gamecock article on cathedrals

published today by the University of South Carolina student newspaper, probably hacked to pieces by an editor who seems to enjoy countering my spellchecking. on the web at www.dailygamecock.com.

On Cathedrals

If there's one thing in this world that I'll never have a full grasp on, its cathedrals. Vast, mind-numbingly beautiful structures in stone and concrete, they bedazzle the eye and the spirit with perfectly formed arches, intricate sculpture, delicate filigree in gold, and--what on earth? A really ugly painting. It befuddles me how architecture from 1077 was so amazing, so ornate that each wall in a room is supported by several identical hand-chiseled, 50 foot tall attractive columns, but then some shining star 500 years later decided to soil the actual walls with lousy paintings of disproportionate people and 2-D landscapes. Canterbury cathedral, for all its might and prowess, is full of them.

Take, for example, a rendering of the Legend of St. Eustace: a 19-foot high, 9-foot wide doodle depicting the life and martyrdom of the man, painted in the 1400's. Every person, animal, building, and even plant is so malformed that its comical--on first sight I had to bite my tongue to keep from laughing. There are certain places where its simply inappropriate to giggle, and the quire of a living tenth century cathedral is one of them. A particularly good example from this painting is near the bottom, in which Eustace has a vision of Christ between the horns of a stag. The stag, standing a full 4 hands higher than the saint's horse, has one big eye in the centre of its forehead and uniformly yellow fur. The pair meet in a forest of waist-height topiaries that look rubber-stamped up and down the wall like brickwork. And Eustace himself, seated--or possibly standing--between the two, has one arm from a gigantic tanned lumberjack and the other from a diminutive, shut-in princess.

There's no excuse for this. Artistic styles and forms had moved well past cave drawings by the fifteenth century. The walls of the Sistine Chapel were painted in the same century as this monstrosity, and even Michaelangelo's ceiling didn't come much more than fifty years after both. The paintings covering the chapel are of people and angels who clearly overlap to show depth, express roundness through shadow and hue, and have realistic-looking faces, muscle structure, and attire. Pisanello painted a scene depicting the same events at the same time as or even earlier than the mural, now at the National Gallery in London, which clearly depicts sources of light, landscape intricacies, and even what a real deer looks like. German Albrecht Dürer sketched the scene, too, no more than fifty years later, and it involved a real-looking man, an interesting forest, and a believably distant castle on a hill.

I'm not going to claim that every artist should have the same talents as Michaelangelo, but if you're the head of a church it would probably be wise to view a sample of an artist's work before commissioning them to paint an enormous mural on the wall of an already historic cathedral. Canterbury cathedral was nearly 400 years old when that painting was made--it had enough clout by then to legitimately expect quality interior decoration. Not finger-paintings my 8-year old cousin would scoff at.

If English people were artistically inclined enough in the eleventh century that they could create this church--with its quire and cloister and crypt and breezeways and tombs topped with sculptures of the deceased and all of its lovely stained glass windows, you'd think that half a millennium later the repertoire would still include painters who could draw a person who looks real.