Exactly one thousand years ago, on Good Friday 1014, Brian Boru was killed at the Battle of Clontarf. His remains were brought to the church at Armagh, where he had made costly offerings. The supposed location of his burial is marked by a modern plaque on St Patrick’s Cathedral, the successor to the building where he is said to have been interred. James Stevens Curl does not mention this (external) plaque in his survey of the monuments in the cathedral, but he does deal most fully with the riches within. St Patrick’s contains important monuments by Roubiliac, Rysbrack, Chantrey, Bacon and Nollekens (working together), and Marochetti, as well as works by less well-known artists, such as the intriguing Kathleen Shaw, responsible for a number of gorgeous plaques.
Curl is, as always, good company. His style is urbane and leisurely. He is widely read: it is nice to find Microcosmographia Academica cited in the splendidly combative Preface and he makes good use of early writers on funerary monuments, as well as giving the various dismal societies, such as the Church Monuments Society, their due. He opens with a full history of St Patrick’s, enabling the memorials to be put in context. He explains why the important monuments are important, gives biographical sketches of the major artists and the major persons commemorated (one would have liked more on Shaw) and, importantly, discusses the original positions of those monuments that can be shown to have been moved. There are some particularly good features: dates are given for the excellent photographs, and there is a full account of the heraldry in the form of both footnotes and an illustrated appendix.
The book has several purposes. It is a full account of the building and its monuments, useful both as an examination of the objects in their context, and in adding several items to the oeuvres of important artists. It is also an admirable guide to the monuments in situ, taking the reader on a tour of the cathedral and examining the monuments topographically, rather than on a chronological or stylistic basis. This means that there is some repetition, as the problems of the original location of monuments based on early and misleading descriptions of the building are reiterated each time they are relevant, but this spares the visitor using the work as a guidebook from having to look for cross-references amongst its pages.
There are a few desiderata, largely caused by Professor Curl’s determination not to talk down to his readership. Translations should have been provided for the simple Latin inscriptions, as well as the more testing ones, and it would have been helpful for architectural terms to be glossed. It would also have been helpful to be given the dimensions of the monuments (easier to do now that laser measuring devices are available).
The churches of Britain contain the bulk of its sculpture, by natives and immigrants. Particularly for the period before the late eighteenth century, it is impossible to get an idea of the enormous riches that survive without visiting ecclesiastical buildings, contributing to the shameful lack of awareness of these riches in the public consciousness. Yet few church guides give these art works their due by weighing both their historical and their aesthetic importance. Even those institutions which do have publications devoted to monuments, such as York Minster and St George’s Chapel, Windsor, confine their (excellent) inventories of monuments to descriptions and inscriptions without venturing into art-historical territory. No one using this book would be able to leave St Patrick’s without being thoroughly informed about all aspects of its rich sculptural possessions. In this pioneering work Professor Curl has produced a model for others to follow, and a standard for them to aspire to.
