In 1789 the Bishop of Salisbury ordered James Wyatt to bring his cathedral into line with late eighteenth-century tastes and liturgical needs. Wyatt’s activities in the eastern arm – controversial then and now – included removing screens, destroying stained-glass windows and whitewashing the medieval vault paintings. Arguably, the paintings got the best of it, whitewash being – in some hands at least – more or less reversible. They were also the subject of a remarkably systematic survey by the draughtsman Jacob Schnebbelie, engaged by Richard Gough, then Director of this Society. In his new book, Matthew Reeve pays tribute to the significance of Gough – pioneering in his thinking about building conservation – and Schnebbelie, whose work is sound enough to allow reconstruction of the iconographic programme and, in Reeve’s view, analysis of its style.

Reeve is not the first to tackle the Salisbury paintings, or to tell the story of Wyatt, Gough and Schnebbelie. But his interpretation of the painted scheme is far more ambitious than that offered by F R Horlbeck in 1960, whose analysis of Schnebbelie’s drawings nevertheless remains useful. Reeve seeks to establish that the conditions of Salisbury’s construction – a new build undertaken by a religious community intimately involved in institutional and liturgical reform – produced a uniquely integrated programme of architecture and imagery, informed largely by the requirements of the liturgy. He argues that the paintings not only ‘mapped’ the cathedral’s liturgical spaces, but provided an allegorical commentary on them.

This multi-layered reading of the paintings, informed by a very wide range of primary and secondary sources, is lively, compelling and full of ideas. There is, as he anticipates in his introduction, plenty to enjoy and lots to disagree with, too – the mark of a truly stimulating book. His thesis that the vault paintings help define liturgically distinct spaces seems unassailable, although the suggestion that this amounts to a ‘cognitive map’, designed to ‘guide the worshipper through … an increasingly complex and involved liturgy in an increasingly complex liturgical space’, is less convincing. Visual aids to liturgical processions are more commonly found on pavements – most spectacularly in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Italy – than on vaults, for obvious practical reasons. And it is difficult to see how the schematic arrangements of the Salisbury paintings would nudge the worshipper into recalling specific aspects of the liturgy. But his allegorical interpretation of the programme – for example, his reading of the prophets above the choir as typological predecessors to the clergy below – is illuminating, supporting his thesis that the paintings enhanced the performance, and thus the meaning, of the liturgy.

Reeve departs from Horlbeck’s reading of Christ in Majesty as an apocalyptic figure, suggesting instead that Christ’s framing by evangelists in human, and apostles in earthly, form evokes ‘an historical and ecclesiological’ vision of Christ. However, the parallels he cites – Chartres, Moissac – are rather puzzling in this context, since they employ tetramorphic symbols of the evangelists, rather than the ‘author portrait’ representations used at Salisbury. It would be pedantic to list other such slips, which occur throughout the book; their unfortunate effect is to undermine the overall authority of the text.

Reeve is a passionate advocate of a holistic approach to art-historical research (although his sense that he is ploughing a lonely furrow is not really justified – one thinks of Tim Ayers’s exemplary study of the stained glass at Wells Cathedral, for example). Much that is good about this book derives from his determination to view Salisbury Cathedral’s paintings in the context of its architecture and its function. It is a pity, though, that he does not pay more attention to the chapter house, arguably the only discrete space in the cathedral whose entire decorative scheme – sculpture, polychromy, stained glass and tiles – can be deduced with reasonable confidence. The chapter house was, outside the presbytery, the most important space in the cathedral complex, with a distinct but related function. The commemorative content of its windows reflects its significance and its institutional purpose, and – as one might expect, particularly after reading this book – contrasts with the imagery of the eastern arm of the cathedral. There are relationships between the schemes, however. A few stained-glass panels containing figures of angels survive in a nave window. Like the ‘celestial acolytes’ painted above the eastern transepts they issue from clouds and bear attributes. These come not from the Trinity Chapel scheme of the 1220s, as suggested by Reeve, but from the 1260s windows of the chapter house where, as Sarah Brown has shown, they flanked images of kings and bishops vested for mass. Some assessment of the contrasts and congruities of the chapter house and eastern arm iconographic programmes would have enhanced our understanding of the whole cathedral.

As he acknowledges, Reeve is building on the work of many other scholars of Salisbury Cathedral, including Olivia Horsfall Turner, with whom he published the central thesis of this book as an article in this journal (85, 2005, 57–102). The book, which also incorporates his previously published work on Schnebbelie, affords him space to amplify his ideas. His determination to present Salisbury as unique in its integrated expression of function and form, however, assumes a certainty about the precise nature of Sarum Use before 1230 which is not currently shared by all liturgists. It also occasionally constrains a fuller consideration of Salisbury’s relationship with other earlier or contemporary buildings, like Old Sarum, Canterbury or Winchester. A sense of a truly broader context, not only beyond Salisbury, but within the cathedral complex itself, would have made for a more convincing book.