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Seven Sacraments Compositions in English Medieval Art

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2012

Extract

Émile Mâle says that medieval Christian art in its last period had lost touch with the great tradition of symbolism which had been so important in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and still largely dominated the art of the fourteenth. But there was one great symbolical idea which survived, and that was the harmony of the Old and New Testaments; and so we find among the most popular subjects of fifteenth-century Church art the concordance of the Apostles and Prophets in the Creed, and the series of parallels between the life of Jesus and episodes of Old Testament history, which were summed up and digested in the Biblia Pauperum and the Speculum Humanae Salvationis. The reason for the popularity of these subjects was, no doubt, their didactic value, and though Mâle does not develop this side of the subject, we may say that one, though not the only, characteristic of the religious art of the fifteenth century was that, instead of being symbolical, it became didactic. We find in this period a whole series of subjects which reduced the articles of Christian faith and practice to pictorial form, and seem to have been intended to illustrate the medieval catechism by which the teaching of the Church was imparted.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Society of Antiquaries of London 1929

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References

page 83 note 1 L'Art religieux de la fin du moyen âge en France (3rd ed., Paris, 1925)Google Scholar, ch. vi, p. 223.

page 83 note 2 Ibid., p. 229.

page 84 note 1 Hoskins, E., Horae B. Mariae Virg. (London, 1901), pp. xii ff.Google Scholar; Wilkins, Concilia, ii, 54 (Constitutions of Peckham) ; cf. i, 704 (directions of Walter de Kirkham, bishop of Durham, in 1255). For foreign examples see Kraus, Geschichte der Christlichen Kunst, i, 398.

page 84 note 2 Survey of Worcestershire (Worc. Hist. Soc.), ii, 177.

page 84 note 3 Vol. lxxi, pt. i (1801), p. 22. See also lxxvi, pt. i (1806), p. 210.

page 85 note 1 Wiltshire. The Topographical Collections of John Aubrey, 1659–70, by J. E. Jackson (Devizes, 1862), p. 215. The first of the pairs of shields in the tracery lights (pl. iv) is Hungerford with a molet for difference, but the second, bendy wavy or and argent, awaits identification. Fosbroke suggested that it was ‘by mistake, or else assumed for difference’ for Moleyns (paly wavy or and gules), because Robert, third Lord Hungerford, married (before 1440) Eleanor, daughter and heiress of Sir William de Moleyns, and was summoned to Parliament 1445–52 as Lord Moleyns. He was attainted and beheaded after the battle of Hexham, 1464 (Complete Peerage, new ed., vi, 618). The window may well be about the middle of the century, and the arms might refer to his third son, Leonard, about whom little seems to be recorded (Hoare, Wilts., i, pt. 2, pp. 94, 98, 117), and nothing that connects him with Crudweli or John Dow. The Hungerfords of Down Ampney, to whom Aubrey refers the coat, had no claim to the Moleyns arms.

page 84 note 2 Mr. Atchley has given me the following instances: Wells Cathedral, two images and an altar of St. Saviour (Hist. MSS. Comm. Report, 1914 (Wells), ii, 18, 98, 107); All Saints, Bristol, (Trans. St. Paul's Eccles. Soc., ix (1922), 18, 29)Google Scholar; Great St. Mary's, Cambridge (Cambridge Ant. Soc., 1905, p. 97). The images of ‘Our Saviour’ in Lincoln Cathedral (Archaeologia, liii, 45) and St. Peter Mancroft, Norwich (Norfolk Archaeology, xiv, 153), were, however, clearly the Christ of the Resurrection holding the cross-banner, used as a monstrance at Easter.

page 84 note 3 For the details of the various rites I have referred to Maskell's, W.Monumenta Ritualia Ecclesiae Anglicanae (2nd ed., Oxford, 1882)Google Scholar, and the Liber Pontificalis of Edmund Lacy, Bp. of Exeter, edited by R. Barnes (Exeter, 1847).

page 86 note 1 Maskell, ii, 231. Mr. Atchley has called my attention to the fact that the liturgiologists are agreed that the imposition of the bishop's hands is the whole matter of ordination, the other acts (anointing of the hands, delivery of the chalice and paten) being subsidiary and not essential.

page 86 note 2 Maskell, i, pp. cclxxvii, III.

page 86 note 3 Preserved by Aubrey, Wiltshire Collections (edited by J. E. Jackson), p. 215. The usual title is Penitentia.

page 87 note 1 Perhaps this was a west-country fashion. Our Fellow Prebendary Chanter tells me that in the terriers of churches in the diocese of Exeter for the first half of the seventeenth century there is usually an entry of a surplice with sleeves for the minister, and a surplice without sleeves (sometimes described as a rochet) for the clerk. On the other hand, e. g. in the Leicester Sacrament roundels described below (p. 96), the clerks wear ordinary sleeved surplices.

