How welcome the publication of this book is! Unlike stained glass, which has been well-served by the efforts of the Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi, wall paintings have remained a specialist, even an exotic interest because of their difficult access, their imperfect preservation, their scarce reproduction--and consequently, the limited scholarship on them. Aside from the modern work of David Park and Miriam Gill, the bibliography on English wall painting is brief, and depiction of these murals has been advanced mostly through websites (www.paintedchurch.org).
Now comes Roger Rosewell's book with its hundreds of color photographs. Excluding its gazetteer, subject guide, and index, the book has 224 pages of text, and every one of these pages offers a color illustration. Indeed there are a good many in the book's back matter as well, for a total of 255 color images. The photographs are for the most part satisfyingly close up and sharp, and the choice of subject is remarkably fresh. It is genuinely exciting to turn the book's pages and to see these vigorous, relatively unknown designs. Who is responsible for this wealth of new material? Overwhelmingly, it is the author, who by my count is credited with 177 photographs, and secondarily, C. B. Newman, with over fifty.
The book's opening is an adroit one. Wishing to make some general remarks about the current situation of wall paintings, their meaning and value, the author presents a brief six-page introduction. It is illustrated with photos from the village church of Slapton (Northamptonshire), whose murals are almost unknown and extremely intriguing. The reader is thus introduced to the subject of wall paintings both verbally and visually, via the beautiful, unfamiliar examples accompanying and elucidating the text.
Chapter one then gives a thematic and stylistic history of this art, illustrating the twelfth-century interest in painted masonry patterns, the emergence of painted heraldry in the thirteenth century, the French-influenced S-curve figures of the fourteenth century, and so on. Equally interesting is chapter four's discussion of technique, including the use of materials like compasses and stencils. (The photo of the only known stencil, a lead rosette with a slight handle from Yorkshire, next to a photo of a rosette-patterned painted wall is very effective.) The discussion here of the significance of position and placement is inconclusive. Better is the analysis of painting's purposes: "making the church ["marking" would be equally appropriate], proclaiming faith, private devotion, belonging to the church." Under the first heading, for instance, fairly large consecration crosses, often several times repeated, signed the walls as sacred space. Paint created fictive arches, pillars, and niches as well, and simulated marble or fabric. The author even suggests the possible coordination of wall paintings and stained glass, or wall paintings and sculpture, in a unified decorative scheme.
The book's last chapter, on the Reformation and after, gives the familiar account of whitewashing church walls, but relatively unknown (because so brief) is the Catholic restoration of religious art under Mary. At Stoke-by-Clare a large and elaborate Last Judgment painting was produced. One would have liked to know the uncredited author of the contemporary assessment: "for a future hope and daily comfort of old popish beldames and young perking papists."
This quotation illustrates one of the book's central difficulties. The decision not to use footnotes, and hence to stress the book's popular appeal, is thoroughly defensible--at least until historical evidence like wills and contracts is presented. Then the need either to check the information or to follow up on it is felt acutely. The quoted Yatton churchwardens' accounts for 1454, where can they be found? The 1450 contract between painter-stainer John Brentwood and the earl of Warwick, where does it survive? (The transcription of the contract's wording, "of fair and slightly proportion" is unlikely to be correct.) A stratagem that is sometimes used, to print five or six references at the end of each chapter, without notes, would have been welcome here.
In other ways as well, the book makes it hard for the interested reader to pursue its leads. The gazetteer of wall paintings is a real achievement, presenting, as the author says proudly, "over five hundred religious buildings where medieval wall paintings can be seen." These places are listed alphabetically within county, and of course an English user will know that Chalgrove is in Oxfordshire while Chaldon is in Surrey. An American user, however, for whom the place name does not summon up its county, will be completely at a loss to find in the gazetteer the place name he/she is interested in. (Although the book does have an index, the gazetteer entries are not indexed, only the text material.)
This readerly desire to learn more is likewise frustrated by the book's conventional bibliography, divided only into books and articles. How to read up on Horsham St. Faith, for instance? Few readers will want to search the entire bibliography to find a relevant title. If the reader's needs had been attended to, the bibliography might have been divided into general works and alphabetically- organized place name headings (or if that were too much work, counties at least).
Perhaps inevitably, there is a good deal of repetition. Patronage, for instance, is the subject of chapter three, "Patrons and Painters," but it also receives fifteen pages in chapter five. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the book needs a more satisfactory organizing structure. In chapter two, "Subjects," the decision to recount both Old Testament narratives and the especially familiar incidents of Christ's life in the New Testament (retelling the Passion, for instance), must be considered a mistake, given an audience interested in religious imagery. The result is both lengthy and repetitious.
Stylistically, the author's fondness for the vivid verb is often startling ("Such imagery had prowled the walls," "the armsbellow their patronage") and sometimes simply wrong ("traditionalists palled at these attacks" [paled?], "imagery that could be averred to" [adverted to?]. There are mistakes in some transcriptions ("xiss" should probably be "xi s.") and translations ("venite benedicte patris mea" means "come, blessed of my father" not "the blessed come to my Father") and the capitalization is downright eccentric ("the story of St. Gregory and the Irreverent woman").
Nonetheless the effort and ingenuity that has gone into presenting and synthesizing this material makes the book extremely valuable. Its productive approach is summed up in two remarkable series of photographs. At Ewelme, the cadaver tomb sculpture of Alice de la Pole, duchess of Suffolk, has been frequently photographed. A few yards above the recumbent stone figure, however, lies a painted ceiling depicting the annunciation, its intimacy here photographed by C. B. Newham. The author has used the same technique to give us the ceiling painting from the tomb of Bishop Walter de Stapledon in Exeter Cathedral: a beautiful image of Christ displaying his wounds. Each of these painted ceilings, lying just above the sculpted corpse, has hitherto been seen only by the cadaver whose eyes are fixed upon it. Successful recovery of these paintings from their obscure positions symbolizes this book's larger recuperative achievement.