THE GROTESQUE IN CHURCH ART.
Only 400 copies of this Book published
for Sale, and this is No. 315
THE STORY OF JONAH, RIPON.
The Grotesque
in Church Art
By T. Tindall Wildridge
LONDON:
WILLIAM ANDREWS & CO., 5, FARRINGDON AVENUE, E.C.
1899.
Preface.
he designs of which this book treats have vast fields outside the Englishchurch works to which it has been thought good to limit it. Books andbuildings undoubtedly mutually interchanged some forms of their ornaments,yet the temple was the earlier repository of man’s ideas expressed in art,and the proper home of the religious symbolism which forms so large aproportion of my subject. In view also of the ground I have ventured tohint may be taken up as to the derivation, of a larger number than isgenerally supposed, of church designs from heathen prototypes by the handsof apprenticed masons, it is fitting that the evidences should be fromtheir chisels. The only exceptions are a few wall-paintings, which serveto point a difference in style and origin.
In every case the examples are from churches in our own land. Theconclusions do not nearly approach a complete study of the questions, theresearch to the present, great as it is, chiefly shewing how much has yetto be learned in order to accurately compare the extant with thelong-forgotten.[Pg vi] The endeavour has been to present sufficient to enablegeneral inferences to be drawn in the right direction.
Of the numerous works consulted in the course of this essay, the mostuseful has been “Choir Stalls and their Carvings,” sketched by Miss EmmaPhipson. While tendering my acknowledgments for much assistance obtainedfrom that lady’s book, I would add that the ‘second series’ suggestedcannot but equal the first as a service to the cause of comparativemythology and folk-lore.
This place may be taken to dispose of two kinds of grotesques in churchart which belong to my title, though not to my intention.
The memorial erections put into so many churches after the middle of thesixteenth century are to be placed in the same category as the less oftenludicrous effigies of earlier times, and may be dismissed as “uglymonumental vanities, miscalled sculpture.” The grotesqueness of some ofthese sepulchral excrescences may in future centuries be still moreapparent, though to many even time cannot supply interest. Not all arelike the imposing monument to a doctor in Southwark Cathedral, on which,by the way, the epitaph is mainly devoted to laudation of his pills.Yet, though the grotesque is not entirely wanting in even these monuments,it is chiefly through errors of taste. The worst of them are m