By Richard Jenkyns
Read the Bldg weblog interview with Mary Beard concerning the Wonders of the realm series(Part I and half II)
Westminster Abbey is the main complicated church in lifestyles. nationwide cathedral, coronation church, royal mausoleum, burial position of poets, resting position of the good and of the Unknown Warrior, former domestic of parliament, backdrop to the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales--this wealthy and remarkable development unites many functions.
Westminster Abbey is either an appreciation of an architectural masterpiece and an exploration of the building's transferring meanings. We listen the voices of these who've defined its varieties, moods, and ceremonies, from Shakespeare and Voltaire to Dickens and Henry James; we see how rulers have made use of it, from medieval kings to fashionable leading ministers. In a hugely unique ebook, classicist and cultural historian Richard Jenkyns teaches us to examine this microcosm of historical past with new eyes.
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But this time only the piers of the main arcade are Purbeck; everything above is of white stone. If we read the elevation of the nave in terms of form, it has a strong verticality, the three stages of the elevation being bound together in each unit of the arcade. But if we read it in terms of material, the piers of the arcade, so distinct in colour and texture, seem to belong to one another more than to the stages above them. Perhaps this is an intriguing ambiguity, perhaps too blunt a contrast.
This is an exotic wonder in its English setting, yet it also lays claim to a centrality for, like the Conqueror’s coronation, it looks beyond France, asserting allegiance to the cultural and spiritual authority of Rome. History has its ironies: now it lies at the spot where the sovereign swears to uphold the Protestant religion by law established. It drew on another kind of Roman authority too – that of classical antiquity. Formerly it was surrounded by an inscription in brass letters, apparently giving a symbolic explanation of the pavement’s abstract design, written in classical Latin metre.
And thus it took a robustly patriotic Victorian Englishman to give the north transept, at last, a properly French elevation. Architecture is, like music, an experience in time, but unlike music buildings allow us to choose the pace and sometimes even the order in which we enjoy them. It makes a difference whether we go round a building fast or slow, whether we move from larger to smaller spaces or the reverse, whether the whole of an interior breaks upon us all at once or is revealed more gradually.