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Blackfriars, Cambridge | ||
 The left-hand section of the retable |
The Blackfriars RetableThe aula's iconographic austerity has been relieved in recent years by the acquisition of a copy of the Thornham Parva Retable, the principal visual art work left by the Dominicans of the English Middle Ages (the original, made for an East Anglian priory, is now, by the gift of its last lay owners, the Barons Henneker, in a tiny Suffolk C. of E. church).There follows an article on the Retable's now restored original, co-authored by a member of the Blackfriars congregation, Dr Eamon Duffy.
For four years, art conservationists, working inside a humidity-controlled polythene tent in a former mill-house near Cambridge, have been
resurrecting a miracle of medieval painting. Four metres long by a metre high, the Thornham Parva Retable is the largest surviving altar-piece
from the English Middle Ages. Its very survival is a near miracle in itself, and piecing together the story of its mysterious origins and history
has demanded scholarly detective work of the highest order. | |
 The middle section of the retable. |
Now, millimetre by millimetre, the Cambridge University team at the Hamilton Kerr Institute, led by Dr Spike Bucklow, have
been returning it to its former glory. Using sturgeon glue applied with tiny dabs of a cotton-bud, they fix the panel's flaking paint to the
chalk-and-size gesso with which the medieval artist had smoothed the oak planking he worked on. Some later owner had attempted to modernise the picture by slapping grey carriage-paint over the precious gilded tile background, and an "artist" repaired the robes of the saints and the loin-cloth of the crucified Christ with lozenges of opaque colour. Slowly, painstakingly, these barbarisms are being cleared away to reveal the exquisite medieval drawing of the figures of Christ and his saints, and the glowing autumnal palette of translucent reds, purples and greens in which the unknown master had clothed them. The picture first emerged between the wars from an obscurity just as dense as these muddy layers of over-painting. In 1927, a Suffolk aristocrat, Lord Henniker, discovered it stacked in an 18th-century woodpile in his stable-loft. Although he initially mistook it for fencing, in time he consulted Professor E. W. Tristram, the leading expert on medieval English art. Henniker then donated his discovery to the neighbouring parish of Thornham Parva and its tiny Romanesque thatched church, because his brother was the parson there. No one at first knew where it had originated, but the picture itself provided vital clues. The saints who flank the central Crucifixion are arranged in matching pairs, from the outer edges in. At the extremities stand two black-cloaked friars, the one on the right bizarrely crowned with a dripping butcher's cleaver buried in his skull. Beside them stand St Catherine of Alexandria and St Margaret of Antioch. These figures pinpoint the picture's origins. The blackcloaked male saints are Dominic and Peter Martyr, the victim of a 13th-century heretic's knife), joint patrons of the Dominican Order, which in 1254 had ruled that all its churches must display their images. Catherine and Margaret, preachers and martyrs, were also mascots of the order, so there can be little doubt that the painting was made for the altar of a Dominican Priory: the presence of the Apostles Peter and Paul believed to have spoken to St Dominic, bears this out. But the remaining pair of saints presents a greater puzzle. The effete, gloved figure of the martyr-king Edmund suggests that the painting was made for a priory in East Anglia. Edmund was the region's greatest saint, and his shrine at Bury St Edmunds drew pilgrims in numbers the Dome management would kill for. But he is uniquely and improbably matched by the gaunt and barefoot figure of John the Baptist in his camel-skin. It is difficult to account for this unlikely pairing. In medieval art, however, such otherwise puzzling combinations were often a coded reference to the benefactors who commissioned the work. As it happens, we do not need to look far for the likely Edmund/John combination. The Dominican priory at Thetford, about 20 miles west, in Norfolk, was established in 1335 by a joint benefaction from John de Warenne, Earl of Surrey, and a priest, Edmund de Goneville. The ostentatious inclusion of their name-saints above the altar was just the sort of pious swank medieval donors demanded as value for money. | |
 The right-hand section of the retable. | All evidence suggests that the Thornham Parva panel was made around 1336 for the altar of the
Dominican church at Thetford. And to clinch the matter, an archaeological dig there has recently uncovered hundreds of fragments of stained
glass, a jigsaw puzzle of painted saints, decorated with borders bearing acorns and oak leaves like those carved on the surround of the
altarpiece, using the same autumnal colours, drawing-style and even the same scale as the Thornham Parva figures. All this adds up to what
