Romanesque Sculpture at Quenington and South Cerney
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Trans. Bristol & Gloucestershire Archaeological Society 132 (2014), 97–124 Romanesque Sculpture at Quenington and South Cerney By RITA WOOD with an historical note by BRUCE COPLESTONE-CROW Introduction Quenington church has two magnificent doorways dating from the first half of the 12th century, but their sculpture has never been studied for its own sake. The subject in the tympanum of the north doorway is clearly the Harrowing of Hell; the subject over the south doorway is now shown to be the Crowning of Christ’s Bride Ecclesia. Related sculpture at South Cerney uses the same Harrowing of Hell scene as at Quenington; there it is part of an unusual vertical display featuring Christ’s Ascension. The complex teaching programmes at these two churches must have been organized by a specialist designer, a cleric. He derived the main imagery from the lost scheme in the chapterhouse of Worcester cathedral priory, had an Anglo-Saxon interest in the Ascension, used apocryphal gospels, and added his own design features to standard Romanesque formats. Further sculpture that can be linked to him and which also employed some of the craftsmen who worked in Gloucestershire has been identified at Dinton in Buckinghamshire. It is suggested that Agnes de Mountchesney may have been the patron who forged the link between the strikingly similar doorways at Quenington and Dinton. St Swithin’s, Quenington The history of the building is obscure, but Domesday Book mentions a priest here; the dedication in the 12th century was to St Mary. The twin north and south doorways (Figs. 1 and 2) are the principal survivals of that period; the date of the sculpture has been estimated as not later than 1150.1 Much of the fabric too is of the first half of the 12th century, but alterations to the windows over the years, the loss of the chancel arch, and the Victorian restoration have destroyed any strong impression of a Norman village church.2 Inside at the west end are reset a variety of pieces of 12th-century sculpture which are likely to have originated from the corbel table, string courses and chancel arch; a corbel of a ram’s head is reset over the north doorway. The south doorway would normally be the entrance used, but at Quenington this side faces towards the river; consequently the church is entered on the north side, where the village lies. Both doorways have a similar amount of elaboration and their relationship is discussed later. 1. Victoria County History [VCH] Glos. VII, 126–7; G. Zarnecki, ‘The Coronation of the Virgin on a capital from Reading abbey’, Jnl. Warburg and Courtauld Inst. 13 (1950), 6. There are reasons for considering a date in the 1120s or 1130s: see n. 67 below. The patronage is discussed briefly at the end of this paper. 2. D. Verey and A. Brooks, Gloucestershire 1: The Cotswolds (London, 2002), 569–71, state that the west end was rebuilt and the north vestry added in 1881–3. 98 RITA WOOD Fig. 1. Quenington: the north doorway (photo: Zodiaque, reproduced with permission). The South Tympanum at Quenington The tympanum over the south doorway shows a woman being crowned by a man; she is rather small and not central (Fig. 3). The larger figure must be Christ; he has a cross-halo and is raised up as if on a plinth. In some photographs he can be seen to hold a book in his left hand, but detail over the whole torso was never bold and is now much reduced.3 Christ and the woman are sitting 3. C. Keyser, A List of Norman Tympana and Lintels, 2nd edn. (London, 1927), pl. 130; L. Musset, Angleterre Romane, I, (Zodiaque, La Pierre qui Vire, 1983), pl. 138. The position of the book is comparable to that in the mandorla at South Cerney (Figs. 12, 13). Changes in the condition of the tympanum between the plate cited (c.1983) and the author’s photographs (2009) are striking. ROMANESQUE SCULPTURE at QUENINGTON 99 Fig. 2. Quenington: the south doorway (photo: author). side-by-side on the same seat, a flat, roughly semicircular area which to modern eyes might suggest a sofa. Unlike Christ’s seat in the mandorla at South Cerney, for example, which is a bench with spiral-patterned corner posts (Figs. 12 and 13), this seat was not developed into any recognizable medieval object. Fitted in irregularly around the couple are the four living creatures of Ezekiel and Revelation all holding scrolls,4 two seraphim, and a building so high and extensive it could be a 4. The eagle of St John strides downward to the left; a bust of St Matthew encircled in scrolls is on the right. At the bottom of the tympanum are the ox of St Luke (left) and the lion of St Mark (right). This order is followed, for example, at Moissac and Angoulême, but reversed (left and right) at Chartres: the flying creatures are always at the top. On the south tympanum, the enclosing form of a roundel may be implied by the rather forced positions of the upper two creatures. 