“An Air of Grandeur & Modesty”: James Thornhill’s Painting in the Dome of St Paul’s...

Johns / “An Air of Grandeur & Modesty” 501

Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 42, no. 4 (2009) Pp. 501–27.

“AN AIR OF GRANDEUR & MODESTY”: JAMES THORNHILL’S PAINTING IN THE DOME OF ST. PAUL’S CATHEDRAL

Richard Johns

In the summer of 1715, the English artist James Thornhill and a small team of assistants began painting the inner dome, or cupola, of St. Paul’s Cathedral in the City of London (Figure 1). It was a formidable task. Measuring 130 feet across and rising more than 200 feet above the ground, the painted dome would become the most expansive decorative scheme anywhere in Britain: substantially larger, even, than Thornhill’s work in the Great Hall of the Royal Naval Hospital at Greenwich, the first phase of which had been unveiled the previous year. It would also become the most visible. As the natural home of the re-established Church of England, a place of national commemoration and thanksgiving, and a monument to London’s recovery from the Great Fire, the cathedral commanded a unique presence within the spiritual and secular life of the early modern capital, attracting tourists and casual sightseers as well as worshippers in unprecedented numbers.1 Within a little over two years the main section of the dome had been embellished with an ambitious cycle of eight religious history paintings, each depicting a well-known episode from the life of St. Paul chosen from the Acts of the Apostles. These figurative bays, painted with a muted palette of stone-like browns, are framed by a continuous arcade of feigned architecture that visually rests upon the piers and pilasters of the drum and crossing below, contributing to an architectonic interior that is magnificent in scale but subdued in color and selective in its use of figuration.

Besides the practical challenges of painting on such a grand scale, the job of finishing the dome was complicated by the absence of any immediate or obvi-ous precedent for decorating a Protestant cathedral, and by a diversity of attitudes

Richard Johns is Curator of Prints and Drawings at the National Maritime Museum, Green-wich. He is currently preparing a book with the working title James Thornhill and the Birth of English History Painting.

Eighteenth-Century Studies 42 / 4502

within the Church of England toward religious painting that ranged from the en-thusiastic approval of an array of biblical subjects to the outright condemnation of all such imagery as “Popish superstition.” Yet the potential rewards of such a high-profile scheme were far reaching. The commission to decorate the dome carried an additional cachet for Thornhill because it followed an open competition that had attracted entries from some of the most highly regarded decorative painters in Europe. The English artist’s eventual success in the contest was welcomed by advocates of a native school of painting as a significant victory—not only over for-eign artists already working in England, including the relative heavyweights Louis Cheron and Antonio Pellegrini, but also over the distinguished Venetian painter Sebastiano Ricci, who had traveled to England in 1711 in the hope of stealing the commission (and who, according to George Vertue, promptly left the country in dismay when the job was given to an English painter).2

Neither did it go unnoticed by the press that, as the sole English contender, Thornhill had seen off the challenge of all comers from the Continent. Within days of the commissioners’ decision, the Weekly Packet confidently predicted that the resulting decoration would once and for all “put to Silence all the loud Applauses we have hitherto given to foreign Artists.”3 And as the main section of the dome neared completion, in the autumn of 1717, the capital’s newspapers gave a ring-ing endorsement of the work with the now remarkable-sounding claim that, when finished, Thornhill’s painting was “likely to be the greatest Ornament, and perhaps the most masterly Performance of the whole Fabrick.”4

Two years later, Thornhill announced his intention to publish the newly completed narrative scenes as a series of high-quality prints, aimed at a discern-

Figure 1. The inner dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral (viewed from the cathedral floor), with painted decora-tion by James Thornhill, 1715–21. Courtesy of the Dean and Chapter of St. Paul’s Cathedral.


ing audience of virtuosi collectors by employing “the best Engravers” from the Continent.5 One week before the finished engravings were issued to subscribers, in May 1720, the first set of prints made a fitting gift to George I on the occasion of Thornhill’s knighthood—famously, the first time such an honor had been be-stowed upon an English painter. By any contemporary measure, then, the painted decoration of St. Paul’s was a resounding triumph, securing the artist’s reputation as England’s foremost history painter and prompting further professional success and even greater public acclaim during the decade that followed.6

But history has not always been so favorable to Thornhill’s rather sober contribution to the cathedral’s interior; many later onlookers felt that the monochro-matic painting at the center of St. Paul’s left the building wanting. The plainness of its decoration exposed what one embarrassed nineteenth-century viewer described as the “naked appearance” of the cathedral—a consensus that prompted several schemes to “complete” the interior with varying amounts of color and sparkle.7 In more recent times, when it has been noticed at all, the painted dome has gener-ally been thought dull; the feigned architecture that features so prominently has been censured, above all by Wren scholars, for being contrary to the spirit of the architect’s design. The architectural historian Kerry Downes encapsulated this longstanding antipathy toward Thornhill’s work when he dismissed the painted dome as one of two “monumental . . . blemishes” inflicted upon the cathedral, the other being the rooftop balustrade that Christopher Wren famously scorned as a form of “edging” better suited to a lady’s dress than to architecture.8 Even Edward Croft-Murray, author of the only major survey of English decorative painting and usually one of Thornhill’s more forgiving proponents, felt obliged to concede that the painted dome “does nothing to add life and warmth to Wren’s rather frigid architecture,” blaming its shortcomings, in part at least, on the “absurd ruling” of the presiding committee that the entire scheme be painted the color of stone, when “what was needed was a splash of colour.”9

While the political background to the commission has been the subject of fruitful research in recent years, surprisingly little attention has been afforded either the narrative content of Thornhill’s painting—which has remained all but invisible within the historiography of the cathedral—or the broader significance of the finished dome within the social and cultural milieu of the early eighteenth century. In the pages that follow, I suggest that Thornhill’s decoration, arguably the largest and most ambitious scheme ever painted in England, was driven by the long-term objectives of the Protestant state, visibly shaped by its more recent contradictions, and refined by the aspirations of an artist set on transforming the very idea of English history painting. Combining previously unpublished docu-mentary evidence with a fresh analysis of the eight scenes of biblical history that constitute the main part of the decoration, this essay will, I hope, contribute to a better understanding of Thornhill’s unparalleled intervention at St. Paul’s—aimed somewhere between the hopeful enthusiasm of the artist’s early supporters and the outright disdain of his later critics. To begin, it will be useful to consider the narrative aspect of Thornhill’s painting in a little more detail, and to summarize what is known about the origins of the project, before going on to explore the dy-namic interplay between ecclesiological and artistic ambition behind the apparent simplicity of the painted dome.


THORNHILL’S PROPOSAL

The pictorial retelling of the life of St. Paul begins in the easternmost compartment, facing the visitor approaching from the nave, with The Conversion of Saul (Figure 2). This opening scene introduces the evangelical theme of the decoration and, in echoing Francis Bird’s relief in the pediment above the west entrance, inaugurates a visual and iconographic connection with the other figura-tive components of the cathedral’s eighteenth-century decoration.10 The subject of spiritual enlightenment continues in the adjacent scene to the right, where Thornhill painted the blinding by Paul of the sorcerer Elymas, and the resulting conversion of the Roman proconsul Sergius Paulus who is enthroned at the center of the composition (Figure 3). Continuing the visual narrative around the dome, in The Sacrifice at Lystra (Figure 4) the visitor encounters Paul again, this time accompanied by Barnabas as they resist the idolatrous advances of the Lycaonians who, having witnessed the healing of a lame man, prepare a sacrifice in honor of the two apostles they mistakenly believe to be pagan gods. For the fourth scene, Thornhill turned to the moment, several years later, when Paul and Silas convert their Roman jailor in the Macedonian city of Philippi (Figure 5). This is followed, in the westernmost bay, by the sight of Paul addressing the Epicureans and Stoics of colonial Athens (Figure 6). In the sixth scene, the apostle directs his evangeli-cal ardor toward the citizens of Ephesus, where he convinced the conjurors of the ancient city to burn their books of “curious arts” (Figure 7). In the penultimate bay, Paul recounts his own conversion as he defends himself against the charge of sedition before King Agrippa (Figure 8). Finally, closing the circle, we find the apostle shipwrecked on the island of Melita, miraculously shaking off a poisonous viper that has leaped out of a fire, to the astonishment of the assembled islanders (Figure 9). In each section the horizon is obscured, with an accompanying loss of perspective that reduces the background to an assortment of architectural (in one case, maritime) motifs, marking out a shallow, grid-like ground against which the apostle’s animated gestures remain legible even when viewed from the cathedral floor some 200 feet below. In this way, Paul is repeatedly presented to the cathedral’s visitors as a dynamic figure: first as he is converted, then as he actively seeks to convert those around him.

