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Canterbury Cathedral: Classical Columns in the Trinity Chapel?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 April 2016

Peter Draper
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Extract

In his exemplary account of Canterbury Cathedral in The Buildings of England, John Newman observed that the proportions of the Trinity Chapel constituted an improvement on those of the choir and presbytery (Figs 1, 2 and 3). This perception of improvement results from the reduced height of the Trinity Chapel piers that produces a more satisfactory balance in the design of the elevation and, more significantly, a consequential change in the proportions of the piers, which now take on the appearance of classical columns. That this classicizing appearance is intentional is manifest in the elegant attic bases, the finely carved Corinthian-style capitals and particularly in the use of polished limestones to give the effect of marble. The piers are columnar, constructed in drums of predominantly Purbeck marble of varying colours, but the conspicuous eastern piers are partly made up of two other stones which must have been imported: a smooth creamy-white peletal limestone from Caen and a rose-pink marble which has now been shown to come from the area around Tournai. The supply of these imported stones was obviously limited and must have run out as two of the piers had to be completed in Purbeck, as can be seen in Figure 3. In fact, the use of such exotic polished stone was already well established at Canterbury, having been employed by Prior Wibert as early as the 1150s in the infirmary cloister and in the undercroft to the Treasury where both Purbeck marble and onyx can be found.

Type
Section 6: Cathedrals, Abbeys, Churches and Chapels
Information
Architectural History , Volume 44 , 2001 , pp. 172 - 178
Copyright
Copyright © Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain 2001

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References

Notes

1 Newman, J., The Buildings of England: North-East and East Kent, ed. Pevsner, N. (1969), pp. 163ffGoogle Scholar.

2 Much of the paving of the Trinity Chapel is usually identified as local Bethersden ‘marble’ which occurs only in very shallow beds. It has also been suggested that it may come from one of the beds in the Isle of Purbeck.

3 The source of the onyx has yet to be established — it may be from North Africa or the Middle East — nor is it known when it was imported, whether in the twelfth century or in the Roman period, and then later reused in the cathedral. See Tatton-Brown, T., ‘Building Stone in Canterbury c. 1075-1525’, in Parsons, D. (ed.), Stone: Quarrying and Building in England AD 43-1525 (1990), pp. 70–82 Google Scholar.

4 See Kidson, P., ‘Gervase, Becket, and William of Sens,’ Speculum, 68 (1993), pp. 969-91CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Severans, K. W., ‘William of Sens and the Double Columns at Sens and Canterbury’, in Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, XXXIII (1970), pp. 307ffCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 The fundamental study is by Willis, Robert in The Architectural History of Canterbury Cathedral (London, 1845), pp. 32–62 Google Scholar. In addition to Newman, see also F. Woodman, The Architectural History of Canterbury Cathedral (1981); Draper, P., ‘William of Sens and the Original Design of the Choir Termination of Canterbury Cathedral 1175–1179’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 42 (1983), pp. 238–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kidson, P., ‘Gervase, Becket, and William of Sens,’ Speculum, 68 (1993), pp. 969-91CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hearn, M. F., ‘Canterbury Cathedral and the Cult of Becket’, Art Bulletin, 76 (1994), pp. 19–54 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Draper, P., ‘Interpretations of the Rebuilding of Canterbury Cathedral, 1174-86; Archaeological and Historical Evidence’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 56 (1997), pp. 184–203 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Kidson, ‘William of Sens. . .’, pp. 984-85.

7 The √2 sequence, together with those of √3 and √ 5, is conveniently set out in Cocke, T. and Kidson, P., Salisbury Cathedral: Perspectives on the Architectural History (London, 1993), pp. 92–93 Google Scholar.

8 These measurements are based on the best available drawings. Confirmation will have to await a full measured survey of the east end of the cathedral. The present evidence suggests that the unit of measure was the English foot rather than the Roman.

