Medievalists.net has a report about an ingenious scheme that has been installed at St Albans cathedral to recreate in situ medieval wall paintings which survive on four of the pillars of the north nave arcade. A restored facsimile of the painting is projected by light onto the now faded and damaged originals to recreate the form they once had.
St Albans is a treasure house of medieval painting and decoration and it is good to see this being enhanced by a modern technology that removes the need for physical intervention and overpainting whilst still recreating what past centuries saw.
This is, I assume an English version of the well known scheme at Amiens thst restores by night the polychromatic decoration of the west front of the cathedral through skilfully projected coloured lighting. It would be good to see that attempted at Wells, at Exeter, and at Lichfield to recreate the medieval schemes.
The St Albans technological version could perhaps be tried to ‘colour in’ some of the interiors of other medieval great churches - the Norman naves of Durham, Gloucester and Tewkesbury spring immediately to mind as possible venues, or the faded vault paintings in the choir of Salisbury.
The report, well illustrated with contrasting views of the surviving paintings and their virtual projections, can be seen at Recreating Medieval Paintings with Light at St Albans Cathedral
I have long been fascinated by the surviving painted decoration of medieval churches both great and small. Once you begin to realise what was once there you will never look at these churches in the same way again. Why look at these buildings in black and white when they are meant to be in colour?
Sadly, it will be difficult to project light satisfactorily onto the west front of Exeter Cathedral, because many of the statues are quite badly eroded.
ReplyDeleteIn the 19th century a huge annual celebration bonfire was lit on the green not far from the west front, and the heat from this caused even more damage than rain and frost!
Some considerate person eventually persuaded the idiotic townsfolk to stop this destructive custom or move it elsewhere. But by then the damage had been done.
John R Ramsden
Exeter Cathedral has, or used to have, an excellent illustrated leaflet about the polychrome decoration of the statues and screen. That helped to create in the mind’s eye an idea of what was the intention of the scheme.
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