The extraordinary scale of Thornhill’s scheme is conveyed most effectively by a later engraving published in 1755 by two Royal Academicians, John Gwynn and Samuel Wale (Figure 10). Their remarkable print offers a unique section view of the crossing and transepts of the cathedral, revealing the inner dome and show-ing how Thornhill and his assistants subsequently extended the architectural ele-ments of the decoration: both upwards into the conical brick dome that supports the cathedral’s great stone lantern, and downwards from the top of the tambour immediately beneath the dome to the Whispering Gallery.11 However, Gwynn and Wale’s design has also prompted a degree of confusion over the original extent of Thornhill’s decoration, by combining an impressive description of the executed work with an unrealized proposal for extending the decoration into the main body of the cathedral “agreeably to the original Intention of Sr Christopher Wren”—a rather spurious claim on the part of the publishers.

Recent cleaning trials have confirmed that the upper section of the drum was enriched with painted fluting on the pilasters, and that the rectangular panels


Figure 2. James Thornhill, The Conversion of Saul, 1715–17. Oil on plaster. Courtesy of Paine & Stewart Ltd. and the Dean and Chapter of St. Paul’s Cathedral.

Figure 3. James Thornhill, The Blinding of Ely-mas, 1715–17. Oil on plaster. Courtesy of Paine & Stewart Ltd. and the Dean and Chapter of St. Paul’s Cathedral.

Figure 4. James Thornhill, The Sacrifice at Lystra, 1715–17. Oil on plaster. Courtesy of Paine & Stewart Ltd. and the Dean and Chapter of St. Paul’s Cathedral.

Figure 5. James Thornhill, Paul Converting the Jailor at Philippi, 1715–17. Oil on plaster. Cour-tesy of Paine & Stewart Ltd. and the Dean and Chapter of St. Paul’s Cathedral.


Figure 6. James Thornhill, Paul Preaching in Ath-ens, 1715–17. Oil on plaster. Courtesy of Paine & Stewart Ltd. and the Dean and Chapter of St. Paul’s Cathedral.

Figure 7. James Thornhill, The Conjurors of Ephe-sus Burning their Books, 1715–17. Oil on plaster. Courtesy of Paine & Stewart Ltd. and the Dean and Chapter of St. Paul’s Cathedral.

Figure 8. James Thornhill, Paul Before King Agrippa, 1715–17. Oil on plaster. Courtesy of Paine & Stewart Ltd. and the Dean and Chapter of St. Paul’s Cathedral.

Figure 9. James Thornhill, Paul Shipwrecked on the Island of Melita, 1715–17. Oil on plaster. Courtesy of Paine & Stewart Ltd. and the Dean and Chapter of St. Paul’s Cathedral.


beneath each window alternately included the crossed swords of St. Paul and swags.12 These architectural elements of Thornhill’s scheme, whitewashed during the 1850s, have recently been reinstated as part of an extensive program of resto-ration in anticipation of the 2010 tercentenary of the cathedral building’s comple-tion. However, the cathedral accounts indicate that the gallery wall immediately beneath the tambour—where Gwynn and Wale depict a series of smaller panels with biblical subjects, long thought to have been a part of Thornhill’s original scheme—was originally finished by another painter, Samuel Nichols, in a single flat color.13 All painting in the upper reaches of the church had ceased by the sum-mer of 1721, six years after work had begun, when the last of the scaffolding was removed from the crossing. It had been a major undertaking, for which Thornhill was paid a total of £6,575.14

Responsibility for the New Testament subject matter of the dome lay with the royal commission appointed by Queen Anne to oversee the final stages of the rebuilding. The commissioners—an august body of senior churchmen, aris-tocrats, and intellectuals, headed by the Archbishop of Canterbury—first turned their attention toward the decoration of the inner dome in the spring of 1708, when the aging Surveyor General, Christopher Wren, was instructed to procure designs and proposals for an appropriate painted scheme.15 No suitable designs were forthcoming, however, and the following March the commissioners agreed

Figure 10. John Gwynn and Samuel Wale, Section of St Paul’s Cathedral, 1756. Engraving. Courtesy of the Dean and Chapter of St. Paul’s Cathedral.


upon a different approach: declaring an open invitation to all capable artists to submit a design for painting the cupola “with figures,” to which they added the sole proviso that the stated figures be “confined to the Scripturall History taken from the Acts of the Apostles.”16 One month later, preliminary designs and proposals were duly accepted from five painters, of whom two—Thornhill and the Venetian artist Antonio Pellegrini—were chosen the following February to submit further models in a second round of the contest.17 Further delay ensued, and in January 1710/11 Wren observed that the commissioners were no closer to deciding how, or by whom, the cupola was to be decorated.18 Shortly thereafter, the possibility of finishing the dome in a simpler fashion seems to have been temporarily revived as a cheaper and less contentious solution, closer perhaps to the plain coffering first suggested in miniature in the painted interior of Wren’s Great Model of 1674. But still no decision was forthcoming.19

George Vertue later attributed the slow progress of the commission to what he described as “mighty contests and parties”—a suggestive remark that led to Carol Gibson-Wood’s illuminating essay on the political background to Thornhill’s paint-ing at St. Paul’s. Pointing to the conflicting Whig and Tory biases of the successive committees appointed to oversee the final stages of the rebuilding, Gibson-Wood explains the commissioners’ protracted indecision in the light of the party-political wrangling that accompanied the later years of Queen Anne’s reign—a situation finally resolved during the Whig ascendancy that followed the arrival in England of the first Hanoverian monarch in 1714.20 Vertue may have also had in mind other “mighty contests” that had arisen during the critical early stages of the commis-sion. First was the incendiary trial and sentencing of Henry Sacheverell following the clergyman’s barely concealed denouncement of the Glorious Revolution in a sermon delivered at St. Paul’s in 1709. Second was the unseemly breakdown of communication between those responsible for the fabric of the cathedral, which resulted in what London’s press called the Frauds and Abuses scandal. The affair saw Wren and his supporters publicly accused of mismanagement and financial irregularities amid claim and counter-claim that eventually led to the dissolution of the rebuilding commission—forcing an unceremonious interlude at what ought to have been the cathedral’s finest hour.21

Another four years were to pass before the question of how and by whom the dome should be painted was eventually resolved. Finally, on 28 June 1715, three days after the rebuilding commission had reconvened under a new royal warrant, a meeting headed by the Bishop of London and attended by Christopher Wren, Isaac Newton, and twelve other commissioners considered and accepted a new proposal from Thornhill. Their decision is recorded in some detail, and is worth citing again here in full:

Mr James Thornhill was this day chosen to paint the great Dome of St Paul’s, And It was ordered to be done in Basso-Relievo, after the midlemost of the 3 Designes w[hi]ch now hang in the Chapterhouse, including all Guilding, according to his proposall given this day to the Com[mission]ers to be performed in the best manner he can, w[hi]ch he promiseth to finish if possible by the later end of the next summer, And he is to receive for the whole Worke, not exceeding the sume of 4000 £.22


New light is cast on the commissioners’ decision, and on Thornhill’s subsequent intervention at St. Paul’s, by a previously unpublished manuscript among the un-cataloged cathedral papers in London’s Guildhall Library.23 Prepared and signed by Thornhill himself, the document describes the artist’s plans for the dome at length, outlining the proposed scheme, “both as to method, price & time.”

