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The Doom, Ickleton, Cambs. (‡Ely) C.14 (central area & detail)

Photo : T.Marshall Although much of it has been lost and most of the rest is faded, this 14th century Doom (over the chancel arch) has one very unusual feature, namely the Virgin baring her breasts in supplication to her Son (detail, right, below).

This gesture, pagan in origin but found occasionally in Christian art, is extremely rare in the English church, but there is another example of it, probably from around the
same date (but very different in style), in the Doom at North Cove in Suffolk. The gesture might almost have been designed to draw fire from those of an iconoclastic turn of mind, particularly after the Protestant Reformation. In 1570 the Flemish theologian John Molanus had this to say of it:

‘Many painters show Mary and John the Baptist kneeling beside Our lord at the Last Judgment...But we may not think that at that day the Virgin Mary will kneel for us before the Judge, baring her breast to intercede for sinners. Nor may we think that John the Baptist will fall upon his knees to beg mercy for mankind in the way the painters show. Rather, the blessed Virgin and St. John shall sit beside the supreme Judge as assessors. The mercy which is extended now will have no place then. There will only be strict justice at that day.’¹

Hard as it is to warm to Molanus, his pronouncement is a telling comment on the magnitude of the Reformation sea-change.

There are other paintings at Ickleton, including the early and high-quality true fresco Passion Cycle already in these pages.

¹J.Molanus, De Historia SS. Imaginum et Picturarum pro vero earum usu contra abusus, Louvain, 1594, Book iv. cap.24. in A. Caiger-Smith, English Medieval Wall Paintings [Bibliography Page], p. 35.

The Doom, Ickleton, Cambs

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Wall painting was once the national gallery of England. The imprinting of natural colours into moist plaster defied the passage of time. Kempley's colours seem to glow even more vividly when the walls become moist. Churches were entirely coated in these messages, telling stories, recording pilgrimages, terrifying the wicked, saluting St Christopher, the saint of travellers, or just graffiti celebrating life on Earth.

The Reformation whitewashed over most church murals, or over-painted them with "the word" - biblical texts, creeds and commandments. But substantial sets have come to light, the "Sussex school" at Clayton and Hardham, Copford in Essex, Ickleton in Cambridgeshire and the great Doom painting in St Thomas's, Salisbury. While stained glass, sculpture, screens and icons were stolen and smashed, wall paintings slept undisturbed until roused by scholars such as Ernest Tristram and Clive Rouse.

Many of these paintings would be on London pedestals, had some avaricious director been able to prise them from the walls, as they did so much of the stained glass and statuary now in the V&A and elsewhere. The lovely swaying figures of the Brent Eleigh crucifixion in Suffolk might have stepped from a work by Italian painter Cimabue. Norwich St Gregory's George and Dragon would pass muster in an Italian sanctuary. The terrifying Ladder of Salvation in Chaldon, Surrey, is pure Hieronymus Bosch. The Lily Crucifix in Godshill on the Isle of Wight is delicate beyond compare.

Overwhelming these delights is despair at the sheer ragged incompleteness of it all. To study this elusive art is to gaze on mostly a ruin. It is as if every painting in every gallery were a tattered piece of canvas in a broken frame; as if the parish church as the aesthetic climax of English life, offering a narrative of its past, were just a mausoleum.

Restoring Church murals in England

The extent of the destruction of English Christian heritage by Protestant vandals boggles the mind. Christians received better treatment from the Turks.