The post-medieval history of the Westminster Abbey Retable has been chequered, to say the least. Between 1606 and 1827, when at last it was rescued, it formed part of a succession of cupboards in which the abbey stored and displayed its collection of funeral effigies, becoming badly damaged in the process. In recent years the Retable has been subject to expert conservation by the Hamilton Kerr Institute at the University of Cambridge. This work was completed in 2005 and the Retable was then displayed at the National Gallery, before returning to Westminster Abbey, where it can now be viewed in the museum.

This book gives a full account of the conservation work and is comprehensive in several other ways. An introduction – which considers the function, date, imagery and style of the Retable – is followed by chapters on the Art-historical Context, the Decorative Context, Post-manufacture History, Historical Treatments, Materials and Techniques, Technical Context, Treatment and, finally, Documentation. These chapters are divided into separate sections, written by a star cast of no fewer than twenty-nine contributors.Footnote 1 According to my own count (there is no list of figures), the text is illustrated by 177 black-and-white illustrations and 376 coloured ones, as well as by many plans and diagrams. The bringing together of all this material must have been a titanic task, and a great debt is owed to the editors, Paul Binski and Ann Massing, together with their assistant, Marie Louise Sauerberg.

What, then, is the Retable? It is made of wood and measures some 959mm by 3,330mm. In its centre is a painting of Christ flanked by the Virgin Mary and St John the Evangelist, all three within their own aedicules, of which that of Christ is, of course, the largest. To the left of this central composition are paintings of Christ's miracles and St Peter, the former set within four star-shaped medallions, the latter within its own aedicule. The corresponding paintings on the right-hand side of the Retable have been lost, although the medallions and adjoining aedicule survive. The latter, according to an eighteenth-century drawing, once contained a painted figure of St Paul, thus balancing that of St Peter on the other side. The borders of the Retable, together with the aedicules and medallions, are decorated with gilding, coloured glass, gems, cameos and enamels.Footnote 2 Both the colour and the detail of the paintings, placed within this glittering framework, have been much enhanced by the cleaning and other treatments at the Hamilton Kerr Institute, as some striking photographs in the volume testify. One can see as never before the exquisite touch and sensitivity with which the faces, hands and bodies of the figures have been painted. Breathtaking in their beauty, this is art of the highest order.

The detailed examination of the Retable during the course of the recent conservation has made several important contributions to its understanding. The most crucial of these concerns its date. Dendrochronological work on the timbers shows that they were felled between 1232 and c 1270. Art-historical havoc would have been wreaked by any other finding. In the event, it fits well with previous stylistic and historical analysis (confirmed and expanded in this volume), which suggests that the Retable was a work of the 1260s. It was designed as the Retable for the abbey's high altar and was in place for the consecration of Henry iii's new church and the translation of Edward the Confessor to his new shrine, on 13 October 1269. There seems also a consensus – deduced from the style of the paintings, the design of the aedicules and the form of the decoration – that the Retable was the work of Parisian joiners and panel painters who came to work at Westminster.

Another significant finding from the examination is that the Retable was very far from all it seemed, for the surviving gems, cameos and enamels are imitations and, in material terms, virtually worthless. Since the settings of the missing gems are exactly the same as the ones that survive, it seems highly probable that all the decorations were of this type. There was, therefore, a striking contrast between the Retable and the frontal of the high altar. The latter was made of cloth into which were woven an array of genuine pearls, enamels and garnets, costing all of £208. One reason canvassed in the volume for the use of imitation stones on the Retable is the possible speed with which it was completed, and the consequent difficulty of acquiring in the time available the 2,500 gems and thirty-six antique cameos needed. Yet it is difficult to believe that a good number of precious stones could not have been assembled and worked into the design, had the intrinsic value of the objects adorning the Retable been thought important. Manifestly it was not. The Retable was thus viewed in a different way from the frontals, copes, mitres and other vestments that Henry commissioned, as well as the jewels he gave to the Shrine of the Confessor, objects that he often stated should be ‘precious’, and which, indeed, generally cost great sums of money. The Retable, by contrast, was looked on essentially as a painting, and here it was not the intrinsic value of the object that counted (something Henry never mentioned in his commissions), but the content and aesthetic effect.

The content of the Retable is indeed remarkable. Some other retables, including that in the abbey's Chapel of St Faith, have Christ on the Cross as their central image. In the high altar Retable, by contrast, Christ is depicted as the Saviour of the World (John 12:47). Instead of being pinned naked to the Cross, he stands richly robed, blessing with one hand and holding in the other a globe representing saved creation. In harmony with this joyful theme, the Virgin Mary, depicted on Christ's right hand, is smiling. Both she and St John, on Christ's left, hold palms in their hands, like the multitude who came before the throne of God in the Book of Revelation, needing to hunger and thirst no more (Rev 7:9–17). The medallions depicting various of Christ's miracles reflect the same joyful spirit. The three surviving scenes are of the Feeding of the Five Thousand, the Restoration of Sight to the Blind Man, and the Raising from the Dead of Jairus's Daughter. Here, then, Christ appears not as the Judge of Mankind but as our feeder, healer and saviour.