Several details, including the agreed-upon timing and cost of the project, clearly identify this undated document as the written proposal considered by the fabric committee in June 1715 when, after six years of deferment, Thornhill was finally chosen to paint the dome. First, the painter notes his intention to segment the hemispherical surface with feigned architecture, in accordance with the eight piers of the crossing below, before suggesting an assortment of decorative motifs, all of which feature prominently in the executed design:

I humbly propose to divide the whole Cupola into 8 equall parts, to answer the 8 staircases & to terminate the Regular Architecture that is underneath. I propose to adorn those 8 parts or divisions with the richest Ornaments of Architecture, Basso relievos, Vases, Foliages, & all the Va-riety of Decorations as make [sic] keep an Air of Grandeur & Modesty.

The whole scheme was to be embellished with “the best double Gold,” selected for both “Beauty & duration,” in which manner, Thornhill hoped, “it will be very well worth 3000 £ at a common price of 30 sh per yard.”

Having set out his plans for the dome, and having cautiously named a price, the artist moved to secure the commission by emphasizing the value of his proposal, in more than monetary terms, to everyone concerned:

If your Honours are determined not to lay out so much it will be very easy to abate in the nature of the work & be reduced to any kind of price, according to the Design; though it is my humble opinion that the best will prove the Cheapest, & that as the Eyes of the World will be very much upon it, I shall do my hearty Endeavour to secure my Reputation & to merit whatever price your Honours shall allow.

As a record of the contractual stage of a grand-scale decorative project, Thornhill’s proposal is a rare survival, of interest beyond the immediate circumstances of the cathedral and its decoration. The artist emerges as a skilled negotiator, responsive to the issues concerning the cost and content of the commission that had held up the project until now. Moreover, by staking his own reputation on the success of the proposed design, Thornhill no doubt also hoped to remind his potential employers of his recent success in completing the decoration of another high-profile scheme of national import, in the lower hall of the Royal Naval Hospital at Greenwich. Finally, having reassured the commissioners that he was ready to begin work im-mediately, and that he would endeavor to finish the painting by the end of the following summer, the artist recorded the commissioners’ decision at the bottom of the page: “Agreed for 4000 £ not to exceed”—substantially more than he had been prepared to accept.

Thornhill’s carefully worded proposal bears a closer examination, not least for its suggestion that the distinctive monochrome appearance of the painting—far from being an unwelcome constraint imposed at the last minute by a group of


dogmatic churchmen—was already an integral feature of the proposal before it was considered by the commissioners in June 1715. It is striking, moreover, that the artist gives prominence to the architectural elements of the projected scheme, emphasizing the need to make any painting answerable to its physical surroundings while playing down the importance of the planned narrative content, which he refers to simply as “basso relievos”: a noun used routinely during the eighteenth century to denote figurative painting in imitation of a low-sculpted stone relief, as well as carving proper. It is the sumptuously painted arcade, laden with “the richest Orna-ments of Architecture” and finished with “the best double Gold,” that endows the final scheme with the kind of grandeur demanded by Wren’s monumental building, while the figurative components convey an air of restraint and modesty—attributes articulated most directly through the painting’s understated palette, but equally through the artist’s carefully chosen subjects, and by the compositional economy and condensed picture space of the resulting “basso relievos.”

Accordingly, in the final design the painted architecture serves as far more than a framing device for the eight narrative panels. Extensive coffering, later ex-tended up into the cone, dominates the center of the ceiling, while it is the bulky piers, loaded as promised with a wealth of decorative and ecclesiastical motifs, that first command the visitor’s attention. The unconventional pairing of the richly embellished architecture on the one hand and the sparing pictorial rhetoric of the eight narrative scenes on the other fulfils the artist’s promise of “Grandeur & Modesty,” but in a way that inverts the conventional hierarchy of grand-scale decorative history painting. Several artists from the Renaissance onward—including painters as diverse and well-known as Andrea Mantegna and Nicolas Poussin—had explored the associative meanings of grisaille, the technique of painting in imitation of carved stone, as a way of emphasizing the austerity and authenticity of their classical subjects.24 By overlaying the architectural elements of the scheme with such conspicuous and costly ornament, Thornhill further accentuated the sobriety—and, by implication, the antiquity—of the figurative panels framed within, evoking an authentic biblical past that was temporally distant but intellectually accessible to the cathedral’s diverse public.

As for the three designs referred to by the commissioners in 1715, some idea of their contents is indicated by the eyewitness account of Dudley Ryder, a young law student who recorded a visit to the cathedral in August 1716, at a criti-cal stage in the realization of Thornhill’s plan. Climbing the stairs to enjoy a view of the city from the summit, as many had done before, Ryder’s youthful curiosity led him onto the scaffolding above the Whispering Gallery, where the artist and his assistants were finishing the architectural part of the scheme. The “history part” was still to come, Ryder later recalled, but he was able to inspect three models, each “divided into eight columns or pieces of architecture, in each of which some one [sic] story of St Paul is described.”25 The models varied “partly in the different stories that are described in each and partly in the different postures and manners of describing the same story.” In two of the models, Ryder noted the inclusion of St. Paul’s escape from Damascus when he was lowered from the city wall in a basket—“a trifling story” he thought, and one that was not included in the third model, “that which is chosen.” It seems likely that this third model—which Ryder recalled in some detail, noting seven of the eight scenes that Thornhill went on to


paint—was the “midlemost of the 3 Designes” that had been considered by the commissioners along with the artist’s written proposal the previous summer.

PAINTING ON TRIAL

Thornhill had good reason to promote a form of history painting that valued “modesty” over the colorful illusionism of the Continental, Catholic model of church decoration that had reached its most theatrical toward the end of the previous century. As Clare Haynes has shown recently, the outright condemnation of religious imagery remained a minority view within the Anglican Church of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and elaborate depictions of Christ and the apostles remained an acceptable form of decoration in the private chapels of palaces and country houses, and within the closed environment of the university colleges. In more public places of worship, however—in the cathedral or parish church—any attempt to depart from a handful of approved subjects, or to display even those sanctioned images in a place other than above the altar, could be enough to arouse suspicions of encroaching popery.26

Carol Gibson-Wood has drawn attention to the writings of two senior clergymen who were instrumental in the later stages of the rebuilding of St. Paul’s Cathedral, and whose views were representative of the cautious acceptance of im-ages among the senior clergy.27 Thomas Tenison was Archbishop of Canterbury from 1695 until his death in 1715, and William Wake was the Bishop of Lincoln for ten years before becoming Tenison’s successor. Both men sat on the successive rebuilding commissions, and both had published similar views on idolatry earlier in their careers—views that would later have a direct impact upon the decoration of the cathedral. Tenison’s Of Idolatry (1678), for example, is a weighty dissec-tion of idolatry in all its forms from pre-Christian times to the present in which the author, while opposing the Romish veneration of images, was equally keen to distance the modern Anglican Church from both the hard-line image breakers of the Reformation and the Puritanical purges of the 1650s.

As Gibson-Wood suggests, Tenison offered a guarded approval of religious imagery within certain boundaries. For example, he declared that the representation of the New Testament saints was acceptable only when confined to the earthly, mortal roles of their subjects, and only then “if they be made with discretion.”28 It was an attitude that, broadly speaking, recognized the potential instructional value of religious art and implicitly acknowledged its cultural appeal to the laity: but, mindful of how effectively religious painting had been used by Counter-Reformation propagandists on the Continent, refused to allow the medium to be fully unleashed in English churches. For his part, William Wake first addressed the question of idolatry in 1686 with An Exposition of the Doctrine of the Church of England, a shorter treatise that is more enthusiastic in its approval of religious subjects, declaring the Church of England “so far from condemning the making of all sorts of Images, that we think it not any Crime to have the Histories of the Gospel carved or painted in our very Churches, which the Walls and Windows of several of them do declare.”29

For prominent Anglicans like Tenison and Wake, both of whom were in-fluential in shaping the later decorative policy of St. Paul’s Cathedral, the problem


was not painting and sculpture per se but their potential for misuse: only when acts of viewing became confused, willfully or otherwise, with acts of worship did the source of that confusion represent a danger to the Church. Accordingly, Tenison cited the Alexandrian St. Cyril approvingly and, in so doing, encapsulated his own opinion and that of the more moderate clergy:

We do not reprobate the noble Art of Painting. So far are we from that [extreme] that we allow to such as please, the Pictures of Jesus and his Saints. But for the adoration and worship of them, we detest it, as contrary to the Scripture, and lest, instead of God, we should ignorantly worship Colour, Artifice, Creatures.30

The conditional approval of religious imagery did not go unopposed, however, especially where doctrinal arguments for and against “Pictures of Jesus and his Saints” were called upon in defense of more immediate, temporal goals. The le-gitimacy and political potency of religious imagery were brought precariously to the fore during the extraordinary case of the Whitechapel altarpiece, a controversy that inadvertently aggravated the contentious issue of church ornament at a critical stage in the embellishment of St. Paul’s Cathedral.