looks like the elements of a carefully coordinated decorative scheme. The Thornham Parva picture is not the only survival from Thetford. When the panel was investigated in the 1970s it was realised that an identical tiled background and similarly swaying figures were to be found on a painted altar-frontal of the life of the Virgin, now in the Musée de Cluny in Paris. Detailed analysis established beyond doubt that the two panels belonged together, the upper and lower parts of a single altar. The history of the Cluny picture is even more mysterious than the Thornham Parva panel, and it is unclear how the two halves could have become so widely separated. But there can be little doubt that the ultimate culprit was Henry VIII. Having broken with the Papacy in 1534 he turned his hostile attentions to the English monasteries. Thetford Priory was dissolved in 1538, its main buildings confiscated and stripped of their lead roofing. The chancel roof, however, was tiled, not leaded, and it remained intact, becoming part of a private house. The Thornham Parva panel must have remained on public view, because sometime in the reign of Edward VI, when the Reformation had become more fiercely protestant and images of the saints taboo, the figures were attacked, their faces and eyes scratched and gouged with a knife. By 1616 Thetford Priory had been acquired by the region's dominant family, the Howards. Their ownership may account for the presence in Europe of the Cluny section of the Thetford altar. For the Howards were Catholics, and had close connections with the Dominican Order. The Thornham panel, by contrast, certainly remained near its original East Anglian home. The Howard stewards and bailiffs in the region were the Fox family, based at Stradbroke, a few miles east of Thornham. The Foxes too were Catholics, and shared with their patrons an interest in the artistic and religious history of the region. So it was at the Fox farm that the Thornham Parva panel came to rest, perhaps as part of the furniture of the family's chapel, reputedly located in the spacious attic. Continued religious use of this sort would account for the "modernising" coat of grey paint, and the fact that at some point the panel was sawn into three sections, perhaps to make its central section a better fit for the smaller dimensions of a baroque domestic altar. At any rate, it was from Stradbroke that it made its way at last to the Henniker woodpile. Still pasted to the carved pillar to the left of the figure of St Dominic is a tiny paper tag, labelled "Second day, Lot 171", a relic of the auction which dispersed the contents of the house when the Fox family died out in 1778. The unfashionably "gothick" panel, however, found no buyers. The Thornham Parva Retable was lying unregarded among the unsold lots when Lord Henniker's ancestor, who had bought the farm, cleared the stables. The rarity and sorry state of such flotsam from the cultural cataclysm of the Tudor reformations has long deceived art historians, many of whom have concluded that there had been nothing worth preserving to begin with, that late medieval England was an artistic wasteland - imitative, provincial, second-rate. The glories currently emerging under the patient cotton-buds of the team at the Hamilton Kerr Institute belie that judgment: they are a poignant reminder of the enormity of our loss. The Blackfriars retable has since been complemented by a set of engraved windows of angels and archangels - based by their designer (the Icklingham stained glass artist Bronwen Pulsford) on the late mediaeval panel-painting of St Michael in the Norfolk church of Ranworth St Helen's; a Flemish Mother and Child of c.1700, and an early Gothic revival wooden figure of St Dominic, French in provenance. A note on the windows follows. | |
 A drawing of one of the windows. | The Angel WindowsBlackfriars Cambridge is dedicated to one of the archangels, St Michael. That was the choice of the Bullough family who gave us this house on Mount Pleasant. They remembered how shrines of the angels are usually on hill tops (like Mont St Michel) and wanted a symbol of the struggle of intellectual good with evil - which archangels can fittingly furnish. Traditionally, Catholic churches contain some image(s) of the angels - either in bosses attached to the roof, or in stained glass, or as frescoes or sculptures. The Preface of the Western Mass speaks of how, in the Liturgy, the angels are present to the worshipping Church. We pray 'in company with angels and archangels'. So we here at Blackfriars had two reasons - one particular and one general - for wanting some angel iconography in the main chapel of the house.In that chapel, six windows look out onto the street. We felt that we could keep the two outlying ones to represent the openness of the Church to the world, but use the four inner ones to indicate the angelic presences. East Anglia, especially Norfolk, is rich in remnants of mediaeval iconography and angels figure in a number of East Anglian churches. With the help of Dr Eamon Duffy we identified a St Michael from one such church (Ranworth St Helen), and Mrs Bronwen Pulsford, a lay Dominican and longtime member of our congregation, has produced not only a faithful version of this but two original sketches in the same style for St Gabriel and St Raphael for the other central panes (they are, with St Michael, the archangels personally named in Scripture), as well as sketches suggesting the wider heavenly hosts for the remaining intermediate windows. | |