I recently came across a BBC News report about the preparations to install a statue of The Queen on the west front of York Minster to commemorate the Platinum Jubilee next year. The space in front on the Minster is being redesigned and renamed Queen Elizabeth Square.
Like so many English cathedrals York has lost most of the statuary which presumably once adorned the west front. One or two pieces survive and others have been added during the major restoration of the towers a generation or more ago. The odd thing about that was that the statue of which I have seen a photograph is a coly of one of the splendid twelfth century statues from the remains of the nearby abbey of St Mary, yet added to the fifteenth century Minster western towers. Admittedly the original statues at St Mary’s were recycled in the fourteenth century nave, but the choice seems a little curious.
It is worthwhile looking carefully - either on the spot or in engravings or photographs - at the facade of the Minster to see just how many statues were envisaged. The completed scheme would have rivalled the wonder that is the west front of Wells or the restored facade of Lichfield. Then of course one must add the colour provided by painted decoration. This has been studied at Wells and in particular on the screen of statues that flanks the western doors of Exeter. This was an ambitious scheme of the use of colour, and once you realise it should be there all makes sense. The floodlight reconstruction of the western colouring of Amiens, which I have posted about before gives an indication of what we have lost.
Such external schemes appear to have been the preserve of the secular cathedrals rather than their monastic counterparts in medieval England.
The denuded facades of York, of Lincoln and of much of Salisbury are testimony to the iconoclasm of the sixteenth century - the seventeenth century engravings by Hollar and King indicate that the statues had already gone by their time - and the fury of ‘cleansing’. Westminster Abbey has added statues of Twentieth Century Martyrs to its west front as part of its ongoing programme of enhancement, following on from the reconstruction of the north transept front and its statues in the nineteenth century.
The York statue of Her Majesty may be only one statue but it is definitely a move in the right direction.
The illustrated article about the new sculpture can be viewed at Minster reveals Queen's jubilee statue design
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