Learn Wall Painting in the Gothic Style of Matthew Paris and the School of St Albans

Artists, This Will Equip You To Get Commissions

Here is a recommendation for painters: if you want to get commissions, you need more than the ability to supply individual paintings in your chosen style. You need to be able to paint walls. My recommendation for style in contemporary churches is a new manifestation of the School of St Albans. Read more about why here.

Virgin and Child, by Matthew Paris, English, 13th century. The artist has included himself venerating the Mother of God and adoring Christ

And here’s a recommendation for patrons, those choosing and paying for art for churches: if you want to have an impact on the liturgical engagement of your congregations through art – something which is vital for the revival of Catholic culture – the most cost-effective way is to introduce a planned full schema of art, floor to ceiling, on the apse or back walls of the sanctuary. Ideally, this would be like the iconostasis in a Byzantine church, except as a wall painting behind the altar.

Fresco by Martin Earle, English, 21st century

Artists can now learn how to do this by taking the Writing the Light wall painting program and icon drawing program under Master iconographer George Kordis. This is a two-year, part-time hybrid program (a combination of online and in-person workshops) – see a recent post about it here. The program focuses on the Greek style of iconography, but students who want to make the School of St Albans style their own should supplement it with personal study of past works by artists such as Matthew Paris. The key is to imitate that style until it becomes your natural artistic expression. This process of copying with understanding is how, for example, artists of the High Renaissance such as Michelangelo and Raphael made the ancient Greek ideal their own. They systematically copied Greek and Roman statues as part of their training, as well as drawing and painting from life. So artists who wish to make the Gothic style their own should learn the skills of their craft – Writing the Light will teach them this – as they study both from life and works of past Masters in the Gothic style. It will need students with ability and drive initially, but it is most certainly possible.

Patrons, another challenge for you: consider sponsoring a talented artist from your church to develop these skills through Writing the Light. You can read more at WritingtheLight.com.

What is the School of St Albans?

The School of St Albans is the style of English illumination in the late Romanesque and early Gothic period, particularly the work of the 13th-century monk Matthew Paris, based at St Albans Abbey in Hertfordshire, England. The style can be seen in manuscripts like the Westminster Psalter and in wall paintings that still survive in English churches.

This is a style that relies on the description of form with line, and is restrained in its use of tonal and color variation. These limitations help eliminate the sentimentality of naturalism, which is the blight of so many modern artists.

True to the Gothic spirit, by which classical sources were integrated into cultural expressions. Paris drew and painted not only sacred art for books like psalters and illustrations of the lives of saints, but also figures such as Plato and Socrates. He was also influenced by the renewed interest in the philosophy of Aristotle, and thus a keen observer of nature who drew many studies of plants and animals.

Why the School of St Albans?

When in discussing the reestablishment of beautiful sacred art in the Roman Catholic Church, part of what we have to think about is choosing a style from the past and using it as a starting point from which it is believed a characteristic style for today will emerge. Some look at the Baroque, some at iconography. My thought is that we look at this period. The suggestion for the name of the art of this period – the School of St Albans – originally came from a student in a class of mine over 10 years ago now.

My experience as a teacher is that Roman Catholics do seem to take to this style naturally and make it their own, even in a single class. You can see the work my students did in a past week-long workshop several years ago in this blog post.

When we studied images from this period, the students engaged with them much more readily – they liked them more than Eastern icons and seemed to understand them more instinctively. As a result, some quickly developed a feel for what they could change without straying outside the tradition they were working in. In contrast, most who had not seen it before found the style of Eastern icons slightly alien. In iconography classes, they had no instinctive sense of what they could change while remaining within the tradition. This meant we had to copy rigorously to avoid introducing errors. It was a bit like learning words in a language by rote, without understanding their meaning. This is not always such a bad thing – copying with understanding is an essential part of learning art – but at some point the student must apply his understanding in new ways. This latter point seemed to be reached more quickly by these Roman Catholic students when working in the Gothic style than in the iconographic style.

Can This Style Work on a Large Scale?

The style will be most familiar to readers as seen in illuminated manuscripts by Matthew Paris; generally, these are miniatures. Some have questioned whether this style would work on a large scale. I have always thought that it could be adapted to work on the walls of modern churches.

Original medieval wall paintings have been uncovered at St Albans Cathedral. I made a trip there to see them in 2018. The paintings are pale, but as we can see, they are done on a large scale and follow this same basic style – form described by line, with simple coloration. The photographs include St Amphibalus (a convert of St Alban) baptizing converts – note full immersion! – and Euclid and Herman the Dalmatian (a medieval philosopher), above.

Whether or not you are convinced that it is right to use this style today, we can certainly conclude that the artists of the period considered it appropriate for floor-to-ceiling frescoes (this church has a high ceiling). I would encourage patrons and artists to look at these and think about how they could reproduce this style in our churches. I think that it allows for large areas to be covered relatively easily and appropriately.

St Francis of Assisi: Illuminations by Matthew Paris

I recently visited an exhibition at the National Gallery in London that focused on art relating to St Francis of Assisi. In the course of the next few weeks, some of my posts will show what was featured there. There were some excellent examples of traditional art, ranging from Italo-Byzantine to Gothic to Baroque, and just for comparison, as the dissonant chord that makes harmony all the more sweet, some truly awful modern images. The contemporary artists seemed more intent on undermining the Faith and trying to push it into a contemporary box of leftist or relativist dogma, rather than revealing Truth (more on those later in the series).

This week, however, something good!

There was a manuscript of a world history, the Chronica maiora of Matthew Paris, with illustrations of St Francis and a six-winged seraph, exquisite tainted pen drawings in the style of the 13th-century English school of St Albans, of which he was the pre-eminent exponent.