In April 1714, a painting of the Last Supper by the Englishman James Fellowes was installed above the communion table in St. Mary’s Church in the East London parish of Whitechapel. The subject of the painting was not in itself contentious, and would have been barely noticed outside of the parish but for one detail: an alleged—by some accounts, unmistakable—resemblance between the figure of Judas Iscariot and the Whig cleric White Kennett. Kennett was a political adversary of Richard Welton, the Tory rector of St. Mary’s who, it was claimed by Kennett’s supporters, had ordered the likeness when commissioning the painting.31 The apparently willful confusion between an ambitious Whig churchman and the betrayer of Christ was gleefully reported in the press—fueling an acrimonious exchange of pamphlets and a mischievous print of the offending image in which the likeness was exaggerated for satirical effect—before the case was eventually referred to John Robinson, Bishop of London, who ordered that the painting be taken down.32

The quarrel over the Whitechapel painting inadvertently revived the debate on idolatry, prompting a reissue of The case concerning setting up images or paint-ing of them in churches, an uncompromising treatise against images from the late Thomas Barlow, Bishop of Lincoln. Barlow’s tract had first appeared in the wake of the case of the Moulton apostles in 1684, when the parishioners of Moulton in Lincolnshire were refused permission to display paintings of the twelve apostles in their church.33 The local churchwardens had been overruled by the zealous bishop, for whom the very idea of figurative decoration was anathema in a Protestant place of worship. On appeal, and in contrast to the later Whitechapel fiasco, the setting up of the Moulton apostles was declared lawful by the Archbishop of Canterbury, but not without provoking a forthright response from Barlow. In setting out his objections, he had appealed to the legal inheritance of the Reformation, denouncing all religious painting as “Popish Superstition” and citing the persuasive, if hopelessly outdated, authority of the “Homily against peril of Idolatry and superfluous decking of Churches” from the Second Book of Homilies, issued by Elizabeth I.34


Although such resolute iconoclasm does not appear to have had many supporters in the eighteenth century, Welton was not far off the mark in claiming that the specter of idolatry had been purposefully revived by Kennett and his sup-porters (“the very Scum of a Whigg-Faction” according to the aggrieved rector) for short-term political gain.35 Defending his own conduct during the Whitechapel incident, Kennett (or another writing on his behalf) sought to divert attention from the supposed likeness between himself and Judas with an uncharacteristic assault on images that echoed Barlow’s earlier argument in its absolute rejection of religious painting. “God’s horrible Wrath cannot be avoided,” warned the author of Images an Abomination to the Lord, “without the utter abolishing of Images in Churches.”36

The Whitechapel fiasco drew unwelcome attention to the often-bitter political discord within the Church during the latter years of Queen Anne’s reign. It also revealed the fragility of the Protestant image within the secular realm of modern party rivalry. In ordering the removal of the altarpiece, Bishop Robinson sidestepped the issue of idolatry and fudged the equally damaging question of whether or not the painting constituted a libel against Kennett, citing instead the more anodyne fact that the painting had been erected without the necessary permission.37 Nevertheless, the pamphlet-reading laity, all too familiar with public quarrels between clergymen, could have been in no doubt that the incident was born of a far deeper schism that threatened to overshadow the authority of the established Church. The thinly veiled censorship of the Whitechapel altarpiece preceded by a matter of months the decision by the rebuilding commission to end years of deliberation and finally complete the decoration of St. Paul’s.38 Returning to the cathedral, we can now see how Thornhill and his employers, chief among whom was Bishop Robinson, set about reclaiming the visual aspect of Protestant worship with a cycle of religious history paintings that takes the inflammatory is-sues of idolatry and factionalism as two of its central themes.

PROTESTANT VISION

The first two episodes in the dome engage explicitly with the issue of the religious use and abuse of the visual by associating the process of Christian con-version with physical blindness. Both scenes represent well-rehearsed episodes of Christian mythology: first, as the future apostle is blinded by a heavenly light on his way to Damascus, losing the use of his eyes for three days (Acts 9:1–18); second, as Paul in turn deprives the sorcerer Elymas of his sight temporarily as a punishment for attempting “to pervert the right ways of the Lord,” converting Sergius Paulus in the process (Acts 13:6–12). When viewed in the light of contemporary anxieties over the visual aspect of worship, the implications of Thornhill’s choice of subject become apparent. True Protestant enlightenment necessitated a temporary loss of sight, or an end to old ways of looking, before the individual could learn to see the world anew, stripped of the distractions and superstitions of false religion.

The religiosity of sight and sightlessness had evidently occupied Thornhill for some time as it is a recurring theme in the artist’s preliminary drawings and sketches, more than fifty of which survive for this scheme alone, including early color oil stud-ies relating to three of the eight scenes (see, for example, Figure 11). One way of plotting a course through these many preparatory works is to observe how the artist


repeatedly adjusts and refines the figurative details of the scheme as it develops on the page. What emerges is a meticulous concern for biblical narrative that is in marked contrast to Thornhill’s written proposal to the commissioners, in which the pictorial aspect of the project was purposefully underplayed. In one chalk and wash study for the Blinding of Elymas (Figure 12), for example, Thornhill envisaged the scene more or less as it was eventually painted. The drawing differs from alternative versions of the same episode, however, in its focus on Sergius Paulus’s immediate, involuntary reaction to Elymas’s sudden loss of sight—an instant graphically conveyed by the proconsul’s animated body language, as well as by the physical nature of the blind sorcerer’s clawing gesture. In a closely related chalk drawing (Figure 13), as in the final design, the artist has moved the narrative forward momentarily—most visibly by shifting the proconsul’s attention from the blind Elymas toward Paul, whose own clear vision enabled him to see through Elymas’s trickery.

It is not necessary to insist on a particular chronology for these and other exploratory works to see that collectively they show Thornhill restlessly playing around with the precise moment that each scene was to represent, before arriving at a configuration that conveyed most effectively the reformed gaze of its central character, on whose conversion the rhetorical force of the episode hangs. Elsewhere around the dome, whether depicting Paul preventing a pagan sacrifice at Lystra by urging those gathered to “turn from these vanities unto the living God” (Acts 14:11–15); preaching to the Athenians on “Mars’ hill,” where visitors to the cathe-dral witness the apostle declaring, “I perceive that in all things ye are too supersti-tious”’ (Acts 17:22–34); or, in a less familiar episode, persuading the sorcerers of Ephesus to burn their books of magic (Acts 19:1–19), it seems that Thornhill sought to reassure his patrons by tackling head on the difficult question of idolatry in all its guises. The result is a pictorial scheme that could itself be read as a powerful lesson warning against the misuse of images and other superstitious texts.39

In this way, Thornhill’s final designs provided a powerful riposte to the critics of church imagery, absorbing the dangers associated with such a bold pictorial intervention by framing the viewer’s own vision within a pious setting. By affording the painted dome anything more than a cursory glance, eighteenth-century visitors were forced to confront the spiritual perils of abusing their own eyesight. Moreover, this lesson in Protestant vision was presented in a way that associated modern Anglicanism with the uncorrupted early Church, inviting con-temporary churchgoers to identify the wayward pagan spiritualism encountered by Paul with the equally superstitious rituals of the modern Church in Rome, and marking Catholic idolatry (rather than religious imagery per se) as an Elymas-like perversion of God’s will.

