Price: £24.95

Publication Date: Early Summer 2007

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Summary:

Wall paintings are a unique art form, complementing, and yet distinctly separate from, other religious imagery in churches. Unlike carvings, or stained glass windows that could be perfected in workshops, their support was the structure itself and meant that they had to be made on-site in the church and nowhere else. They were also monumental, often larger than life-size images for public audiences. The artist’s ‘canvas’ was the stone and plaster of the church itself.

Notwithstanding their dissimilarity from other religious art, wall paintings were also an integral part of church interiors, enhancing devotional imagery and inspiring faith and commitment in their own right. Today, when many can only be seen as patches amidst otherwise plain and sparsely decorated walls, they can appear without meaning or context. But five hundred years ago, when windows shone with colour, polished silver chalices gleamed on altars, and polychromed statues wore velvet cloaks and gold rings, wall paintings provided a monumental artistic setting for the church’s sacred rituals and public ceremonies. 

For centuries, generations of Christian worshippers drew hope from the visions of courage and redemption that glowed from the walls of their churches and which transported them from the drudgery of daily survival into the company of angels and knights, popes and saints, and the Divine made real. For such audiences, these paintings were not just art. They were indivisible from the art of life itself.

This publication brings together, often for the first time, many of the very best surviving examples of medieval church wall paintings. Using new technologies and many previously untried techniques this book allows us visualize these images as the artists originally intended. Accompanied by an authoritative and scholarly text this work helps bring to life the imagery and iconography of the medieval church.
 

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