Painters And Decorators

“Abbey Beautiful: Our top tips this summer to make your monastery look fabulous”. Okay so it’s unlikely that this will ever grace the cover of a home and lifestyle magazine, but this is not entirely as farfetched as it may seem. 

                Our impressions of churches, cathedrals and abbeys are often informed by what has been left after the passage of time. Drab stone walls and empty shells of (often roofless) rooms suggest that the medieval period was cheerless and ascetic. In fact art and architecture were key ways through which to entertain and inform the general public in an age without mass media.

                Attempts have been made to reconstruct some of the interiors of well known heritage sites in order to show visitors how these buildings may have looked when they were freshly decorated. The keep at Dover Castle, for example, has been ‘redecorated’ to depict as accurately as possible how it may have looked in the twelfth century.

                I support whole-heartedly the motivations behind this re-vamp, but for my own taste it is a little too garish. I enjoy looking for the subtle, smudged and almost hidden clues of the interior-design of medieval abbeys and churches.

Remains of white paint
at Fountains Abbey

Where better to start than the walls of a building. Today they may be weather beaten and green with plant growth, but they were originally painted, just as we paint our living rooms. The Cistercian order, for example, painted both the exterior and interior of their monasteries white. This symbolised the purity and spirituality of their order, and reflected their ‘White Monks’ nickname. The interior was then further painted with thin red lines that created an almost brick like pattern.

Remains of wall painting
at St Augustine's Abbey

Cathedrals and churches often had more complex wall paintings that were meant to inform the viewer of a theological message as well as entertain them during a long service in unintelligible Latin. Wall paintings could also suggest the holiness of a particular place and so can often be found behind an altar, for example in the crypt at St Augustine’s Abbey.

Floor tiles at Byland Abbey

Floor tiles were another form of decoration. Similarly to the wall painting, elaborate tiles were often placed close to altars to emphasise the holiness of the space. Some of the most well preserved tiles can be seen at Byland Abbey. Tiles were not only coloured to make mosaic-style patterns, but they also were decorated with heraldic devices and animal imagery. There are also remains of tiles that contain biblical figures or scenes from Romance. It is not always easy to imagine how elaborate and decorative tiles could have been for the medieval interior, because so often very few survive and those that do are removed individually to museums for conservation. 

Stained glass at York Minster

Medieval stained glass in cathedrals such as Canterbury and Chartres are amazing testaments to the expense and complexity of medieval art. At Canterbury the twelfth and thirteenth-century glass that surrounds the Trinity Chapel were installed as entertainment for the waiting pilgrims, but they were also a method of teaching biblical tales in incredibly intricate typological windows.

Blind arcading at Ely Cathedral

Carved capitals and other smaller architectural details are frequently passed over, but are often highly decorative. In the crypt of Canterbury Cathedral there are a series of carved capitals that depict not only geometric designs, but also a lion, a wolf and the Whore of Babylon. Often positioned high up and noticed only with a thorough eye these features can often add to the impression of simplicity of a Cistercian abbey or the splendour of a Gothic cathedral. 

                It is repeatedly stressed that medieval art had a serious purpose and there has been much scholarly output about the various theological messages conveyed through wall paintings and stained glass. However it should be remembered that these mediums were also quite simply decoration. They were colourful and bright and they symbolised the beauty of the heavenly paradise. For as Abbot Suger of St-Denis famously justified in the mid twelfth century; “Thus sometimes when, because of my delight in the beauty of the house of God, the multicolour loveliness of the gems has called me away from external cares, and worthy meditation, transporting me from material to immaterial things, has persuaded me to examine the diversity of holy virtues.”