Lord spare us: parishioners rail against ‘ugly’ abbess portrait
Abbey’s controversial £6,000 artwork is called ‘sinister, grotesque and anatomically impossible’
ONE of Britain’s oldest abbeys is in a row with parishioners over attempts to spend £6,000 on a painting that worshippers say is putting them off their prayers.
The modern diptych, which depicts a legend from the life of St Ethelflaeda, an abbess at Romsey Abbey in Hampshire, in around the year 1000, was created by artist Christopher Gollon for an exhibition held in October 2016.
Now the abbey has been allowed to buy it for £6,000 and keep it hanging in the church – against the wishes of worshippers who say it detracts from the architecture of the Grade I-listed building and is a distraction while praying.
The panels, hung in the abbey’s south aisle, show the abbess, a patron saint of the abbey, alongside a candle, representing a story from her life in which light miraculously emanated from her hands to enable the nuns to read scripture after the lights went out.
It has been hanging in the abbey temporarily while a decision is made over whether to keep it. A community of nuns was established on the site in 907 and noblewomen including Matilda, who married Henry I, were later educated there.
It was purchased by local people for use as a parish church following Henry VIII’S dissolution of the monasteries. The present building is largely Norman and built between 1120 and 1250, though elements of the original Saxon site survive.
In documents published last summer, then-vicar Tim Sledge told Winchester diocese’s advisory committee for the care of churches that the painting is “a way of telling the story of the Benedictine history of the abbey”.
“This visual representation adds to the history, and enables visitors and worshippers to enter more deeply into the pattern of life and prayer of the abbey then and now,” he said.
The committee later recommended that the abbey should be allowed to keep it, and supporters argue that it is meant to be “challenging and controversial”.
The artist visited before the exhibition and the size, colours and composition are meant to be designed specifically to suit the church and the area where it hangs.
But objectors say it is “ugly”, does not “enhance or beautify the Abbey in any way”, and the image of the saint “is sinister and anatomically impossible”, while the accompanying candlestick “looks like a giraffe neck”.
Others among the congregation say it is “dark and disturbing”, “grotesque”, “does not put my mind at ease” and “raises nothing but horror”, claim documents published earlier this month from the diocese’s consistory court.
Others said the money for the painting could be better spent elsewhere and the congregation had not been properly consulted on whether or not to keep it. Matthew Cain Ormondroyd, chancellor of the diocese, said he recognised that there was a “significant minority of the congregation who find the painting not just ugly but also, partly as a consequence, a distraction from worship”. He added: “Worship is a
‘A significant minority of the congregation find the painting not just ugly but also a distraction’
deeply personal matter. A church is not an art gallery and I find it hard to see how claimed artistic merit can justify a new introduction which presents an impediment to worship on the part of a significant number of parishioners.”
But he allowed the abbey to go ahead with the purchase after visiting the site because he considered that the “painting’s size and location are discreet enough, that it need not present an obstacle to worship to anyone who is displeased or offended by it”.