If these experiments in pictorial invention suggest that Thornhill’s scheme can be profitably explored in relation to contemporary debates within the Church, they also indicate that the eight narrative bays must be understood within the broader category of Western religious painting, as works of art whose terms of reference reached beyond the ideological and physical spaces of worship. More specifically, as well as indicating a keen attentiveness to the doctrinal implications of his chosen subjects, Thornhill’s preparatory drawings also reveal an ongoing engagement with Raphael’s celebrated Acts of the Apostles.40 Raphael’s seven sur-viving tapestry cartoons, from a series of ten originally produced for Pope Leo X,


Figure 11. James Thornhill, The Blinding of Elymas, c. 1710. Oil on canvas. Courtesy of the Dean and Chapter of St. Paul’s Cathedral.

had been highly esteemed in England ever since their arrival in the 1620s. Their importance continued to grow following their repair and installation in Christopher Wren’s purpose-built gallery at Hampton Court in 1699. Thereafter they enjoyed near-mythical status, becoming the most copied, written about, and emulated im-ages in the country, with a reputation that transcended their Catholic origins and reached far beyond the immediate environs of the court through a succession of printed and painted reproductions (see, for example, Figures 14 and 15).41

The first three of Thornhill’s designs for the dome at St. Paul’s find direct counterparts among the cartoons, while the other five engage with the series in a variety of other ways: either by depicting episodes that Raphael had also painted but which had not survived, or by complementing or otherwise extending the narrative sequence that was initiated by the cartoons. In other words, through a pattern of repetition, variation, and allusion, all eight of Thornhill’s designs can be positioned, in one way or another, relative to those of Raphael.


Figure 13. James Thornhill, preliminary study for The Blinding of Elymas, c. 1715. Chalk and other drawing media on paper. Courtesy of the Trustees of the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Figure 12. James Thornhill, preliminary study for The Blinding of Elymas, c. 1715. Various drawing media on paper. Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum.


Figure 14. Simon Gribelin after Raphael, Elymas the Sorcerer Struck with Blindness, 1707. Engraving. Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum. Figures 14 and 15 belong to the first of several sets of prints made from the cartoons and published in the eighteenth century.

Figure 15. Simon Gribelin after Raphael, Paul and Barbabas at Lystra, 1707. Engraving. Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum.


In the final design for the Blinding of Elymas, for example, we can see how the artist shifted forward the rhetorical emphasis of the image, by selecting a point in the biblical narrative that immediately followed that depicted by Raphael, and upon which Thornhill had modeled his earlier drawing. This calculated adjustment, signaled most clearly from one image to the next by the shifting attitude of Sergius Paulus toward the apostle, not only emphasized the purification of the proconsul’s vision but also inaugurated an artistic dialogue with one of the most celebrated pictorial series of the Italian Renaissance. The critical difference between Raphael’s design and Thornhill’s depiction of the same scene may rest on little more than the turn of a head through ninety degrees, but with such a small adjustment Thornhill clearly proposed an alternative pictorialization of the subject by situating his own design in the moment after Raphael’s takes place. In this way, Thornhill encour-aged the viewer to regard his paintings in the same serious-minded, theoretical way that was routinely applied to the greatest examples of the Italian Renaissance. It was, moreover, a form of pictorial dialogue that the artist implicitly encouraged eighteenth-century collectors to pursue on paper when subscribing for a set of the St. Paul’s engravings.

In another appeal to the Protestant faithful at St. Paul’s, in The Sacrifice at Lystra we find the apostle forcefully rejecting the idolatrous attention of the

Figure 16. James Thornhill, preliminary study for The Sacrifice at Lystra, c. 1715. Ink and wash on paper. Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum.


Lycaonians by tearing off his clothes in order to reveal his naked flesh—proof of his own mortal status. Meanwhile, Barnabas, immediately behind Paul, gestures in defiance: both of the scene that is unfolding at their feet and of the simultaneous sacrifice enacted on the carved pediment of an adjacent temple, itself a reworking of Raphael’s version of the same image. Again, a brief examination of the artist’s preparatory works reveals the painting’s Raphaelesque origins. In one early design (Figure 16), from a group of pen-and-wash drawings distinguished by their loose handling and by the relatively ornate architecture that frames each scene, Thornhill repeats, quite unmistakably, the ox and the two Lycaonian priests from the right of Raphael’s design. Both images center on one all-important detail—the raised ax, which Raphael has introduced to represent a critical moment in the narrative. Held aloft by a priest, poised ready to deliver the fatal blow, its perilous position signals the final, highly charged moment at which the sacrifice could be stopped. Thornhill’s drawing follows this arrangement particularly closely, clearly identify-ing the raised ax as a central motif and, with a few provisional lines, including the younger figure whose outstretched arm lent an additional urgency to Raphael’s composition.

However, in the reworked design that was eventually painted in the dome, the ax has been removed to the edge of the picture, where it rests, half-hidden and unthreatening, over the priest’s shoulder. The alternative treatment of this crucial pictorial detail highlights a strategic difference between the two paintings—quite apart from any formal concessions that Thornhill’s later image makes to the shape of the dome. In Raphael’s invention—as well as in Thornhill’s initial, tentative drawing—the ax teeters between life and death, suspended between the conflict-ing religions represented in the picture. As such, it physically and symbolically separates Paul from the as yet unconverted crowd. By contrast, in Thornhill’s final version the same motif emphasizes the disarming effect of Paul’s preaching and of the triumph of the Word of God over idolatry and brute force.

“NATIVE SIMPLICITY”

The figure of St. Paul had been implicated in contemporary theological and political debates in other ways that had a bearing on Thornhill’s painting. Church historian Jeremy Gregory has observed how it became a regular conceit of eighteenth-century preachers in the cathedral to illuminate contemporary issues by drawing on the life and writings of its patron saint in their sermons, a number of which were subsequently published for wider consumption. By and large, Paul was valued by the clergy as a unifying role model for an institution otherwise vulnerable to the damaging effects of schism. According to Gregory, moderate churchmen found in Paul a model of true Anglican behavior: “What they saw as St Paul’s emphasis on practicalities, and this-worldly actions, as well as his stress on unity and concord, [were] useful paradigms with which to address current concerns.”42 It was a natural extension of Paul’s role within the capital that, when represented in the dome, he should be called upon to address the same concerns that occupied the city’s preachers in the pulpits below. But if Paul was regarded by many as a shining example of moderation, he could also be summoned by those intent on exposing divisions within both Church and society. This was most spectacularly the case on 5 November 1709, when Henry Sacheverell took to the pulpit at St. Paul’s,


beneath an as yet unpainted dome, to deliver his infamous sermon on “The Perils of False Bretheren”—a ferocious attack on the Whig government and its Episcopal allies, in which a Whiggish Church of England was likened to the corrupt Church of Corinth decried by Paul in his second letter to the Corinthians.

The publication of Sacheverell’s sermon and its author’s subsequent im-peachment triggered an outpouring of pamphlet literature and graphic satire, as well as sermons from politicking clergymen from both sides, in an affair that has received the close attention of political and cultural historians of the period.43 One such pamphlet, typical of the kind of dry scholarly literature that emerged in opposition to Sacheverell, set out the general opinion of Whigs and moderate Tories alike. St Paul and her Majesty Vindicated (1710) took the form of an inquiry into the true meaning of Paul’s precept that “he who Opposeth the Government, Resisteth the Ordinance of God”—a loose translation from Paul’s Epistle to the Romans 13:2 that allowed the pamphlet’s anonymous author to distinguish between “the Government,” which it was agreed may never be resisted, and the individual “Prince or Ruler,” who may justifiably be opposed if he acts with “private Will” against the Government.44 By responding squarely to Sacheverell’s insistence on “the utter Illegality of Resistance upon any Pretence whatsoever,” the pamphlet’s author repudiated the accusation (implicit throughout Sacheverell’s offending sermon) that resistance to James II in 1688 had been a betrayal of God as well as of the king.45 The purpose of such pamphlets (and St Paul and her Majesty Vindicated is representative of many) was to reclaim London’s patron saint—and, by association, the building that carried his name—from the likes of Sacheverell who had held the apostle up as an exemplar of nonresistance, or passive obedience.

