandrels of the arches), is hardly fashionable.* The work is certainly interesting if one bothers to look – if the urn in all its swagged and pelleted elegance is out of a pattern book, that bird with its opening beak, carefully delineated feathers, and inquisitive eye is a charmer. And the beast in the lower photograph is arrested and engaged me as I looked and tried to work out the relationship between head and massive paw and wings. I’m not sure who made these carvings – someone out there must know.†  For the rest of us, they’re a diverting free show for the eye, a prelude perhaps to the serious art inside, or an interlude on the way up Piccadilly.

* Perhaps I should say, especially because it’s hardly fashionable…

† Pictures of Burlington House’s architectural sculpture appear quite often on line, on photo-sharing sites, but I’ve not seen anywhere the name of the person who did these carvings. There’s an excellent post about the more prominent statues of artists on the same building at the Ornamental Passions site, here.

Oxford

Screen goddess

I don't know anything about this relief. Positioned high on the wall of a cinema in a side street in Oxford, it may be by Newbury Trent, who did many carvings for cinemas. Its subject is a cousin of the curvaceous and silvery women who adorn a former cinema in Cheltenham and who were the subject of one of my previous posts (that Cheltenham building is still empty and yet more unkempt since I posted it back in 2008).

It's not the greatest piece of carving. The hands, elegant as they are, don't quite work for me, and, if you will pardon the expression, the breasts don't repay close examination. But I like her face, which seems to me to be sensitively carved, and the way the film snakes its way around the figure, part frame, part secular halo. The simplified tripartite wave of her hair is perhaps a signal that we should take the whole carving as designed to be looked at from some distance without the assistance of the zoom lens I used to take the photograph.

The relief is a relic of a time, the 1930s I suppose, when cinema was the epitome of glamour and modernity and when old established arts like sculpture could be brought to its service. Cinemas of the 1930s – along with contemporary factories and other buildings – were often decorated with this kind of carving. Such decoration forms a reaction to the minimalist modernism of buildings in the tradition of Le Corbusier – and ultimately of the Central European architect Adolf Loos† who declared that ornament is crime – and shows how buildings can be modern and ornamented at the same time. And if buildings connected with the arts cannot be a bit showy, what can?

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† Loos was born in Brno, another of those with Czech origins (think Freud, Mahler, Rilke) subsumed into the all-embracing Austro-Hungarian culture.

Hollen Street and Wardour Street, London

Five early pieces: 3

Here is a further re-posting, part of my series to mark this blog’s fifth birthday. Perhaps my readers will forgive my for including another one relating to printing and publishing – after all, such businesses have been central to my life for a long time.

High above Hollen Street, in one of Soho’s unregarded corners, a group of putti are making music. It seems a strange decoration for this otherwise industrial-looking building in a Soho side street. But this plaque, and another up the street that depicts putti churning out pages on a printing press, are a clue to the building’s origins. This was the printing works of the music publishers Novello’s, just around the corner from their offices (now Chappell’s) in Wardour Street.

Both these buildings were designed by Frank L Pearson, who was the son-in-law of the company chairman and the obvious choice for the job. The printing works came first, in 1898, and were followed in 1906 by the offices, all in brick with stone dressings. The office building has a beautiful small concert room on the first floor, done out in the style of a 17th-century hall – the kind of oak-panelled room you find in a country house or Oxbridge college of the Commonwealth period or just after. It’s not normally open, but can be glimpsed, often lit up, from the comfort of the pub opposite in Wardour Street. Among the neon-lit media offices and restaurants of Soho, the concert hall and the charmingly decorated printing works form a throw-back to another time.

                                         The George, Wardour Street

Postscript 2012 Novello’s (now part of the Music Sales group) is a 200-year-old company that found success in the Victorian period by selling affordable editions of music, championing British music, and selling scores of work by European composers from Berlioz to Wagner. Although I’m no musician, I’d long been aware of their publications, but first noticed their building when drinking in the George, the pub opposite in Wardour Street, one evening. To commemorate this I add a photograph of the pub, with its plaster relief of the Prince of Wales and its stripy walls and elaborate window bays – very much in the late-19th century fashion and no doubt influenced by buildings designed by Norman Shaw and Ernest George. Here’s to it.

North Cerney, Gloucestershire

The sun is a great visual friend to buildings. Under the warming influence of its rays old red bricks shimmer, windows become a patchwork of glittering reflections, and stone seems to change colour before our eyes. Along the limestone belt that stretches from Dorset to Lincolnshire, for example, stone that looks grey against a cloudy sky can warm up in the sunshine to the ‘honey-coloured’ appearance beloved of the guidebook writers, while the darker lias walls of parts of northern Oxfordshire and southern Northamptonshire turn a rich toffee shade, an architectural feast, indeed.

