Brighter than Right, Part 1: A Modernist Makeover at St Paul’s Cathedral
“I’m the 17th surveyor to the fabric after Sir Christopher Wren and am responsible to the Dean and Chapter for the care and conservation of the cathedral”, the architect Martin Stancliffe told Fiona Campbell of the Financial Times Magazine (“Lord of all he surveys” January 10th 2004) and, he added, “If there was anything I could ask Sir Christopher Wren it would have to be what his intentions were for the interior of the building.”
We were startled by this apparent admission of ignorance about the original condition of the interior at a time when the cathedral authorities were over three years into a most radical and experimental restoration of it. Two years earlier the stripped stonework of the cathedral’s newly cleaned south transept had been presented to the press (and widely accepted) as a “recovery” of Wren’s proper original condition. It had specifically been claimed in a press release (“Restoring the glory”) and press interviews that by “returning” the interior stone to its natural state, Wren’s intentions were being shown “for the first time”. (For the post-cleaning state of the stone, see Figs. 4 & 5.)
As the final stage of the building of St. Paul’s was reached in 1709, Wren ordered the interior to be coated three times with oil paint. His son later said that this was not just “for beautifying, but to preserve and harden the stone”. That there is much evidence for what Wren had considered to be beautifying was shown by the art historian Florence Hallett in two articles in the ArtWatch UK Journal (“Cleaning St Paul’s Cathedral”, No. 17, Autumn/Winter 2002, and “The supposedly ‘model’ restoration of St. Paul’s Cathedral”, No. 18, Spring/Summer 2003). In essence, Wren’s aesthetic purpose had been to unify the interior surfaces by suppressing all arbitrary blemishes and irregularities (see Figs. 4 and 5) that had arisen during the building’s thirty-five years long construction, so that his own finely adjusted architectural forms and decorations would read at their best.
Analysis of surviving sections of Wren’s paint was only undertaken – we discovered – after the stripping began. It had established that, in addition to lead white, ochre and black pigments had been included to produce a warm “stone colour” and not a pure white finish. This was precisely the warm effect found in other Wren churches and the effect recorded in early paintings of St. Paul’s’ interior (see Fig. 1). Had these findings been available before the cleaning programme began, would its aims and methods have been different?
Mr Stancliffe has disclosed that prior to 1999 a “comprehensive repainting of the interior” had been considered in order to return it to the true state at which Wren left it, and “to unify the interior”. This was rejected on two grounds. First, it would “result in a finish which, to modern eyes, would seem bland and perhaps inappropriate”. (Perhaps this trumping of historical authenticity by modernist aesthetic sensibilities had been a hangover from Mr Stancliffe’s own early career spent with the modernist firm Powell & Moya?) Secondly, because it would “undo the work so carefully and laboriously executed in the 1870s to strip Wren’s paintwork”.
One might have thought that an architect charged in the 21st century with protecting the fabric and artistic integrity of an ancient cathedral would have felt more loyalty to the original architect’s (painted) creation than to a 19th century predecessor Surveyor’s misguided and botched attempt to undo it. There are grounds for concluding that, as with 19th century church-stripping restorers before him, imposing whiteness and brightness on an originally coloured decorative scheme was Mr Stancliffe’s own and primary objective in this restoration. After stripping the interior, he told the Guardian (“Interior of St Paul’s – brighter than even Wren saw it”, June 10th 2005) that: “During the 35 years of its original building the architect had the Portland stone painted in several thick layers of oil and paint to protect it from the elements before the roof was put on, so it never was as white as now.”
This was misleading. While it was true that no one had ever seen all the stones in the cathedral as if simultaneously quarried and dressed, this was because by the time the construction of the cathedral was finished, the first laid stones had been exposed to the elements and London’s pollution for over a third of a century. Wren’s 1709 instruction to have the interior painted “3 times in oyle” was made 34 years into the construction when the roof was in place and it was far too late for the paint to act as weatherproofing. Moreover, in the cathedral’s own1999 proposal for treatment, it had been tacitly acknowledged that Wren’s paint served aesthetic not weatherproofing purposes because it had been applied late to “cover the uneven effects of the new stone inserted where the supports to the dome had cracked” and to “unite and brighten” the whole interior.