Several years after Thornhill’s work had first been exposed to the “Eyes of the World” and more than a decade after Sacheverell’s trial, a new Pauline tract offered a more detailed expository account of the apostle’s Revolution Principles. The Example of St Paul (1726) trawled the New Testament to illustrate Paul’s consistent refusal to “yield a tame Submission to Tyrants, governing according to Will and Pleasure, and not according to Law.”46 Far from advocating a doctrine of nonresistance, it was argued, Paul could be found “more than once having Recourse to the Law, and claiming the Benefit of it, in Opposition to those ruling Powers that had acted contrary to it.”47 Among the examples to be found were two episodes that Thornhill had painted in the dome a few years earlier: Paul’s imprisonment by the Roman magistrates of Philippi, and his appeal to King Agrippa in Caesarea, each of which the author explains with an equally Whiggish turn of phrase. On Paul’s encounter with Agrippa, for example, we learn how the apostle “shew’d a just Regard for the civil Liberties of Mankind, whereof the Law is the Guardian” when appealing against “the arbitrary and illegal Proceedings of Rulers.”48

Strikingly, both of these episodes already formed a highly visible part of the cathedral’s figurative decoration, providing the subjects for two of four new panels commissioned for the west portico from the sculptor Francis Bird around 1712—three years before Thornhill began work on the interior (see, for example, Figure 17).49 The pictorial affinity between Bird’s bas-reliefs and Thornhill’s much larger “basso relievo” paintings in the dome point to a consistent decorative strategy on the part of the cathedral’s commissioners during the later stages of the rebuilding, manifested in a shared concern for compositional clarity and an icono-


graphical emphasis on Paul’s moral authority—central to which was the apostle’s recourse to the law when faced with the “arbitrary and illegal” proceedings of overreaching monarchs.50 The inclusion of a full-length marble statue of Queen Anne, by the same sculptor, extended the building’s figural aspect into the adjacent churchyard.51 Following its unveiling in front of the west entrance in 1713, Bird’s royal statue marked the beginning of an axial arrangement of figurative decoration that included the relief carving around the west entrance, and which later reached inside to include Thornhill’s eight grisaille history paintings over the crossing. Far from being an unfortunate “blemish,” the later decorative components of St. Paul’s should be understood as an essential chapter in the rebuilding of the cathedral, played out against a recent history of political upheaval and amid rival claims for doctrinal authority that could hardly have been imagined when work on the new church had begun four decades earlier.

As well as offering an apposite commentary on one of the central icono-graphic themes of the cathedral’s decoration—that of Paul’s legal resistance to the illegal demands of errant princes—the author of The Example of St Paul also shared the principle that when it came to the representation of biblical history, less was more. The treatise, addressed to ministers and “private Christians” alike, was prefaced by a recommendation of its author’s clear style from two popular nonconformist preachers, John Evans and Isaac Watts. The insistently visual way in which Evans and Watts approve the straightforward narrative that readers of The Example of St Paul could expect is particularly worthy of note:

So shining a Character as the Apostle Paul’s might easily be wrought up with many Embellishments . . . But at the same Time it may justly be said, that it doth not need it. The naked Representation of so many divine Excellencies, in their native Simplicity and in a contracted View, presents us with such a Constellation of Graces and Virtues, as is suf-ficient to excite Admiration and a holy Ardour to imitate them, without any artificial Colourings.52

It would be difficult to imagine a more convincing endorsement of the eight scenes that Thornhill and the cathedral commissioners had jointly conceived for the central space in St. Paul’s. The tantalizing parallel between the plain-style writing recommended here and the somber, stone-like tones and sparing pictorial rhetoric of the decorated inner dome alludes to a Protestant aesthetic that emphasized the instructional value of contemplating the apostle’s life through art, including the notion that simplicity in matters of doctrine and liturgy brought worship-pers closer to God. For the nineteenth-century author cited at the beginning of this essay, the “naked appearance” of the cathedral had become something of an embarrassment in need of colorful disguise. To the authors of The Example of St Paul, by contrast, the unadorned representation of the saint’s life provided a way of expounding biblical truths without any unnecessary embellishment. Far from the pale compromise that it would later seem, to earlier churchgoers the “native Simplicity” of religious history—its very nakedness—was a testament to its modesty and confirmed the cathedral’s status as one of the most significant artistic sites of the eighteenth-century capital.

Following the completion of the decoration, contemporary guidebooks invariably recommended that visitors pause at the Whispering Gallery, the narrow


balcony around the base of the drum, to enjoy a better view of Thornhill’s larger-than-life scheme. In 1729, the anonymous author of The Foreigner’s Guide, printed in English and French, counted both the gallery and Thornhill’s painting among the sights of particular interest in the cathedral, urging the visitor to rest on his way to the roof to take in “the whispering Place above [where] you will also much better observe the Beauty of the Painting.”53 Another guide of 1730 praised “the fine view of the curious paintings” from the gallery, helpfully identified the subject of each scene, and even remarked upon the ease with which the gentle steps could be climbed by “notable visitors.”54 For these early viewers, ascending the cathedral to enjoy a bird’s eye view of the post-Fire capital, Thornhill’s painting was part of a larger architectural adventure that took them into the inner recesses of Wren’s building before they emerged onto the uppermost gallery, almost 300 feet above the ground.55 As they encountered the repeated image of the apostle preaching to and converting all kinds of people, from the rude inhabitants of Melita to the royal entourage of Agrippa in Caesarea, Paul assumed a potent polyvalent identity. As God’s chosen apostle to the gentiles and, since early medieval times, the patron saint of the City of London, Paul stood both as the champion of Christianity throughout the classical world and as the partisan embodiment of the modern Anglican Church, mediating between the cathedral’s monumental interior and the burgeoning urban prospect that lay beyond.

Figure 17. Francis Bird, Paul Before King Agrippa, carved relief in the west portico of St. Paul’s Cathe-dral, 1712–13. Courtesy of the Dean and Chapter of St. Paul’s Cathedral.


NOTES

I am deeply indebted to Emily Mann, Anthony Geraghty, Mark Hallett, and Clare Haynes, as well as to the editors and anonymous readers, for their comments on various drafts of this article. My thanks are also extended to Jeremy Barker, Jeremy Gregory, Gordon Higgott, Stephen Paine, and Hannah Talbot.

1. The architectural history of St. Paul’s Cathedral is well documented. Among the most lasting modern studies is Jane Lang, Rebuilding St. Paul’s after the Great Fire of London (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1956). More recently, the history and architecture of the cathedral have been reassessed in Derek Keene, Arthur Burns and Andrew Saint, eds., St Paul’s: The Cathedral Church of London, 604–2004 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2004).

2. George Vertue, “Notebooks,” Walpole Society 18 (1930): 39. Ricci’s interest in the St. Paul’s commission is registered in a letter from John Talman to Henry Newton in November 1711, discussed by Carol Gibson-Wood in “The Political Background to Thornhill’s Paintings in St Paul’s Cathedral,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 56 (1993): 235.

3. Weekly Packet, 18–25 June 1715. The full notice reads: “We hear, that the Commissioners for building and repairing St. Paul’s Cathedral, have at last agreed with Mr. Thornhill to paint the Dome of that Cupola; and it is not to be doubted, when finish’d, but the exquisite Skill of this our celebrated Country-man, whose Memory must live as long as Hampton-Court or Greenwich-Hospital are in Be-ing, will put to Silence all the loud Applauses we have hitherto given to foreign Artists.”

4. The same notice appeared in the Post Boy and the Evening Post on 17 October 1717, and again in the Weekly Journal for 26 October, suggesting that Thornhill himself may have been behind the advertisement.

5. Daily Courant, 15 October 1719. The completed set of prints was issued to subscribers the following May.

6. The artist’s career is examined in Richard Johns, “James Thornhill and Decorative History Paint-ing in England after 1688” (Ph.D. thesis, University of York, 2004). See also Edward Croft-Murray, Decorative Painting in England 1537–1837, 2 vols. (London: Country Life, 1962–70).

