At St. Peter and Paul, Pickering, there are frescoes. This came as a surprise to me because, as everyone knows, there are no frescoes in England. We whitewashed them all during the Reformation. Or so I thought. Having done a bit of googling it turns out there’s exactly enough surviving visual church in art in England for you to get a sense of what a catastrophic loss of heritage the Reformation was.
Pictured here with slightly less snow than there was last weekend.
On the day I visited St Peter and Paul, there was a sort of tea and cake day on at the back, attended exclusively by very old people, who were very visibly curious about why three young people, none of whom were from Yorkshire and only one of whom was English, were in Pickering church on a Monday afternoon.
The north wall of the nave. The south wall, not pictured, is also covered with paintings.
The frescoes were bigger and more sophisticated than I had anticipated. You can get a sense of them using the 3D point-and-click service on the website. There’s a scene of the beheading of St. John the Baptist. There’s St. George slaying the dragon. There’s someone full of arrows who looks very much like St. Sebastian but turns out to be someone entirely different called St. Edmund, who I had never heard of.
St. Edmund, only quite happy about the restoration job that’s been done on him.
There’s Christ harrowing hell and greeting Adam, who holds the apple towards him. There’s the seven works of mercy and even a sophisticated nine-scene retelling of the life of St. Catherine of Alexandria (the one with the broken wheel).
The frescoes at Pickering were whitewashed during the reformation, as part of the nationwide drive to purify and reform religious practice in the United Kingdom. They were uncovered in the nineteenth-century, which caused quite a stir in the locality and attracted interest from the Archbishop of York. Everyone came to have a look, after which they were re-whitewashed by the local priest, Rev. Ponsonby, who thought they had a nasty romish taint and distracted from worship. You can feel free to curse his name. They were then uncovered again by the subsequent priest, Rev. Lightfoot, and touched up a bit to give more of an idea of what they would have looked like.
The beheading of St. John the Baptist.
Recently I have been reading The Stripping of the Altars, Eamonn Duffy’s classic history of lay religion in 15th and 16th century England. Duffy believes that the reformation in England was not just a sort of cool and groovy democratisation of meaning (English bibles etc.) but, in a lot of ways, a pretty ghastly top-down imposition of a lifeless and colourless form of worship on what was once an intricate and much-loved set of ceremonies, religious practices and ritual objects.
I was wondering what a painting like this would have meant to a parishioner of the time. Did it become part of the furniture? Did it frighten them? Move them? Awe them? What relationship did they have to these images, or did the painting itself simply mediate between them and their God?
At which exact point an old woman approached me and started talking to me, unprompted, about the frescoes. ‘They’re amazing aren’t they,’ she said in a North Yorkshire burr. ‘I grew up here. I used to do Sunday school right here in the church. I was absolutely terrified of the dragon. I had to run past it each time, I was that scared.’
All of which I took for an answer, or a sort of answer, at least.
St. George Slaying the dragon; St Christopher.
St. Peter and Paul, Pickering, is easy to find: just look for its tall stone spire. Entrance is free, though a £5 donation is recommended for the upkeep of the church.
Housekeeping
I’ve had two pieces about paintings up since the last blog, which are linked below.
Ham thighs and rosy cheeks:
‘The charismatic, free orchestration of Hals’ brushwork is now on display at The Wallace, where a host of important male portraits have been assembled. They seem to cry out for anachronism: a jagged black and white sleeve feels like a detail from Pollock; the deep, textured blacks of the velvet doublets recall Manet and Rothko. Castiglione’s ideal courtier aspires to live with sprezzatura – a nonchalance that conceals all art and effort. Hals’ paintings are one step beyond this: they perform brilliance achieved with the bare minimum of care.’
I wrote an almost essay about Frans Hals for Engelsberg Ideas. A show of Hals’ portraits is showing at the Wallace until January 30th. It’s well worth seeing but don’t ask me to go with you because I’ve already been five times, and five is enough.
Paedophile satyrs and classical bimbos:
‘Time is the key, I think. Time and attention, both in the sense of active watchfulness but also the buried sense of passive waiting. Things happen when you sit with Poussin that don’t happen with other painters. The parameters of his art start to replace the ones you brought with you. Look at the Golden Calf, for instance, how the deep shadow on the shoulder of a kneeling woman shimmers into life. It sends a ripple of verisimilitude onto her neck, and across the oily crumple of dark fabric beneath. Look at the calf’s front legs, their veiled implication of a human figure imprisoned in the gold. Look at the feet, which retain the equipoise of a standing clay model and evince so realistically the world’s weight and balance.’
I asked if it’s possible to like Poussin for Soft Punk, and how one might go about doing that.
Till next time!