To unite, certainly, but brightening, we should be clear, was Mr Stancliffe’s idée fixe not Sir Christopher Wren’s. In a programme note (“How the glory of St Paul’s was restored”) to a service held at the cathedral on June 1st 2005 in honour of the restoration’s donors, Mr Stancliffe declared that “the heart of my vision for the interior [was] to clean it and relight it” – even though Wren had not brightened the interior to a state of whiteness and the cathedral was not being “relit” to original levels but lit to unprecedentedly high ones. Further, Mr Stancliffe had specifically boasted in the Times of June 10th 2004, of his own “pretty controversial” intention to introduce “six huge chandeliers” to flood the interior with artificial light. A year later he told the Guardian “we have installed new chandeliers and more lights”. Also in 2005, Mr Stancliffe expressed satisfaction on “seeing our initial vision gloriously realised.”
Thus, by courtesy of the banker Robin Fleming’s generosity, the cathedral’s 17th surveyor has been permitted by the church authorities (and by architectural heritage watchdog bodies) to have his own way with Wren’s great, once-painted interior, which now resembles a plaster cast of itself that is lit to department store levels (see Fig. 3, right). As well as being historically false and aesthetically/spiritually inappropriate, the present vulgar fix of whiteness will prove transitory. No surface is harder to maintain and keep free of dust, grime and finger marks than a white, porous, (and now) highly chemically reactive one in the fluctuating environment of a tourist thronged building.
Coda: Mr Stancliffe had sought an even whiter finish. It was his intention to lime-wash the stripped stone surfaces. Ironically – and much as critics among conservationists had predicted – his chemically invasive cleaning method has left the now exposed raw stonework chemically vulnerable. Trial applications of lime-wash kept turning brown. Research that is reported in the conservators’ own house organ, ICON NEWS, (May 2011 issue, p. 30) discovered that humic acids within the stone were being drawn to the surface by the water-based lime applications. For centuries Wren’s oil paint had rendered the stone surfaces hard and impervious and thereby provided a barrier against disfiguring chemical interactions and migrations. Mr Stancliffe has been hoist with his own petard.
In part two, we will examine the controversial and health-threatening chemical means by which Mr Stancliffe’s whiteness and brightness were achieved.
Michael Daley
Comments may be left at: artwatch.uk@gmail.com
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Misreading Visual Evidence ~ No 1: David Hockney, an art historian and an x-ray photograph
It was recently claimed that “fresh insight” gained on Caravaggio’s painting technique supports David Hockney’s theory that the artist used a primitive form of photography to create his paintings (“Exhibition sheds new light on the art of Caravaggio”, Daily Telegraph report, March 11th). Diagrams, mirrors and light boxes displayed in an exhibition at the Palazzo Venezia in Rome, were said to “show” that Caravaggio “may indeed have” used a camera obscura to project figures on to a canvas so that they might be painted directly, with “extraordinary realism” and without any need for designs or preliminary studies. Showing that someone may have done something cuts no ice when logic, logistics and the laws of art all combine to testify against the Hockney hypothesis.
“Insight” itself is a weasel term and is not the same thing as evidence. The art historian supporting Hockney’s thesis, Dr John Spike, offered the observation that “Gallileo was developing the telescope and they [artists] were all fascinated by optics” as if by way of some circumstantial corroboration. Whether or not they were so fascinated, we should note the absence of evidence and consider the logistical difficulties that they would have faced if attempting to work on the basis of the Hockney Hypothesis.
Are we really to suppose that all the figures and animals, and babies, and flying angels, writhing serpents, crucified men and beheaded victims depicted in Caravaggio’s paintings in arrested moments of extremis, were actually copied directly, literally, from life? More specifically, are we to suppose that various combinations of human, bestial and divine creatures were first assembled and then simultaneously posed in full costume for as long as it took the artist to convert their projected photographic image into his painted pictures? (See illustrations on the right.)
