Britain’s ‘Sistine Chapel’ is high point of baroque magnificence
The painted ceiling is one of the spectacular high points of European art and architecture, seen in Italian churches, German abbeys and French palaces, overwhelming with its illusionistic sense that the very roof has been blasted heavenwards. But such baroque magnificence is in short supply in Britain. Do we instinctively recoil from the authoritarian bombast of epic colonnades and vast staircases – or were we just short of money in its 17th-century heyday? There are St Paul’s and Blenheim, but they hardly rival the epic scale of St Peter’s or Versailles.
There is one place in Britain, however, where you can get a taste of baroque splendour and sample Britain’s best example of the painted ceiling: The Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich, where all 40,000 sq ft of James Thornhill’s Painted Hall (“the Sistine Chapel of the UK”, as it’s trumpeted in the blurb) have been restored in a two-year refurbishment costing £8.5 million.
Christopher Wren’s imposing college buildings create a theatrical build-up, though you now enter not through the original fine doorway but a restored undercroft, where a new café and gift shop tug at your sleeve as they do in just about every building of consequence these days. If forking out a frankly steep £12 – where prerestoration entry was free – rather takes the wind out of your sails, the sense of drama as you mount the stairs through the high-domed vestibule restores the spirits.
Looking up into the hall with the great tumult of the ceiling bearing down on you generates a feeling of quasi-religious awe, which turns out to be entirely appropriate given what you’re about to experience; never mind that the Painted Hall (started in 1707, and 19 years in the completion) was, and still is on occasion, just a very grand dining room.
If Thornhill’s vast oval of illusionistic sky doesn’t quite explode out of the building as you might hope, his jubilant uproar of clouds, allegorical figures and swirling drapery is immensely impressive. The surprisingly earthy colours – deep browns, creams and hot pinks – offset by touches of eggshell blue, glow in the new restoration like never before. Couches, on which you’re invited to recline, allow you to take it all in without cricking your neck.
The arrangement is that of a chapel, the eye led through the long Lower Hall towards an arched vista into the Upper Hall, where a trompe-l’oeil painted curtain is swept back to reveal an ethereal space beyond.
We’re in a world of painterly illusion that was developed in Rome during the Counter-reformation to stave off the Protestant threat through sheer sensual overload. As in Baciccio’s fresco in the Gesù church in Rome – probably the greatest of such ceilings – Thornhill builds his composition dramatically from dark to light, so that the semi-silhouetted figures at the edges frame the brilliant centre. The focus of this heavenly riot is the figures of the British monarchs William and Mary, seated in splendour on clouds, surrounded by female figures representing the virtues. The Dutch-born king reaches out to take an olive branch from the figure of Peace, while resting his elegant foot on a ghoulish form representing Tyranny.
The angel pulling back the painted curtain in the Upper Hall carries not a cross, as you’d expect, but a secular obelisk, while beneath her is seated the monarch George I.
This, then, is a tabernacle to the Protestant succession, couched in visual terms that couldn’t be more Catholic if they tried; or, if you like, British independence celebrated in a visual language that is profoundly European. The Painted Hall is both a visual feast and a reminder that those in power will employ any means when it comes to spectacular PR.