Somerton, Oxfordshire

 

A moment of confusion

Standing in St James’s church, Somerton* recently, I was amazed, Why was this not more famous: a 14th-century reredos consisting of a depiction of the Last Supper, with intact figures of Jesus and the apostles in a row of niches. The architecture of the niches is exactly right and the carving has that element of wear that is testimony to the age of the piece. This is as rare as hens’ teeth, I said to myself. And the figures are characterful and ooze charm – Jesus sits with the head of the apostle he loved best (normally said to be St John the Evangelist) on his lap; one diner seems to be refusing a drink; another pours from a jug; yet another gesticulates, as if in conversation. The faces, some with curly hair and beards, are delightful. The story is that the reredos was removed from its place behind the altar at the time of the Reformation and hidden away. It was, say different accounts, reinstalled during a restoration of the church in 1822, or after another in the later-19th century.

And in the back of my mind there’s a nagging doubt. If something seems too good to be true, as they say, it probably is. Setting aside such normally authoritative sources as Pevsner and the listing description of the church, I do another Google search. This time I find a short piece on a website called The Antiquary. Here, the historian Dr Allan Barton gives a different story. That the figures, damaged beyond repair during the Reformation, was at some point restored. The restorer remade the faces and other details (handles, vessels, etc) using plaster of Paris attached to the surviving 14th-century stone (the arches, table, the bodies of the figures) by means of wooden dowels.

Barton does not give a source for his account, although it would no doubt be possible to tell the difference between stone and plaster on very close examination. But this version of events seems plausible. It would account for the style of the facial sculpture, which is rather more like Romanesque sculpture than 14th-century Gothic. And it would account for the good condition of the faces, which are surprisingly crisp for medieval survivors that had been removed, hidden and reinstalled.

There are problems with this kind of restoration. It is, of course, going against longstanding principles of historic buildings conservation to replace old work with new, and if damaged medieval carving was destroyed in the process, this would be cause for great regret. However, if the iconoclasts of the Reformation had hacked off whole faces and limbs, one’s attitude to a later sculptor adding new work would be more accepting. Even so, disguising the difference between old and new is also a problem. It should be clear what has been done and where the original ends and the repair begins. 

The usual 21st-century attitude to such items is to condemn them as fakes or forgeries. But we are where we are. Simple pleasure at what we are left with now is also a legitimate response.† It would be fascinating to know more, however. How does Barton know what material the additions are made of, and how they’re attached? Who modelled these faces and when, and was their intention to pull the wool over our eyes or just to renew something in their own way? What did the reredos look like in its damaged state? Oh to know more.

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* The Somerton in Oxfordshire; there are others.

† Albeit with questions about what if any medieval work was sacrificed during the restoration. 

Hanley Swan, Worcestershire

Saints and flowers

Although as someone who writes about historic architecture, I make trips especially to look at buildings, it’s always been a feature of this blog that many of the structures I include have been seen by chance, viewed en passant, while I was on my way to somewhere else entirely. ‘When you’re shopping, look at the shopfronts. If you take the train, spare a few minutes to notice the station,’ as I’ve said more than once. Some of my buildings are ones I’ve often passed, like the church of St Gabriel at Hanley Swan, Worcestershire. I’ve glanced at its Gothic revival exterior many times as I’ve passed – precisely accurate 13th-century tracery, broach spire, chunky grey masonry. I wasn’t surprised when I learned that it was designed by George Gilbert Scott.

Finally the other day I stopped and looked inside. What drew and held my attention was not Scott’s architecture, but what lay at the focus of all this stone: the reredos behind the high altar. This is a very Victorian marble composition with a pair of mosaic portraits of saints. My photograph above shows one of these, the archangel Gabriel, revered as St Gabriel, richly robed in front of an architectural background, carrying the lily that is this most familiar attribute.This reredos, which also features lovely tiles embellished with stylised flowers (showing perhaps the influence of the aesthetic movement), was the work of two of the most prominent Victorian firms of craft workers, Clayton and Bell, to whom the design of the figures is attributed, and Powell & Sons, who actually constructed the reredos and put the whole thing – marble, mosaic, tiles – together.

So, in the early-1870s in a small Worcestershire village, a group of the most prominent artists and craftsmen came together with one of the most celebrated architects of the period to build a church and furnish it with style. They did this thanks in the main to Samuel Martin, a former Liverpool merchant who’d become a local grandee, who provided the funds. No doubt local stonemasons, carpenters, and others were responsible for the building work, too. A happy combination of local and nationally known talent.

Bristol Cathedral

The great modernist architect Le Corbusier wrote a book called Quand les cathédrales étaient blanches (When the Cathedrals Were White). In other words, when they were new. Le Corbusier liked things that were new and white and most people think that whiteness is the natural state of old cathedrals, their stone chastely expressing their structure. But actually medieval cathedrals were painted in glowing colours, their interiors resembling jewel boxes or manuals of heraldry. Go inside the wonderful Sainte Chapelle, the royal chapel in Paris, a vast kaleidoscopic casket of painted stone and stained glass, and you get the idea.

Ancient English churches and cathedrals on the whole have lost their ancient coloured interiors, but here at Bristol, a little bit of the colour has been restored. The picture shows part of the 14th-century reredos – that’s the decorated wall behind the altar – in the Eastern Lady Chapel of the cathedral. This part of the building was constructed between 1298 and 1330, and the reredos is a classic 14th-century piece of stone carving. The curvaceous double-curved ogee arches, the circular flowers, the little pinnacles and the other intricate details are all typical of the highly ornate style that the Victorians appropriately christened Decorated. In 1935 the reredos was restored and the restorers repainted it using evidence from remains of the medieval paint so that it displays something like its original colour. When the cathedrals were red, green, gold…