Or should we believe that each figure was individually copied down, in full costume, exactly as seen when projected through a pinhole onto a wall in a darkened room? If so, was each painted figure subsequently “overlapped” and partly obliterated by the next in the sequence? Is there any material evidence of such overlaps? If not, we would have to assume that Caravaggio painted directly onto only that part of the projected image that would remain visible when the next figure was copied in. Timing is an important separate consideration: whether the models were depicted in entire groups or individually, how long would they have been expected to hold their usually animated and dramatically expressive poses (see right) in a compositionally perfect position in relation to other figures not yet posed or painted?
There is another crucial consideration: were Caravaggio’s famously dramatic and theatrical lighting effects copied directly from nature onto the canvas via an image of a multi-figure tableau projected through a pinhole? Consider the exponentially increasing practical difficulties an artist would have to overcome when attempting to work in such fashion. Caravaggio would not only have had to paint at speed to avoid his models wearying and slipping out of pose, he would have had to have done so at a speed that would not allow the brilliant light source illuminating his figures to move – and to have done so when working not in front of his painting but to the side of the image projected upon it so as not to block it with his own shadow. Has any artist in history so handicapped his own labours?
Would the light source deployed on Caravaggio’s frozen models have been the sun? If so, at what time of the day did he work? At noon, with the sun’s all-bleaching brilliant light at its zenith, producing unhelpfully top-lit figures? Or in the mornings and evenings when low, acutely angled, less bright but faster moving and changing? Did Caravaggio not only anticipate photography, but Impressionism too? Or, would his groups have been lit for long periods by a fixed battery of brilliant theatrical lamps?
When it is claimed that Caravaggio had achieved the extraordinary realism of his paintings 200 years in advance of the invention of the camera, on the same logic it should further be claimed that he anticipated and emulated the achievements of the cinema. It took the full resources of modern cinema and means of lighting for Luis Bunuel to be able to compose and momentarily arrest a multi-figured tableau in mimicry of Leonardo’s The Last Supper in his film Viridiana. Is there any evidence that such human and technical resources were available to Caravaggio? Is it believed that Caravaggio had invariably worked in this manner? Or that he did so on some occasions but not others? Has any material evidence been found in Caravaggio’s paintings that reflects such radically different patterns of working methods?
The real problem with the Hockney thesis, however, is not the absence of supporting evidence but the existence of contra-evidence. The Telegraph report is illustrated by a photograph of Caravaggio’s The Calling of St Matthew, and by an x-ray photograph of the two figures at the picture’s right-hand side. Those photographs (see above right) constitute a material record of both the paint that is visible to the human eye and the hidden earlier underlying painting. The caption claims that “x-ray analysis shows the style of the artist and supports the idea that he used a primitive form of photography in his work”. It is hard to see how this might be so. X-rays are notoriously difficult images to read with confidence because while they show all the successive states of a painting simultaneously they do not pick up all pigments and materials equally.
Nonetheless, the x-ray photograph that is shown adjacent to the two figures helpfully permits direct visual comparisons. The most striking feature is that the underlying paintwork exposed in the x-ray is not identical with the paintwork that is visible to the human eye. Had Caravaggio worked in the manner being claimed, an x-ray would reveal no differences – no revisions, no “pentimenti”, nothing other than what was already visible on the picture’s surface. But the x-ray evidence here is doubly injurious. Firstly, it shows major changes to the pose of the figures – Christ’s raised arm is higher in the x-ray than in the painting while, conversely, his hand droops dramatically. Secondly, the image is sufficiently intelligible to establish major discrepancies of artistic style.