The above are in fact reproductions of illustrations drawn in the margin of the book, the originals of which are tiny!

There are two volumes of this history, which focuses, as one might expect, on Church history as a crucial aspect of world history (in contrast to the approach to history of many contemporary historians, who tend to write the prism of woke, neo-Marxist ideology).

The chronicle normally resides in the Parker Library and Corpus Christi College Cambridge. The library website contains the following description:

Matthew Paris OSB (c. 1200-59), a Benedictine monk of St Albans Abbey, was their official chronicler who wrote chronicles covering both world history and British history. These two volumes are of his most important work, the Chronica maiora, covering world history, but with a particular emphasis on that of Britain - vol I is CCCC MS 26 and vol II is CCCC MS 16, their production dating to the period c. 1240-55. Matthew was also a talented artist who was both scribe and illustrator of his own chronicles. These volumes have coloured marginal drawings, and also signs and heraldic shields in the borders signifying the persons and incidents in their lives, and also signifying their deaths, set beside the text passages mentioning these events. Recently, in 2003, the prefatory section to MS 16 (ff. i recto - v verso), containing lists and genealogies of kings, a diagram of the winds, itineraries, maps, and the picture of the elephant given by Louis IX to Henry III, has been bound separately as MS 16I. The part containing the chronicle text itself, ff. 1v-282r, has been rebound as MS 16II.

I wonder at the control that the 13th-century artist had when working on such a small scale. He must have had exceptional eyesight to work without the aid of optical devices and modern lighting systems. I speak as one who at 61 years old, would struggle to match it with something twice the size, even with the best reading spectacles, magnifying glasses and electric spot lamps!

Does the Church Need Artists Who Are Humble Scribes? Or Original Geniuses?

Looking At Rabanus Maurus, St Dunstan, the anonymous painter of the San Damiano Crucifix, and Matthew Paris: how they are connected, and what they can teach us today.

Recently, I was put in touch with a small group of artists at the newly established sacred art studio at Ealing Abbey, the Benedictine house in West London. These artists are learning their craft under the guidance of the British iconographer Aidan Hart, and forming a group that learns together, and passes on what it learns to others, so as to encourage the spread of the iconographic tradition in the Roman Church.

I was interested in talking to them about their vision of past forms of iconography that might appeal to the modern eye, and so serve as a launch pad for what might in time be the development of a distinct contemporary, but nevertheless authentic, tradition of iconography in the Roman Church. I was very pleased to learn that they shared my enthusiasm for the line-based Romanesque and early Gothic styles of the English church. (Regular readers know that I tend to focus on the work of the 13th-century Gothic artist Matthew Paris.) The artists of the Ealing Abbey studio directed my attention to the work, previously unknown to me, of St Dunstan, who lived in the 10th century, a reformer of English monasticism who was based in Glastonbury for a large part of his life. He is less known as an artist: here is his drawing of Christ in which he has painted himself adoring the Saviour.

The inscription above him reads: Dunstanum memet clemens rogo, Christe, tuere. Tenarias me non sinas sorbsisse procellas (I ask you, merciful Christ, to watch over me, Dunstan, and not let the Taenarian storms swallow me.)

In their book The Image of St Dunstan, Nigel Ramsay and Margaret Sparks suggest that the idea for placing himself in the image came to St Dunstan from a 9th-century manuscript by another monk, Rabanus Maurus. Maurus wrote and illuminated “De laudibus sanctae crucis - On the praises of the Holy Cross”, a collection of poems presenting the sacred symbol in words, images, and numbers. One of the illuminated poems (in which every line has the same number of letters) can be seen here: as we can see, Rabanus Maurus portrayed himself adoring the cross.

When I looked at the St Dunstan image. It immediately brought to mind two others. The first was from the 13th-century England, by the monk Matthew Paris.

Here Paris has referred to himself as “Frat[er] Mathias Parisiensi[s] - Brother Matthew Paris.” It might be that he got the idea of including himself from Dunstan, who first got the idea from Maurus, I cannot say. But it occurs to me that it is just as likely that all three, Maurus, St Dunstan and Paris, were working within a tradition in which the scribe portrays himself in this manner, humbling himself before a holy patron. This being the case, it might be that none is aware of the work of any of their predecessors directly.

Another connection that occurred to me as I look at the St Dunstan image is that of the San Damiano crucifixion in the Basilica of St Claire in Assisi.

The facial features of each are striking, to me at least, as being similar to the other. I had always been under the impression that the San Damiano crucifixion had its origins in 9th century Syria, but most references I can find nowadays seem to have revised that idea, and suggest that it was painted by an Italian artist in the 12th century. So assuming the latter to be true, we might ask where the 12th century artists saw the St Dunstan image? Or are both following a established tradition for what the face of Christ looks like, with each being aware of a number of similar images? Again I do not know the answer to this question.

What does seem to be apparent, however, is that artists in the past were looking at each others’ work and happily replicating and adapting what they saw in order to create their own work. This is good practice, for it is the means by which tradition is passed on. 

Following traditional forms in art is almost antithetical to the modern mindset, in which everyone tries to be different from those who preceded them in order to demonstrate “originality.” However, as Christians, until we re-establish a mindset in which artists copy each other’s works with understanding, and deliberately seek to adapt or change only what is necessary to meet the needs of their commission, we cannot re-establish a tradition of sacred art in the Church today. A hermeneutic that dictates that artists do as little original work as possible, rather than as much as they can, is one that respects the past and, paradoxically, allows for the development of steadily better work in the future. In this sense, tradition has its hands on the tiller that guides present day artists as they develop new and inspired work. 

So whichever works from the past eventually do inspire the new tradition of the future, it will take a team of artists who view themselves as humble scribes, in the manner of Paris, Dunstan and Maurus, rather than celebrated original geniuses, for it to happen!