If ever an Angel had cause to Weep, it is this one. I'm using the fallow week between Christmas and New Year - actually, it is anything but, the work I would normally do in the first week of January just being displaced into this one - to have a go at some tasks I've been meaning to do for ages. One job is repairing one of our angels. We have four, but two have suffered a bit of misfortune so, armed with what describes itself as 'Extreme Epoxy', I am trying to glue its right wing back on: we will see whether we can get the celestial being back into service. The remaining one is at our sacristan's house, and we may get round to that in due course.
I thought the angels were plaster, but they turn out to be made from some very heavy metal - not lead, as it's not flexible enough, but something like lead: a kind of pewter, perhaps. Each one holds a staff with a pricket for a candle. They must have come from the riddel-posts of an English altar, but we have never had anything so grand at Swanvale Halt, so one of my esteemed predecessors must have salvaged them from somewhere else. My money is on Fr Edward as the culprit in the late 1960s, as he had a habit of repurposing detritus from other churches even as, paradoxically, he plotted to have his own church purified of all its Victoriana including the stained glass. I would love to know where the angels' former home was, but Edward is no longer around to ask.
It certainly looks like a Nuremburg Angel but I'd need to see the other side to be sure. As you say, they are metal. You can still get them from Watts, but as you might imagine, they are not cheap. I'm afraid that English altars, along with their angels, are a somewhat endangered species these days!😒
ReplyDeleteThank you, as ever, John. Yes, now you come to mention it, they do have a bit of a late-medieval German look to them. I am finding the odd English Altar still in situ here and there - Wonersh and The Bourne being the main instances that come to mind - but it seems far more common to put a curtain behind an altar as a sort of nod in that direction. Even that fell out of fashion: we still have one, handily covering a blank wall in the Lady Chapel, but Fr Edward got rid of the curtains backing the high altar which had themselves I suspect been installed to cover up the uninspiring tilework there. He replaced them with white polystyrene tiles which in my dreams I would like to get rid of, but hold back from doing so 'for fear of finding something worse'!
ReplyDeleteA happy new year to you.