In 1563, a year before his son was born, John Shakespeare was given an unpleasant job. As chamberlain of the Corporation of Stratford, he was tasked with erasing the popish murals in the local Guild Chapel. We assume he found it unpleasant because rather than destroying the art, he covered it up with limewash, to be stripped away by some future generation.
After John’s son William retired to Stratford, he lived opposite the Guild Chapel until his death in 1616. Four hundred years later, those covered murals are being revealed in their fullness. A major restoration project, titled Death Reawakened, finishes this month. The faith of Catholic England will be shown in the images which lived in our ancestors’ imaginations: depictions of the Last Judgment, the Crucifixion, the lives of St George and St Thomas Becket.
Shakespeare may or may not have been Catholic. His father appears to have been. But more certain than these biographical details is the history of a people – a history which, despite the best efforts of the Reformers, is coming back to life.
There is “great enthusiasm” for the restoration work, says project manager Cate Statham. And it’s not just Stratford. The V&A’s exhibition of medieval embroidery has drawn crowds and earned breathless reviews. This month, the British Museum announced it would be displaying a statue of Our Lady and the Child Jesus, which left the country before anyone could destroy it and had spent 600 years in Europe. It is, the historian Tom Holland has commented, “a haunting glimpse of what we lost in the Reformation”.
Statham points out that the public have been “horrified” by the destruction of ancient sites in the Middle East. “It gives us a greater appreciation for the things that do survive to tell the tale.”
The historian Dominic Selwood observes: “The wholesale destruction of English art during the Reformation was on an unprecedented scale, obliterating over 90 per cent of existing artefacts.” That some of the remaining 10 per cent are now attracting so much interest “demonstrates tangibly”, he says, “the deep yearning we have for our lost heritage”.
That yearning also reflects the hard work of historians who have put us back in touch with pre-Reformation England. As Selwood puts it: “The game-changing research being done by Eamon Duffy and others into late medieval England has cast the period in a radically different light, in which we can see a previously invisible religious vibrancy and intensity in social and artistic life.”
The art is a window into the past, demonstrating the attachment of the people to the imaginative world of Catholicism as well as the Church’s teachings and practices. And while the idea of the Reformation as a necessary liberation endures – in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, for instance – the popular appeal of these older works suggests that this story is losing its potency.
Duffy has himself argued that “In multicultural England, the inherited Protestant certainties are fading.” The story of a heroic Protestant revolution having lost its appeal, it is only natural that we seek out our past with curiosity and delight.
That is made easier by the all-embracing nature of medieval Christianity. The natural world was interpreted as bearing the Creator’s fingerprints, and so the artwork of the age is filled with animals, birds and, in a whimsical touch, mythical creatures.
The V&A’s exhibition teems with symbolism: lions, for instance, mean Resurrection, since lion cubs were thought to be born dead and revived by their parents’ breath. And it is playfully reverent towards natural beauty: embroiderers used the eyes of peacock feathers to decorate angels’ wings.
But this art isn’t just attractive, it speaks deeply to people. That doesn’t, admittedly, make it a substitute for faith. As religious practice plummets, it may seem all too fitting that the churches are emptying while the museums are full. It brings to mind the philosopher David Bentley Hart’s description of modern secular Europe, “with its ageing millions milling around the glorious remnants of an artistic and architectural legacy that no modern people could hope to rival”.
But the recovery of Catholic art is also a lesson for evangelisation. Even when nobody listens to what is said from the pulpit, the force of beauty can still fascinate and persuade.
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