medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
'The Romanesque church would undoubtedly
have been painted, and filled with altars, screens, stalls, etc'
I wonder...
I know one very authoritative current opinion (David Park, who heads up
wall painting conservation at the Courtauld Institute) is that Durham,
and c11 Winchester, and other of the VERY earliest post-Norman
Romanesque English buildings, were unpainted on the interior. I've heard
him say so several times, and he's made the point in print, though in a
very undemonstrative way. I think he'd agree some had whitewashed
exteriors (York, Worcester - in both cases perhaps interiors too) or a
few details relieved with colour (Ely). All these were given rich coats
of paint c1150-1220 when they must have begun to appear far too severe
for current taste. Paint before that, on the surviving English
cathedrals, is a rare thing indeed.
It's radical, but if anyone should know, it's him. Our assumption of
paint could itself be a backwards looking one, casting the taste of one
phase of medieval culture onto another. Those big muscular buildings
might really have been meant to look as they do now, almost Brutalist.
I wonder about the rest, too, at this date. Yes to a magnficient shrine
and a carved pulpitum screen. Yes to splashes of textile colour and
candlesticks around side altars and the high altar. Reredoses were
rarely large affairs before the c13 - some would say, c14. Stained glass
expensive and reserved for windows above altars. No monumental tombs
(didn't exist until c12), no rich canopied stalls - the earliest stalls
we have (Salisbury, mid c13) were very simple - no decorative canopies,
just well-made wooden chairs in a row. Screens between choir and aisles
are walls of stone at Winchester, not screens in the later sense. The
building is new: it aint' had time to fill up. Taste is grand but
'clean'.
The impression then certainly very different from that of 2006, but also
very different from that of 1500, or even 1200. And perhaps, by accident
and even disaster, 2006 is closer than any later option. It's from c1100
and into High Romanesque that Richness starts: after these great
post-Conquest monster-cathedrals were designed.
Jon
-----Original Message-----
From: medieval-religion - Scholarly discussions of medieval religious
culture [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Jim
Bugslag
Sent: 26 July 2006 00:55
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [M-R] Dark Ages
medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and
culture
> Weirdly, some of these 'Restorations' and iconoclasms unwittingly put
> churches closer to their *first* appearance than had been the case for
> centuries. Thanks to the Reformation/Iconoclasm/Victorians, Durham
> cathedral has been swept clean of the countless tabernacles, wooden
side
> altars, candlesticks, organs, stained glass windows, relics and etc
> listed in the c16 Rites of Durham - and made into a bare, unpainted
> muscular Romanesque pile with only one or two very spectacular
fittings.
> In general look and feel it is thus closer to its appearance in say
1110
> (including the 'unpainted' bit, I understand) than at any time
since...
Dear Jon,
This is my point exactly. Durham Cathedral *never* looked like "a bare,
unpainted"
pile with "only one or two very spectacular fittings" until the
Reformation, and later,
Wyatt "the scraper" made it that way. The Romanesque church would
undoubtedly
have been painted, and filled with altars, screens, stalls, etc.
Certainly, many such
things would have proliferated rather enormously through the later
Middle Ages, but
I would wager that the church in that condition would have been far more
understandable to its 12th-century patrons than the sweeping -- and
empty --
Romantic vistas of the current church.
Cheers,
Jim Bugslag
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