7. John Britton, The Original Picture of London, Enlarged and Improved (London, 1826), 84. Britton’s comments echoed the earlier remarks of one French author, who typified the reaction of his countrymen by noting “la nudité de ce temple qui, comparé aux églises catholiques, ressemble à un Palais démeublé.” See Pierre Jean Grosley, Londres, 4 vols. (Lausanne, 1774), 3:257. Thornhill’s painting narrowly avoided complete destruction later in the nineteenth century. In 1878, several proposals to cover the inner dome with mosaic were submitted to the Dean; in July, the St. Paul’s Completion [sic] Fund Committee proposed to cover the dome with painted paper, “to try the effect of the proposed decoration of the dome” (Academy, 20 July 1878). The later nineteenth-century redecoration of St. Paul’s prompted a prolonged and sometimes heated exchange in the press, with the most vocal op-position coming from the students of the Slade as well as London’s other art colleges, who protested against “the tyranny of disfigurements which those who are responsible for the ‘decoration’ of St. Paul’s unhappily seek to impose on posterity” (Open Letter, Academy, 13 May 1899).

8. Kerry Downes, Sir Christopher Wren (London: Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1982), 72. Continuing along the same vein, the most recent book-length study of the cathedral refers simply to “Thornhill’s hated paintings in the dome.” See James W. P. Campbell, Building St Paul’s (London: Thames & Hud-son, 2008), 165. Evidence for Wren’s often-cited but anecdotal preference for Italian mosaic originates with the manuscript notes of his son, also called Christopher, first published by the architect’s grandson several years after the event. See Christopher Wren, Parentalia: or, memoirs of the family of the Wrens (London, 1750), 292.

9. Croft-Murray, Decorative Painting, 1:74.

10. Bird’s pediment relief was completed in 1706. Additionally, there are nine smaller carvings by Bird on and around the west front of the cathedral depicting other episodes from the life of the saint. For an excellent account of the sculptural decoration of St. Paul’s, see Philip Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of the City of London (Liverpool: Liverpool Univ. Press, 2003), 361–81.


11. Thornhill produced a model to persuade the rebuilding committee of “the necessity of paint-ing the Crowne of the Cone above the Cupola” some months before the work was agreed to in the spring of 1718. The commissioners delayed their decision because neither Wren nor Isaac Newton, also a commissioner, could be present when the additional painting was first proposed. See Minutes of the commissioners for rebuilding St. Paul’s Cathedral (1685/6–1724), MS 25622/2, 3 March 1717/8, Guildhall Library, London (hereafter cited as Guildhall Library), and various other entries between June 1716 and June 1719. Further painting in the tambour was agreed to on 1 March 1719/20. A proposal from the artist to decorate the half-domes and pendentives of the crossing was accepted at the same time, but was subsequently dropped by the commissioners (18 June 1720).

12. Paine and Stewart Ltd., “St Paul’s Cathedral: The Results of Uncovering Trials within Areas of the Tambour” (unpublished conservators’ report, March 2001). See also Jane Davies, “Microscopy and Archival Research: Interpreting Results within the Context of Historical and Traditional Practice,” Infocus (formerly Proceedings of the Royal Microscopical Society) 3 (Sept. 2006): 32–45. An earlier project to clean the painting is documented in [Godfrey Allen], “Cleaning St Paul’s,” Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects 43.19 (1936): 1037–41. The niches in the tambour remained empty until 1892, when Charles Kempe and William Woodington installed the present statues of the Fathers of the Church.

13. The cathedral accounts for the second half of 1721 record payments to Nichols for twice painting the Whispering Gallery wall, each with three coats in oil—work consistent with the results of recent paint trials. See Accounts of expenditure on building work, MS 25473/42, 118, Guildhall Library; and the unpublished paint analysis report by Jane Davies Conservation, “St Paul’s Cathedral: The Dome Paintings by Sir James Thornhill” (April 2000).

14. MS 25473/42, 119, Guildhall Library; and St. Paul’s Cathedral acquittance book, MS 25481/8, 35–59, Guildhall Library. The accounts for the second half of 1721 detail the complete payments Thornhill had received during the previous six years, amounting to £4,000 for the dome, £450 for the lantern, and £2,125 for the tambour. The high price for painting the tambour is explained, in part at least, by Thornhill’s enhanced status (he had recently received a knighthood) and by the amount of gilding required for the pilasters.

15. MS 25622/2, 21 April 1708, Guildhall Library. Subsequent events, leading to Thornhill’s ap-pointment seven years later, have been considered most fully in Gibson-Wood, “Political Background”; and by Teresa Sladen in “Embellishment and Decoration, 1696–1900,” in Keene, Burns and Saint, St. Paul’s, esp. 237–41.

16. See MS 25622/2, 3 March 1708/9, Guildhall Library. The question of whether or not the dome should include figures (a considerably more expensive form of decoration) had been deferred during the commissioners’ previous meeting, when Wren was asked to establish the remaining funds needed to complete the cathedral.

17. MS 25622/2, 5 April 1709 and 11 February 1709/10, Guildhall Library. Both painters were provided with a “little Cupolo” for their new designs. The other three contenders were the French painters Louis Cheron and Pierre Berchett, and the Neapolitan Giovanni Battista Catenaro. An earlier decision had been postponed because the Archbishop of Canterbury could not be present at the first meeting. See also George Vertue, “Notebooks,” 39.

18. Wren’s comments appear in a letter to the commissioners from 25 January 1710/11, in which the eighty-year-old architect effectively absolved himself of responsibility for any future work in the cathedral. The letter was subsequently published as part of a pamphlet, An answer to a pamphlet entitul’d Frauds and Abuses at St. Paul’s (London, 1713), 59–60 (see n. 21 below).

19. In February 1710/11, the commissioners were shown new estimates for painting the dome: first, “with panels of histories taken out of the Acts of the Apostles,” as planned (estimated at £3,500); second, “with ornaments of architecture in basso relieve, and the mouldings heightened with gold” (£2,000). Wren noted that “several are more inclined to this latter way than the other.” See Wren Society 16 (1939): 147 and 174.

20. George Vertue, “Notebooks,” Walpole Society 20 (1931–32): 125; and Gibson-Wood, “Political Background.” Vertue complicates the history of the commission further with the tantalizing claim that the French painter Louis Laguerre had been chosen to paint the dome “in propper Colours” and had even spent a month working onsite before the idea of a competition was raised. The fragmentary and


typically enigmatic nature of Vertue’s recollections, coupled with the fabric committee’s silence on the matter, means that Laguerre’s involvement with the project must remain a matter for speculation. It is worth noting, however, that in 1710 the City painter William Thompson was employed to prime the inside of the dome with three coats in oil, effectively precluding the possibility of any earlier decorative work (MS 25473/41, 258, Guildhall Library). Thompson received £187 14s for painting the inside of the dome and the choir, which amounted to 5,754 square yards.

21. Francis Hare set out the case against Wren and James Bateman in his pamphlet, Frauds and Abuses at St. Paul’s. In a letter to a Member of Parliament (London, 1712). For a recent summary of the controversy, see Campbell, Building St Paul’s, 154–61. The episode is also covered in detail in Wren Society 16 (1939), part 3.

22. MS 25622/2, 28 June 1715, Guildhall Library. At the same meeting the commissioners dis-cussed the ongoing inquiry into the recent Frauds and Abuses affair and reappointed Wren as Chief Surveyor.

23. James Thornhill’s proposal for painting the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral, Box CF49 (loose material), Guildhall Library. I am most grateful to Anthony Geraghty for bringing this document to my attention.

24. See, for example, Sabine Blumenröder, “Andrea Mantegna’s Grisaille Paintings: Colour Metamor-phosis as a Metaphor for History,” in Symbols of Time in the History of Art, ed. Christian Heck and Kristen Lippincott (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2002), 41–55; and Todd P. Olson, Poussin and France: Painting, Humanism and the Politics of Style (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2002), esp. 28–29.