With the sunlight also come shadows. The crisp shadow lines made in the sun by the protruding bits of a building – stringcourses, pilasters, mouldings – define architectural shapes and rhythms. Shadows also reveal details that are easy to miss on a dull day. Recently I was out with a friend exploring his village church and churchyard. As we came out of the porch and glanced to our left a shaft of light illuminated an 18th-century gravestone. Suddenly its worn inscription, which had been virtually invisible before, was legible again. My friend quickly wrote down its words, capturing the outline of a life before the sun, and the dates, disappeared again.

At least on a gravestone we expect an inscription and know where to look. But the sun can also illuminate the unexpected. This creature is incised with a shallow line on an outside wall of the church at North Cerney, which lies between Cirencester and Cheltenham. It’s a beast called a manticore. Such animals are mentioned in the writings of Classical authors such as the Greek Ctesias and the Roman Pliny, and they are also described in medieval bestiaries. Manticores are meant to have the body of a lion and the head and shoulders of a man – although this example has feet that look like hoofs and a tail that bears a passing resemblance to that of a beaver. There is another at North Cerney, which has a more leopard-like body.

No-one knows why these beasts should be there. Monsters, it is true, are often depicted on the outsides of medieval churches. But they usually appear as small carved corbels not as shallow reliefs taking up more than a linear metre of wall. The best guess is that they are masons’ graffiti carved in the late-16th century, but we can’t know for sure. The sun, which can illuminate hidden lives and reveal fabulous carvings, can also raise unanswerable questions.

Harley Street, London

London’s Harley Street is well known for its doctors’ houses and consulting rooms, making the district, as it were, the capital’s bedside manor. The street was first built in the second half of the 18th century, but there are also plenty of houses from the Victorian and Edwardian periods that left such a mark on this part of London. Number 37, on its prominent corner site, is one of the most spectacular.

It was designed by the architect Beresford Pite, who threw at it all his skill in composing the facades of a building and marshalling all kinds of architectural bits and pieces to make a coherent whole. The two frontages are full of incident – windows of different sizes and shapes, the ornate corner oriel, the doorway and curved pediment, the skyline with its big dormer windows. And all this fits together wonderfully.

But what really take the breath away are the sculptures that encourage the eye to linger on the facades. One represents poetry, a laurel-crowned figure with a lyre and volumes of Homer and Milton behind him. Another is a reclining figure with a telescope and a star, representing the science of astronomy. At the top is a caryatid holding up the heavy cornice. The whole collection constitute a little-known London treasure, but the artist who created them was not a Londoner. His name was Frederick Schenk.Frederick Schenk was the son of a German lithographer who settled in Edinburgh. As a young man he worked in his father’s lithographic business before training as an artist in Edinburgh and London, and working as a modeller for various potteries in Staffordshire. Although he was successful in the precise and painstaking work of the ceramic modeller, a change in the pottery market led him to find a new direction in his career. He became an architectural sculptor, and specialized in low-relief work, especially on public buildings – town halls and the like – designed by the architect Henry Hare.

There weren’t that many houses grand enough for Schenk’s stone sculptures, especially as by the turn of the century tilework and terracotta were so fashionable. But the architect Beresford Pite, a man who combined skilful handling of shapes and masses with considerable decorative flair, gave him his chance on this corner site. Schenk picked up the scheme and ran with it, and his splendid reliefs of about 1900 still delight the eye.

Albert Embankment, London

Before I leave my exploration of friezes, decorations, and reliefs, features that seem to have been preoccupying me on my recent walks around London, here’s one more example. The headquarters building of the London Fire Brigade on Albert Embankment was built in 1937 to designs by architects of the London County Council. It’s a rather monolithic building, characteristic of the strong, silent phase of English building in the 1930s, and not everyone likes it. But it has a saving grace – a dazzling set of relief sculptures by Gilbert Bayes.

This one, part way up the Embankment façade, is a dramatic scene featuring firefighters, but not as we know them. These firefighters have fishy tails. Yes, they’re merfiremen, the perfect mythological creatures for a Fire Brigade HQ by the River Thames. Other reliefs depict galleys (the riverside theme again), and Phoebus with the rays of the risen sun. It’s not just the gilding that makes me think of the interwar period as something of a golden age of architectural. sculpture in London.

Thanks to Zoe, who blogs with such flair about her adventures in the Czech Republic here, for telling me to look at this building.

Cinema, Cranbourn Street, London

Movie posters are often so large and garish that they quite overshadow the buildings they’re attached to. This is a pity because cinemas can be interesting buildings. Some of the best come from the 1930s, like the one now called the Vue in London’s Cranbourn Street, just off Leicester Square. Like many cinemas this 1938 structure has been much altered over the years, but the owners have kept these two chunky expressionistic reliefs, high up on the entrance front, which obviously represent sight and sound. They are by Bainbridge Copnall and they do a better job of representing the aspirations of cinema than the tawdry typography and crude shopfront modernism that most cinemas resort to today. They're an asset to Leicester Square.