Britain’s Christian heritage is more ‘diverse’ than its critics care to admit.
Parliament acts as a artistic microcosm of our entwined religious and political history.
CHARLES MOORE29 March 2024 •
Art UK publishes an annual report of new public sculptures, including those of “named men and women”. Last year, it says, there were more statues erected to the living than to the dead. It distinguishes these 26 persons by race – 10 black and 16 white – and by sex – 12 women and 14 men. The charity says disapprovingly that the people depicted in our public sculpture remain “overwhelmingly white men”.
Should public sculpture be a competition for ethnic or sex balance? Surely the reasons for erecting statues are rightly multifarious and usually reflect local considerations. “Diversity” is celebrated in the report, but in fact the subject matter of the new sculptures is almost uniform – entertainers/musicians and footballers, ethnic minorities preferred.
One might add that the new statues, as pictured on Art UK’s website, are, seen as art, discouraging. A sculpture of Harry Kane, soon to be unveiled, looks actively horrible.
One should not make general rules about whom public sculptures should depict, but surely one should be prejudiced in favour of the dead. Usually, the living can speak for themselves. A major purpose of statuary is a commemoration of those who can speak no longer. As it often says on war memorials, “Lest we forget”.
There is the test of time to consider. It makes more sense to commemorate Agatha Christie, whose image went up last year, than singers and sporting stars who are still, happily, with us, and may not be of continuing interest.
Yes, sculpture can right a past wrong – there is a statue of Alan Turing at Bletchley Park, for example – but these things are better taken slowly. Compare the restless triviality, gigantism and political posturing of the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square with Landseer’s patient lions nearby and Nelson looking down on the lot of them.
Rather than cluttering our spaces with ever more public sculpture, it might be worth looking harder at what we have got. It is a rich store.
Easter seems a good time to emphasise that the most frequently depicted figure in our public art is himself from an ethnic minority: Jesus was Jewish. If you add the sculptures of him to all the public representations of his greatest symbol, the cross, he wins by a country mile – or rather, by a via dolorosa.
After him comes the most frequently depicted woman, his mother Mary, who beats most men and all other women, even Queen Victoria. Other Jews displayed across the land include St Paul, St Peter and the patron saint of Scotland, St Andrew, whose own, diagonal cross forms the basis of the Scottish saltire and part of the Union flag.
In this country, the most astonishing microcosm of commemoration through public sculpture, public art and through architecture itself is what we usually call the Houses of Parliament, but is more all-embracingly described by its official, historic name, the Palace of Westminster.
First on the site, more than 1,000 years ago, came the monastic foundation and its abbey (or minster). Then came the devout King Edward the Confessor, who built the new minster and then his own palace next door. From that proximity came Westminster Hall, under whose great roof developed the Royal Courts of Justice.
The abbey vaults started to provide space for the royal treasury. Its chapter house gave room to the early debates of the House of Commons. Caxton’s first printing shop was carefully controlled by being placed in the curtilage of monastery and palace. Big Ben, the bell that the world knows so well, arose from its predecessors that had told the monastic hours.
Eventually, the royal St Stephen’s chapel was converted into the Commons chamber, with the Speaker’s chair sitting where the high altar had been. This is thought to be the reason why MPs today bow to the chair. Prayers were said in the Commons chamber, as they still are on every sitting day. They used to be taken so seriously that any MP failing to attend them could be fined and the money given to the poor. (Perhaps an idea whose time has come back?)
In this strange, small collection of buildings, a unique polity evolved, one which, despite the Civil War and the execution of Charles I, did not collapse.
Then, in 1834, Parliament accidentally burnt down, the higgledy-piggledy buildings easily combusting. This was, perhaps, good fortune, because at that time this country combined a cracking pace of change and democratic development with a learned and passionate sense of its own history and religion.
The architecture of Sir Charles Barry, the designs of A W N Pugin and the artistic suggestions of Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, masterminded the new building. They created what the advocates of the Gothic style called “the artificial infinite”.
Almost anywhere you tread in the building, you find sculpture, painting and design tracing this exalted historical melange. When the King comes to open Parliament, he enters the huge Robing Room. Facing his Chair of State is a painting by William Dyce called Religion, the Vision of Sir Galahad and His Company, in which Jesus, on a royal throne above the clouds, appears to King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table.
And Art UK, fretting about gender equality, should know that in all 26 niches round the room stand statuettes of holy Anglo-Saxon women of royal birth, such as the glorious St Sexburga, Abbess of Ely.
As the King passes through the Royal Gallery, he walks on encaustic tiles, one of which says (in Latin), “The Queen’s heart is in the hand of the Lord” (the queen, not a king, because Victoria was then on the throne).
When he enters the House of Lords to address both Houses, he sits on the throne which resembles the abbey chair in which he was crowned. The Pugin throne echoes the embroidered canopy under which were crowned the kings of Israel.
Above the throne is a painting, again by Dyce, which shows the baptism of Ethelbert, the first Anglo-Saxon Christian King, by St Augustine.
In the same chamber, Daniel Maclise’s mural of the Spirit of Justice used as its model Caroline Norton, the Victorian woman who won the right of legally divorced or separated women to the custody of their children, a fact that should please Art UK.
Constitutional propriety forbids the King to enter the House of Commons but, if he did, he would walk from the Lords through the Central Lobby and stand on an octagon that quotes (again in Latin) the Psalm, “Unless the Lord build the house, their labour is but lost that build it”. Looking up, he would see above him, at each corner, mosaics of the patron saints of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales.
If he continued, past the narrative paintings which display our entwined religious and political history, past sculptures of Attlee, Mrs Thatcher, Churchill and Lloyd George in the Members’ Lobby, and into the much plainer Commons chamber, he might spot the words “God be merciful unto us and bless us” from Psalm 67, under which all MPs must walk to vote.
Completing his imaginary progress, the King might leave by Westminster Hall, passing another enormous painting, Moses Receiving the Law on Mount Sinai, by Benjamin West. Moses, of course, led the children of Israel out of the wilderness. He is revered not only by Jews and Christians, but also by Muslims, and is the most frequently named individual in the Koran.
Quite a diverse heritage then, certainly a deep one, and one to be proud of. DT.