There were precedents for retables depicting Christ as Saviour, and the subject was, of course, completely appropriate for an altar before which the saving mysteries of the mass were daily performed. At Westminster, however, it had an added significance because of the wider setting. Behind the high altar, there lay the Shrine of the Confessor, the spiritual centre of the church, the whole reason why it was being rebuilt in so wonderful a fashion. Another remarkable fact to emerge from the examination of the Retable shows just how closely its construction was related to this setting. There was a change of plan while the Retable was under manufacture, and it was enlarged by the addition of the two end panels depicting SS Peter and Paul. The most likely explanation is that a decision was made to widen the high altar – which in turn meant widening the Retable that sat above it – as work on the ensemble proceeded. This made it easier to envisage how the high altar would relate to the Cosmati shrine base, which was to hold the Confessor's body aloft in its golden casket, together with the shrine's altar and surrounding Cosmati pavement. The setting also explains another feature of the Retable, which is its comparatively low height. This was surely to facilitate the view above it to the Shrine of the Confessor beyond.

In considering the Retable in this context, one further suggestion may be made, one that develops a link noted by Richard Foster. The Retable's subject matter is surely closely related to that other famous work at the abbey recently conserved, namely the great Cosmati pavement before the high altar, which is securely dated by its inscription to 1268. The pavement, consisting of a series of spherical and geometrical shapes, depicts the whole cosmos of God's creation. From the great stone of Egyptian onyx, shaped as a globe in the centre of the pavement, there was a direct line eastwards to the globe, a few feet away, not dissimilar in colour, held in Christ's hand in the centre of the Retable. There was surely an intimate connection between the two, as there was between everything else created in this area of the abbey for the great ceremony of 1269, whatever its precise sequence and chronology. The whole was given unity by the work of the Cosmati in the form of the shrine base, its surrounding pavement and the great pavement before the high altar. The latter had a riddling inscription giving the date that the cosmos would end, the day, that is, of the Last Judgement. Awed and terrified by the prospect, how consoling then to look from the pavement to the Retable depicting Christ as Saviour, the globe at the centre of the pavement being cradled in his hand. And then, looking upwards and beyond, there was further hope, the hope the abbey was all about; for rising up above the Retable stood the splendid Cosmati base holding aloft the golden shrine and the body of the Confessor, a saint of mighty power whose intercession would help ensure salvation and safe passage into Christ's hands.

One final suggestion. Inscriptions proclaimed Henry iii's responsibility for the high altar pavement and the shrine. Is there also an indication, albeit different in kind, of his responsibility for the Retable? One of the miracles it shows is that of Christ Raising Jairus's Daughter from the Dead: ‘The damsel is not dead but sleepeth’ (Mark 5:22–4, 35–43; Luke 9:41–2, 49–56). This was not a common subject of iconography, although it was perfectly appropriate given the theme of the Retable, as we have seen. It may also have made a link with the Anglo-Saxon past, for it had appeared on the pre-Conquest shrine of Edith of Wilton. For Henry, however, there was far more to it than that. He was himself the father of three daughters: Margaret, who married King Alexander of Scotland in 1251; Beatrice, who married John of Brittany in the abbey on the feast of the Confessor's translation in 1261; and Katherine, who was born in 1253. Henry was a hugely affectionate father. When Katherine fell ill in 1256, he ordered a silver image of her to be made and almost certainly offered it at the Shrine of the Confessor. The wording of the order for the image seems to indicate that there were already two similar images beside the shrine, perhaps put there on previous occasions when a daughter was ill. How much, on those occasions, must Henry also have prayed for the kind of miracle that raised up Jairus's daughter.

In the event, for Katherine that was not to be. She died in 1257, to the great grief of her parents. But this hardly diminished the relevance of the miracle, for if Christ could no longer raise Katherine up in this life, he could certainly raise her up in the next. The depiction of the miracle on the Retable was all the more significant for Henry because it was so close to Katherine's tomb. This bore her silver-gilt effigy, made by the king's goldsmith, William of Gloucester. Its precise location is unknown, but that it was other than in the Confessor's chapel seems inconceivable. The very accounts of William of Gloucester reflect the connection, for they show that he worked not just on Katherine's tomb, but also on the frontal of the high altar and the feretory of the Confessor.

On the Retable, Jairus himself stands praying over his daughter. He is clasped on the shoulder and around the waist by two slim, female hands that belong to a figure, the face now lost, standing behind him. This must have been Jairus's wife, the dead girl's mother, who, with her husband, witnessed the miracle, along with Peter, James and John (the latter presumably correspond to the other three figures in the painting). The image of the daughter herself is lost save for a small and fragile hand, poignantly reaching up to clasp that of Jesus as he bends forward with a look of calm compassion, his other hand pointing upwards as he bids her rise. One may imagine Henry himself gazing at the almost ethereal scene and thinking of his own daughters. The figure of Jairus, enfolded in the arms of his wife, perhaps reminded both him and Queen Eleanor of how they had prayed together over Katherine, who now lay so very close in the Confessor's chapel, beneath her silver effigy. The inclusion of the miracle was deeply personal to Henry. It is his signature on the Retable. He had brought into being a work of great beauty, spiritual significance and power. It is a work worthily celebrated in this magnificent book.