In the space of the figure (St Peter) standing in front of Christ, the type of drapery seen in the x-ray photograph is manifestly different from that now seen in the visible paint above it. One observer (Giorgio Bonsanti) attributed the underlying drapery, on the basis of an earlier x-ray, to the figure of Christ – see right. Certainly as drapery it is greatly more accomplished artistically – more “Raphael-esque” – than the comparatively stiff, angular, “bent-tin” draped material seen on the St Peter. Most damagingly of all, this underlying painted drapery is not just finer it is of a type found only in art and never in nature. It is not some literal mechanical transcription of an actual draped garment, but a conjuring of spirited flowing, wind-filled forms that arc around the body and derive from the laws of drapery that were first understood and devised by the God-like artists of antiquity and then later rediscovered and emulated by the greatest artists of the Italian Renaissance. The living sculpture drapery revealed by the x-ray could not have been taken down from a static figure because it was an invention, a product of art and imagination that served the great powers of composition, design and expression – it conferred grandeur, grace and dynamism to the theatrical stage-right entrance of Christ. We might reasonably agree with Giorgio Bonsanti (see right) that Caravaggio, having first created this great glory, then opted to suppress his own magnificence of drapery so as to have the secondary, Christ-obscuring figure of St Peter serve as a dull mundanely reproachful foil to the wealthily and vibrantly attired group of figures to his left. On the basis of this clear hard embodiment of artistically purposive thought and revision – to the point of artistic sacrifice – it can hardly be concluded other than that Caravaggio was a great inventive, self-critical self-revising showman of an artist and not some secretive shortcut-taking literalist.
Michael Daley
Comments may be left at: artwatch.uk@gmail.com
“Caravaggio did not arrive at the final version right away, and it is important to remember that even compositions that appear to have been born in an instant are the fruit of a long preparatory study. X-ray analysis has proven absolutely indispensable in revealing to our later vision forms and figures that the artist, after sketching them on the canvas, believed would remain concealed from all eyes, including his own, beneath the final version. Thus, in an early version of the Calling of St Matthew, the figure of Christ stood alone and was not covered, as in the final version, by that of St Peter. The latter’s presence involved the accentuation, in the final version, of his role as mediator (he would be the first pope) between man and God. Indeed, we see a sort of division of Christ into two parts, as though two persons have germinated and branched off from the same trunk. This already emphasized Christ’s human and divine nature. Peter laboriously and almost stiffly repeats the gesture of Christ, which in comparison is handled with the greatest eloquence. In addition, we immediately notice the painting’s total independence from the designs of earlier religious painting. From this we may conclude that the artist is not interested in instructing, admonishing or stirring his audience to religious feeling, as the Counter reformation expected art to do. He felt it was not his task. He seems to say, this is what happened. Christ and Peter suddenly came in and made it clear that they wanted to talk to Matthew, while the two youths, taken by surprise, prepared to face an intrusion whose nature they were unaware of; and indeed two other figures, unaware of what was going on, continued counting the money. Matthew brought his hand to his chest, as though to ask if it were he that they wanted. An instant before, the scene had been different; an instant later, it would no longer be the same. If a scene is to be instructive, it must be prepared, planned, and arranged. If it is devoid of this kind of orientation towards a specific end, then the artist is virtually free to shape it as he likes and to change it from one moment to the next, not preparing it, but taking note of it.“
“Caravaggio, who broke with tradition in his representation of this theme, was an unusual exegetist and his imagination produced revolutionary iconographic results. As protagonist of the scene, the painter inserts an angel seen from behind, placing the figure in a prominent position, in the golden section that splits the composition into two parts: the left-hand one, with St Joseph, the donkey, and stones, is dedicated to earthly life, while the right-hand area, which includes the Madonna and Child among living plants, is devoted to the divine world. Even the half-clad angel, for which ambiguous interpretations have forcedly been proposed, corresponds very precisely to the contemporary views put forward by Constantino Ghini in 1595 (the picture, painted at the same time as as the Mary Magdalen, dates from somewhere between 1595 and 1597) and Federico Borromeo, who held that the nudity of angels is a sign of their immunity from any contamination by human misery, just as the bare feet indicate that they are untouched by earthly things…The principal motif of Caravaggio’s Flight into Egypt is that of the music that can be heard on earth, considered by the Fathers of the church to be a copy of music in heaven. The intermediary between these two worlds is the invisible sound, which in art takes the form of an Angel playing music, a divine messenger that stands at the border between material and spirirtual reality. God communicates with men through Angels, who are his go-betweens:'[it is the] Angel who spoke to me,’ says Zachariah and for Ezekiel, the Angel is ‘man dressed in linen,’ just as Caravaggio depicts him.“