25. Dudley Ryder, The Diary of Dudley Ryder, 1715–1716, ed. William Matthews (London: Methuen, 1939), 306–8. Although Ryder thought privately that Thornhill’s figures lacked “that air of grandeur and majesty in describing the postures and faces which appears in the most masterly pictures,” he was eager to compliment the artist by declaring “we should now be able to vie at least with Paris for history painting.”

26. See Clare Haynes, “The Culture of Judgement: Art and Anti-Catholicism in England, c. 1660–c. 1760,” Historical Research 78.202 (2005): 483–505; and Haynes, Pictures and Popery: Art and Re-ligion in England, 1660–1760 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), esp. 102–35. Haynes offers an invaluable insight into the socially nuanced reception of religious painting in England during the period. See also G. W. O. Addleshaw and Frederick Etchells, The Architectural Setting of Anglican Worship (London: Faber & Faber, 1948), 158–61. Among the subjects that were acceptable to most clergy were images of Moses and Aaron (usually shown flanking an inscription of the Ten Commandments) from the Old Testament, and of the Last Supper from the New.

27. See Gibson-Wood, “Political Background,” 232.

28. Thomas Tenison, Of Idolatry: A Discourse (London, 1678), 297. See also the rest of chapter XII, “Of the idolatry charged on the Romanists in worshipping Images,” 276–302.

29. William Wake, An Exposition of the Doctrine of the Church of England (London, 1686), 15–16. Wake’s Exposition was written as a point-for-point response to the Bishop of Meaux’s An Exposition of the Doctrine of the Catholic Church in Matters of Controversie, which had been published in an English edition in 1685 to coincide with the accession of James II. Wake’s Exposition was followed in 1688 by A Discourse Concerning the Nature of Idolatry, in which he expounds his earlier views.

30. Tenison, Of Idolatry, 177.

31. White Kennett, Dean of Peterborough and an enthusiastic Whig, had previously been the chaplain to William Cavendish, 1st Duke of Devonshire. He became Bishop of Peterborough in 1718.

32. See, for example, [Willoughby Welley], A Letter to the Church Wardens of White-Chaple, Ocas-sioned by a New Altar-Piece Set up in their Church (London, 1714); and An Answer to Willoughby Willey’s Letter to the Church-Wardens of White-Chapel (London, 1714). Following the painting’s removal, rival explanations of the case were issued by Kennett and Welton: see [White Kennett], Images an Abomination to the Lord. Or, Dr Kenet’s Reasons for Pulling Down the Altar-piece at White-Chapel (London, [1714]); and R[ichard] Welton, Church-ornament without idolatry vindicated: in a sermon preach’d on occasion of an altar-piece lately erected in the Chancel of St. Mary White-Chappel (London, 1714).


33. For a detailed discussion of the controversies sparked by religious paintings in English parish churches see Haynes, Pictures and Popery, esp. 102–35; and Eirwen E. C. Nicholson, “The St. Clement Danes Altarpiece and the Iconography of Post-Revolution England” in Samuel Johnson in Historical Context, ed. J. C. D. Clark and Howard Erskine-Hill (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 55–76. The Moulton case is also discussed briefly in Addleshaw and Etchells, Architectural Setting, 161.

34. Thomas Barlow, The case concerning setting up images or painting of them in churches . . . Published upon occasion of a painting set up in White-Chappel Church (London, 1714), 7 (previously published as one of Several Miscellaneous and Weighty Cases of Conscience, learnedly and judiciously resolved [London, 1692]). See also Haynes, Pictures and Popery, 121–26.

35. Welton, Church-ornament without idolatry vindicated, unpaginated preface.

36. Kennett, Images, single sheet. The extreme iconoclasm attributed to Kennett here is all the more surprising given his earlier praise for the “exquisite Painting of the Miracles of our Saviour” in the 1st Duke of Devonshire’s chapel at Chatsworth, a room he knew well from his time as the Duke’s chaplain, and which he judged “as splendid as any in a Protestant Country.” See White Kennett, Memoirs of the Family of Cavendish (London, 1708), 23.

37. The Whole Tryal and Examination of Dr Welton, Rector of White-Chapel, and the Church-Wardens (London, 1714).

38. As Bishop of London, Robinson headed the meeting of the rebuilding commission at which it was agreed to give the task of painting the dome to Thornhill.

39. The message was further alluded to in the official engravings that followed the completion of the painting. An inscription accompanying Gerard Vandergucht’s engraving of Paul Preaching in Athens, for example, identified the precise moment that had been chosen for the scene, as Paul extolled the single (and invisible) God who lay behind the idols worshipped in the city, and declared: “Quem ergo ignorantes colitis, hunc ego vobis annuntio” [“Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you”] (Acts 17:23).

40. Thornhill’s work at St. Paul’s represents the latest phase in his career-long fascination with Ra-phael, culminating in the late 1720s when the artist made three full copies of all seven cartoons, including one full-size version now in the collection of the Royal Academy, London. This aspect of Thornhill’s career has been explored in detail by Arline Meyer in the exhibition and accompanying catalog Apostles in England: Sir James Thornhill & the Legacy of Raphael’s Tapestry Cartoons (New York: Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia Univ., 1996). See also John Shearman, Raphael’s Cartoons (London: Phaidon, 1972), esp. 138–64; and Johns, “James Thornhill,” esp. 90–110.

41. The reputation of the cartoons and the concurrent “Englishing” of Raphael during the eighteenth century are explored in detail by Haynes in Pictures and Popery, 46–73.

42. Jeremy Gregory, “Preaching Anglicanism at St. Paul’s, 1688–1800,” in Keene, Burns and Saint, St. Paul’s, 346.

43. See, for example, Geoffrey Holmes, The Trial of Doctor Sacheverell (London: Eyre Methuen, 1973); Clyve Jones, “Debates in the House of Lords on ‘The Church in Danger’, 1705, and on Dr Sacheverell’s Impeachment, 1710,” The Historical Journal 19 (1976): 759–71; and William Gibson, The Church of England 1688–1832: Unity and Accord (London: Routledge, 2001), esp. 78–81. For a discussion of Sacheverell’s impact on London’s graphic print culture, see Mark Hallett, The Spectacle of Difference: Graphic Satire in the Age of Hogarth (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1999), 29 –37.

44. St Paul and her Majesty Vindicated (In Proving from the Apostle’s own Words, Rom. XIII. That the Doctrine of Non-Resistance, As commonly Taught, is None of His) (London, 1710).

45. Henry Sacheverell, The perils of false brethren, both in church, and state: set forth in a sermon preach’d before the Right Honourable the Lord-Mayor (London, 1709), 12.

46. The Example of St Paul (London, 1726), 116.

47. Ibid.

48. Ibid., 118.


49. The other two carvings depict Paul before Felix and Paul bitten by a viper at Melita. The cathe-dral accounts record payments to Bird for only two of these four smaller portico reliefs, for £75 each in 1713. Payments were made to the sculptor “as before,” suggesting an earlier unrecorded account for the other two panels. See Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of the City of London, 369–71.

50. Notably, over the past two centuries Bird’s carvings for the pediment and portico of the west front have provoked the same negative response as Thornhill’s paintings. John Summerson confirmed this antipathy when he wrote that “Bird’s work has always been condemned as inadequate to the occa-sion and it is, indeed, superficial and lacking in any original feeling for design” (Architecture in Britain 1530–1830 [New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1993], 218–19).

51. The present statue is a late nineteenth-century replica of Bird’s original. The figure was probably conceived around 1709 and was advancing by June 1710. See Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of the City of London, 375–81.

52. John Evans and Isaac Watts, The Example of St Paul, unpaginated preface.

53. The Foreigner’s Guide: or companion both for the foreigner and native, in their tour through . . . London and Westminster (London, 1729), 64.

54. The Dimensions and Curiosities of St Paul’s Cathedral (London, 1730), 4. This guide was reprinted numerous times during the eighteenth century.

55. The highest accessible part of the cathedral is the Golden Gallery, originally known, more pro-saically, as the Iron Gallery.

“An Air of Grandeur & Modesty”: James Thornhill’s Painting in the Dome of St Paul’s...

Documents

Transcript of “An Air of Grandeur & Modesty”: James Thornhill’s Painting in the Dome of St Paul’s...