Alex Grey on public art #10: Medieval mural, St Peter ad Vincula Church, Wisborough Green
As everybody knows, I’m a sucker for a church mural, and as we hurtle towards that time of year when ‘longen folk to goon on pilgrimages’, I’ve been on a bit of a church crawl of my own, armed with an ancient copy of EW Tristram’s weighty tome, English Medieval Wall Painting.
Having grown up in 1970s Croydon, a special kind of purgatory all of its own, my first brush with medieval church art was the famously colourful Day of Judgement wall painting in Chaldon, in nearby Surrey, which would have been a magnificent introduction to the world of fresco if I hadn’t been 15 and on what I’d hoped would be a whole different kind of hot date with a local schoolboy I shan’t identify, to spare both our blushes. The Chaldon mural is what today’s 15-year-olds would call altogether ‘extra’, compared with most of the surviving medieval wall painting to be found in Sussex, much of which is part of the somewhat earlier so-called ‘Lewes School’ and includes beautiful and – by comparison – understated examples covering the nave and chancel walls of churches at Clayton, Coombes, Hardham (see ROSA #3) and Plumpton.
But the painting at Wisborough Green is something else again.
Dating from the first half of the 1200s – later than the Lewes School murals by a good century – it’s both smaller in scale and bolder, almost cartoon-like, in style. Despite fading with the passage of time, its colours include greens, greys and charcoals, whose weight somehow anchors the flightiness of the more commonly seen red and yellow ochre, and yet the figures have a lightness, almost larkiness, that makes me half-expect to find speech balloons floating above them.
Shoehorned into a small-pointed recess on the south side of the chancel arch, this bijou mural depicts two entirely separate events, one above the other. At the top, the figure of Christ, now largely degraded except for a head, a halo and a hand holding a staff surmounted by a cross, regards the Art and about Alex Grey on public art #10: Medieval mural, St Peter ad Vincula Church, Wisborough Green figure of St James the Great, identifiable by the scallop shell fastening his cloak and holding a pilgrim’s staff and satchel, who in turn approvingly regards a group of pilgrims who face him from the side wall of the recess, a stylistic detail that creates a strangely three-dimensional effect.
Below, a highly unusual Crucifixion scene depicts a crowned Christ on a cross that has an extended horizontal bar to allow the suspension of a second figure, assumed by EW Tristram to be the penitent thief. Whereas the Christ figure is nailed to the crossbar, the thief alongside him is hanging with his arms looped over the top of it in an altogether more modern- looking stress position. To the left, the Roman centurion Longinus pierces Christ’s side with a lance. In the centre, between the two suspended bodies, St John the Apostle watches on, alongside Stephaton, the soldier offering up a sponge dipped in vinegar, his face described by Tristram as ‘a hideous caricature’ that, perhaps fortunately, has now been lost to the sands of time.
As if all of this were not different enough from a standard Crucifixion scene, the whole of the small mural has been subjected to a curious framing device. The two tiers of the painting are separated by a row of triangular gables, each of which contains a set of church windows – quatrefoils, lancets and roundels, from left to right – and the entirety of the recess has been surrounded by naïve architectural detail: brickwork and a vaulted roof at the top, stonework details and an array of windows to the sides. It is as if the artist has been at pains to make it clear that the significance of both the Christian journey and the Crucifixion itself is to be found in the here and now, in the bricks and mortar and fabric of any local church building and accessible to any ordinary worshipper, rather than being a rarefied sacred mystery unavailable to the common man. I recognise this urge to bring Christian symbology down to earth, particularly local earth, from other, much more modern examples of Alex Grey on public art #10: Medieval mural, St Peter ad Vincula Church, Wisborough Greenchurch art – like the Southdown sheep in the Piper window at Firle (see ROSA #11), for example, or the view of Mount Caburn in Quentin Bell’s The Supper at Emmaus at Berwick.
Even to this heathen, the result is curiously affecting. This small wall painting is modest and rather clumsy compared with the classical good looks of Clayton’s Christ In Majesty, or the roaring red ochre of Chaldon in Surrey, but for a moment it seems to me that I can really imagine the pain of that penitent thief’s dislocating shoulders and I find myself thinking about the cruel and unusual punishments in use today, two millennia after the death of Jesus of Nazareth and some eight centuries after this painting was left on a Sussex church wall. As a call to reflection, it’s wholly successful, and as a call to action not much less so, as I also find myself thinking it might be a satisfying thing to take up a pilgrim’s staff and satchel of my own. Perhaps it’s time I walked the Camino de Santiago – or at least the South Downs Way?
From Wisborough Green, I head south in the watery spring sunshine towards Bedham, where the wild garlic-scented woods conceal the ruins of another church that cries out for some kind of artistic intervention. But as I trudge, my mind wanders back to Chaldon, located at the southernmost tip of the Farthing Downs, where despite my largely urban upbringing I spent many happy hours walking as a child and suddenly find myself longing to visit again. When I make that pilgrimage, I shall seek out the Day of Judgement mural once again and undoubtedly appreciate it a good deal more this time around.