Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Brine, Douglas

Titel

'An unrivalled brass Lectorium': the Cloisters lectern and the Gothic Revival in England

Ist Teil von

• The sculpture journal, 2020-01, Vol.29 (1), p.45-121

Ort / Verlag

London: Liverpool University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2020

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

International Bibliography of Art (IBA)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• The year 2018 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the arrival in New York of an impressive late medieval brass lectern. Comprised of thirty-six individually cast components, it takes the form of an eagle whose outstretched wings and tail support two book-rests and whose claws grip a small winged dragon on an orb under its feet. Below are figures of Christ, St Peter and St Barbara, positioned around a triangular traceried pedestal beneath canopies carrying seated prophets. From the pedestal protrude twisting 'pruned' branches, two of which are pricket candleholders; the third, central branch holds statuettes of the Virgin and Child and a kneeling magus; the other two magi stand atop slender colonnettes at either side. The whole assemblage rests on a trefoil base supported by three crouching lions. Made in the southern Netherlands in around 1500, the lectern has been attributed to Jehan Aert van Tricht, a brass founder from Maastricht. It had previously been housed in St Chad's Cathedral, Birmingham, designed and furnished in 1839-41 by Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin, chief proponent of the Gothic Revival in early Victorian Britain. it is entirely appropriate to examine the lectern's reception in nineteenthcentury Britain from this standpoint.6 Indeed, through its links with Pugin, the lectern can be situated at the quintessentially Victorian nexus of craft, sculpture, history and religion. Despite his prodigious output as an architect, designer and theorist, Pugin is not typically associated with the medium of sculpture. He was keenly interested in Netherlandish brass sculpture though, and his responses to the Cloisters lectern, and the profound impact it had on his own designs for metalwork, afford a valuable opportunity to consider his engagement with the 'plastic arts'.