100 RITA WOOD Fig. 3. Quenington: the south tympanum (photo: Zodiaque, reproduced with permission). Fig. 4. The Eton College manuscript: the Crowning of Ecclesia (author, after Henry, Eton Roundels, f. 7v.) ROMANESQUE SCULPTURE at QUENINGTON 101 Fig. 5. The Eton College manuscript: the Crucifixion (author, after Henry,Eton Roundels, f. 5). city rather than a church; its arcaded wall and corner towers suggest it is the four-square heavenly Jerusalem. In low natural light and with suitable artificial lighting, a surprising amount of fine detail remains legible, but areas have been lost or are worn (the face of one seraph, the face and body of the bull, the left arm and book of Christ). The composition is not a standard one, and as a result there is no unanimity as to what it represents. The Coronation of the Virgin – or the Crowning of Ecclesia? In 1950, in a paper focussing on a capital from Reading abbey, George Zarnecki briefly discussed this tympanum at Quenington and defined its subject as the Coronation of the Virgin.5 Of course, later commentators have almost always agreed with him,6 although one writer has recently 5. Zarnecki, ‘Capital from Reading abbey’, 1–12; figs. 1a, 1c. Zarnecki himself was following earlier writers, chiefly Otto Sinding, see 8, 10. Sinding, and Keyser probably, followed J.R. Allen inEarly Christian Symbolism (London, 1887), reprinted as Norman Sculpture and the Medieval Bestiaries (Felinfach, 1992), 266, fig. 93: Allen’s drawing is not up to his usual standard. The capital was dated toc .1130. See also H. Mayr-Harting, ‘The idea of the Assumption of Mary in the West, 800–1200’, in R.N. Swanson (ed.), The Church and Mary (Woodbridge, 2004), 86–111, esp. 99–111. 6. e.g. Verey and Brooks, The Cotswolds, 570; Musset, Angleterre Romane, I, 368–9. 102 RITA WOOD suggested that the subject is the Coronation of the Bride, that is, ‘the allegorical union of the church as the Bride with the Bridegreoom, Christ, and in the tropological or moral sense the union of each Christian soul with God’.7 The present writer also takes that view. The imagery of the south tympanum at Quenington has for a long time been recognized as linked in some way to a large decorative scheme that once furnished the chapterhouse of Worcester cathedral priory.8 The building is thought to have been devised c.1100 and completed by 1125; its coeval decorative scheme – medium or media unknown – was destroyed when larger windows were inserted and the ceiling raised in the 14th century. All that survives now of the decoration is a copy made c.1200 of the Latin texts that accompanied each of its 40 scriptural and typological motifs; the verses have a short introduction describing the effect and purpose of the imagery. Sandy Heslop discusses the scheme as being arranged in 40 roundels all painted on the ceiling and Neil Stratford thinks it equally possible that the cycle could have filled the ten windows.9 The present writer thinks it is worth considering whether the imagery might not have been shared between ceiling and windows: the foreshadowings painted on the ceiling would be illuminated in all senses by the New Testament subjects in the windows. This situation may indeed be hinted at in the Latin introduction to the verses, for example, where it speaks of the shadow of the Law, and later of the sun of Justice. In the final four lines about Mary, the Nativity scene need not be taken as literally ‘painted’, but as depicted or illustrated. The remnants of the building as analysed and reconstructed by Robert Willis allow for a single round-headed window of c.2.4 × c.1.0 m in each of the ten bays.10 The possible incorporation of the windows in the decorative scheme at Worcester is relevant later in this article. Valuable information about the 40 lost illustrations can be deduced from an early 13th-century manuscript in Eton College Library which is complete with similar texts and related imagery; additionally, some scenes and texts appear on three ciboria of c.1150–75.11 The Worcester scheme consisted of ten New Testament subjects and 30 associated types; the Eton manuscript contains the same material in the same order; 19 of the 40 subjects also appear on the ciboria. There is a roundel on folio 7v. of the Eton manuscript (Fig. 4) which resembles the tympanum over Quenington’s south doorway, making the Quenington sculpture much the earliest of the known derivatives of the Worcester chapterhouse programme.