9 The actual height of the abacus from the ambulatory floor is 6.065 tea, an inch or so short of 20 ft.

10 Jones, M. Wilson, ‘Designing the Roman Corinthian Order’, Journal of Roman Archaeology, 2 (1989), pp. 35–69 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Wilson Jones, p. 41. Measurements very slightly from pier to pier, but of the three measured the average diameter is about 0.6 m. The total height is 6.065 m from the ambulatory floor and 5.945 m from the Trinity Chapel floor. The diameter of the shaft may have been determined by the size of the available blocks of ‘marble’. The proportion between the diameter and the height of the shaft is 1:7.33 rather than 1:8 as was common in Roman practice.

12 For the buildings in Rome see Krautheimer, R., Rome: Profile of a City 312-1308 (1980), pp. 192–202 Google Scholar. For Suger’s interest in them see Grant, Lindy, Abbot Suger of St-Denis (1998), pp. 255-58Google Scholar.

13 On the possible role of Alan of Tewkesbury see Draper, P., ‘Interpretations of the Rebuilding of Canterbury Cathedral, 1174-86: Archaeological and Historical Evidence’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 56 (1997), pp. 184–203 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 There is an extensive bibliography on this aspect of St Denis. Most recently, with numerous references, Klein, B., ‘Convenientia et cohaerentia antiqui et novi operis: ancien et nouveau aux débuts de l’architecture gothique’, in Joubert, F. and Sandron, D. (eds), Pierre, lumière, couleur: études d’histoire de l’art du Moyen Age (1999), pp. 19–32 Google Scholar. For this and other aspects of Suger’s ambitions see Lindy Grant, Abbot Suger of St-Denis (1998).

15 Kidson, P., The Medieval World (1967), pp. 104-06Google Scholar; Benson, R. and Constable, G. (eds), Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century, chapter VII (which includes articles by Bloch, H., Kitzinger, E., Sauerlander, W. and Horn, W.), pp. 615–757 Google Scholar. Sauerlander, W., ‘“Premiere architecture gothique” or “Renaissance of the twelfth century”? Changing perspectives in the evaluation of architectural history’, Sewannee Medieval Colloquium Occasional Papers, No. 2 (1985), pp. 25–43 Google Scholar. In Magdeburg cathedral columns of Italian marble which Otto I had acquired for his church in the mid-tenth century were reset as spolia for the second time in the choir of the early thirteenth-century church.

16 For Pierre de Celle, see Prache, A., Saint-Remi de Reims: l’oeuvre de Pierre de Celle et sa place dans l’architecture gothique (1978), especially pp. 29–40 Google Scholar; for the subsequent link through stained glass workshops see M. Caviness, Sumptuous Arts at the Royal Abbeys in Reims and Braine (1990).

17 Kimpel, D. and Suckale, R., L’architecture gothique en France 1130–1270 (1990), esp. p. 186ffGoogle Scholar.

18 ‘Ex quadem parte ad imitationem ecclesiae beati Apostolorum principis Petri’. For Eadmer’s text, see R.Willis, The Architectural History of Canterbury Cathedral, p. 10, and for Gervase, , Chronica Gervasii monachi Cantuariensis, ed. Stubbs, W., Roll Series, 1, pp. 11–12 Google Scholar.

19 Krautheimer, R., Rome: Profile of a City 312-1308 (1980), pp. 192–202 Google Scholar.

20 John of Salisbury, Historia Pontificalis, ed. and trans. Chibnall, M. (1936), p. 79 Google Scholar. Nothing is known of any such sculptures which Henry of Blois might have brought back, but classical allusions in the form of fluted pilasters and a predilection for the use of Purbeck marble are evident in the buildings he commissioned. For Henry’s patronage see, most recently, Kusaba, Y., ‘Henry of Blois, Winchester, and the Twelfth-Century Renaissance’, in Crook, J. (ed.), Winchester Cathedral: Nine Hundred Years (1993), pp. 69–80 Google Scholar. For ‘the New Rebirth of Rome’ in the twelfth century, see Krautheimer, op. cit., chapter VII.

21 Revelation, 21, 18-19.

22 Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 407. Translation from Hoade, E., Western Pilgrims (Jerusalem, 1970), p. 3 Google Scholar.

23 See the judicious remarks of Crossley, Paul, ‘Medieval architecture and meaning: the limits of iconography’, Burlington Magazine, 130 (1988), pp. 116-21Google Scholar.