page 87 note 2 As is well known, a medieval bishop often administered the rite in the open air as he moved about his diocese. Hence it is exceptional to see him represented confirming in cope and mitre, as in the window at Buckland (see p. 91), or on a few of the East Anglian Sacraments fonts (p. 97, n. 3).

page 87 note 3 It must be remembered that these colours depend primarily on a counter-change with the alternate red and blue backgrounds of the panels.

page 88 note 4 Maskell, ii, 222–31.

page 88 note 5 Ibid., i, 23, 24.

page 89 note 1 Archaeological Journal, xlv (1888), 369 ffGoogle Scholar. The church was built towards the end of the fifteenth century, and the glass was releaded in 1887. See also Proceedings Dorset Antiq. Field Club, xliii (1922), 53Google Scholar, and plate facing p. 50. The Rev. E. V. Tanner has kindly allowed an enlargement of his photographs to be reproduced in plate vi.

page 90 note 1 Maskell, ii, 226; Lacy's Pontifical, 90.

page 90 note 2 See p. 96.

page 91 note 1 Trans. Bristol and Glos. Arch. Soc., xlvii (1925), 299, and pl. x.

page 91 note 2 Maskell, i, 39; Lacy's Pontifical, 9.

page 91 note 3 Westlake, History of Design in Painted Glass, iii, 94, and pl. LVI b; Nelson, Ancient Painted Glass in England, 165.

page 91 note 4 Our Fellow Mr. J. A. Knowles first called attention to this.

page 91 note 5 Ancient Monuments Commission, Inventory of Wales and Monmouth, iv, County of Denbigh (London, 1914), p. 96Google Scholar and fig. 37.

page 92 note 1 See his paper in Trans. of the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiq. and Arch. Soc., N.S., xii (1912), 297 ffGoogle Scholar. A previous account in vol. ii (1876), 389. See also Trans. Lancashire and Cheshire Antiq. Soc., xxix (1916), 29Google Scholar.

page 93 note 1 See the coloured plate (ii) in Canon Fowler's paper referred to in note 1, p. 92.

page 93 note 2 English Church Furniture … as exhibited in a List of the Goods destroyed in certain Lincolnshire Churches, A.D. 1566, edited by Peacock, Edward, F.S.A. (London, 1866), pp. 24 ffGoogle Scholar. and coloured frontispiece. Pl. ix is from a photograph of the original sketch, belonging to the Society of Antiquaries.

page 93 note 3 The Eucharist is represented by the communion of the faithful on two East Anglian fonts: Gayton Thorpe (Norfolk; Arch. Journ., lix, 2) and Denston (Suffolk; Arch. Journ., lxiii, 104). In the Flemish sacrament drawings and the Madrid triptych described below (p. 98, n. 1), the communion and the mass are depicted side by side.

page 94 note 1 Maskell, ii, pp. 189 ff.; Lacy's Pontifical, p. 83. Cp. Duchesne, Christian Worship, translated by M. L. McClure, 5th ed. (1919), 352.

page 94 note 2 The Catholic Encyclopaedia, s.v.; and see vol. iii, 486, for Celibacy.

page 94 note 3 The anointing of the hands is represented, for which in the case of deacons see Duchesne, op. cit., 370 and note 1; Pontifical of Egbert (Surtees Soc., xxvii, 21); Benedictional of Archbishop Robert (H. Bradshaw Soc., xxiv, 122). It was generally obsolete long before the fifteenth century.

page 95 note 1 ‘A nude figure standing upright with outstretched hands displaying His wounds…. Around the head is a cruciform nimbus, and the figure is surrounded by many tools of labour’ etc. Borenius, T. and Tristram, E. W., English Medieval Painting (Florence and Paris, 1927), pp. 2935Google Scholar.

page 95 note 2 e. g. in the east window of Tattershall church (Lines.).

page 95 note 3 e. g. at Bledington (Glos.) two fragments inscribed Priesthood and Wedloke indicate a set of sacraments, with titles in the vernacular. Trans. Bristol and Glos. Arch. Soc., xlvii, 297.

page 95 note 4 Mr. Atchley has kindly supplied me with this example from unpublished MSS. belonging to the church.

page 96 note 1 Dugdale, History of Warwickshire (2nd ed.), ii, 751.

page 96 note 2 Borenius and Tristram, op. cit., 37 and fig. 8.

page 96 note 3 When there are seven subjects to be arranged in a symmetrical window, whether of three or four lights, it is an obvious advantage to combine them with an eighth. Owing to its absence from the window in All Saints, North Street, the seven works of mercy had to be reduced to six.

page 96 note 4 Archaeological Journal, lxxv (1918), 47 ffGoogle Scholar. ‘An account of some painted glass from a house at Leicester, by G. McN. Rushforth.’ The glass includes a figure of the Saviour (pl. xi), of the type which we have seen in the sacrament windows; but the shape of the panel seems to show that it did not go with the set of sacrament roundels.

page 97 note 1 Trans. Bristol and Glos. Arch. Soc., xlvii, 314. The fragments include the titles Baptismus and Ordo, and two kneeling deacons in dalmatics, who may have belonged to the last. See above, p. 94.

page 97 note 2 lix, 17 ff.; lxiii, 102; lxx, 171; lxxvii, 1–7. See also F. Bond, Fonts and Font Covers, 257 ff., where typical sacrament scenes are figured on pp. 260, 261, 264.

page 97 note 3 A few cases of exceptional treatment may be noticed. At Denston (Suffolk) and Gayton Thorpe (Norfolk) the celebration of mass is replaced by the communion of the faithful, and the bishop in Confirmation wears cope and mitre. At Little Walsingham, Earsham, and Gayton Thorpe (all in Norfolk), in Orders the bishop wears a cope, and at Gresham (Norfolk) his walking dress, just as in Confirmation, an obvious mistake of the sculptor. See figs, in Bond, op. cit., pp. 260, 261.

Of sacrament subjects in English alabaster tables only two examples are recorded by Dr.Nelson, (Trans. Hist. Soc. of Lancashire and Cheshire, lxix (1917), 89Google Scholar), both in the Museum at Évreux. One is a typical Marriage scene at the church door, the other the Consecration of a Bishop. The latter, however, may be a scene from the life of some episcopal saint, for the consecration of a bishop is not typical of Holy Orders, as the ordination of a priest is (Rock, Church of Our Fathers (ed. Hart and Frere), i, 142). For a similar consecration scene in Dr. Hildburgh's collection see Antiquaries Journal, i, 227, 228.

page 98 note 1 Often reproduced, e. g. Bryan, Dictionary of Painters, etc. (new ed.), v, pl. facing p. 254; Reinach, Répertoire de Peintures, iii, 201, 744, 745; Michel, Histoire de l'Art, iii, pt. 1, 226; The World's Great Pictures (Cassell & Co., 1909), p. 24. See also Sir M. Conway's Early Flemish Artists, 164; The Van Eycks and their Followers, 137. Roger's triptych evidently inspired another, now at Madrid (Prado, 2189; Phot. Anderson, 16797), but here the six sacraments appear as sculptures on the side-piers of the open portal of a church framing the Crucifixion, behind which the interior is seen, with Mass and Communion taking place at the altars which flank the door of the screen. This picture used to be identified with one painted by Roger for St. Aubert, Cambrai; but Sir M. Conway tells me that this idea is now abandoned. Very similar are the Flemish drawings (c. 1450) of some sacraments in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (Vasari Society, part viii, 15–18), and the sacrament subjects on the vestments captured by the Swiss from Charles the Bold, now in the museum at Berne (J. Stammler, Der Paramentenschatz zu Bern).

page 98 note 2 Michel, Histoire de l'Art, iii, pt. 1, 226.

page 98 note 3 The idea of the Seven Sacraments was first formulated by the Schoolmen of the thirteenth century (Kraus, Gesch. der Chr. Kunst, ii, 393). The seven were, perhaps, first enumerated by Peter Lombard (d. 1164) (Catholic Encyclopaedia, xiii, 300).

page 99 note 1 Storia dell' Arte Italiana, iii, 522 and figs. 424–30.

page 99 note 2 So Venturi, Storia etc., v, 638 and figs. 521–7. Cp. Crowe and Cavalcaselle, History of Painting in Italy (new ed.), ii, 95, note 2.

page 99 note 3 The suggestion has reached me from more than one quarter that the design may have been derived from the familiar pictures of St. Francis receiving the Stigmata. If so, the connexion is superficial, for in the vision of St. Francis it is the repetition of the Five Wounds that is expressed, not their influence or virtue.

page 99 note 4 e.g. St. Augustine, Tract. in Ioannem, 120; St. John Chrysostom, Homil. in Ioannen, 84.

page 100 note 1 Sententiae, Lib. iv, Dist. i, De Sacramentis; Migne, Patr. Lat., cxcii, 842.

page 100 note 2 Sermones de Tempore. Dom. iii Adventus, Serm. I. I have to thank Dame Laurentia McLachlan, O.S.B., of Stanbrook Abbey, for this passage.