The Elgin Marbles of Westminster Abbey
Should the Wallace Collection return to Westminster Abbey its own equivalent of the Elgin Marbles – a sculpture of Christ by Torrigiano, made for the Abbey?
This is the suggestion of Prof Peter Sherlock, an authority on historic monuments, writing in the Winter number of that admirable journal the Westminster Abbey Review.
Visitors to the Abbey can still see where the sculpture, a marble and gilt-stone roundel weighing 400lb, was fixed. Tourists come in by the north door, and on the way to the crossing, where the high altar stands, they pass on their left a clutter of monuments to the once famous.
An enormous monument to General Wolfe overshadows a standing figure in Roman armour (sculpted by the brilliant Nicholas Stone). It memorialises Sir George Holles
(died 1626), and was the first standing effigy in the Abbey, not necessarily a benign development.
Behind the head of this figure is a supine crescent mark of leftover wall-decoration, which shows where the lower part of Pietro Torrigiano’s roundel was fixed.
This wall was the end of the chapel built by the great John Islip, the last but one abbot of Westminster. The chapel was dedicated to Jesus, and the roundel depicting his head would have been visible from the public parts of the Abbey church. We know exactly where it was fixed because it is shown on a copy of the illustrated roll prepared for circulation on the death of Islip in 1532.
Islip’s Jesus chapel was a two-storey structure, lit by the Abbey windows in the north wall. Its site was chosen no doubt because it was close to the tomb of St Edward the Confessor, the Abbey’s builder and patron, behind the high altar.
Not only that, but from the first-floor vantage-point, the altar at the Confessor’s tomb was visible, and the elevation of the sacramental body and blood of Christ, during the Canon of the Mass. In the late medieval period, the sight of this was regarded as an opportunity for intensely beneficial spiritual communication with the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist.
The upper part of the chapel is now dedicated to the memory of nurses, and Florence Nightingale is commemorated there. An altar has been reconstructed incorporating four small Renaissance colonettes from Islip’s lost monument, probably by Torrigiano.
The Italian sculptor was the newest, best-regarded contriver of public art for Church and State. He made Henry VII’S memorial in his Perpendicular chapel. Henry VIII commissioned one, bigger, for himself at Windsor, but it was never completed.
It is not known when the Torrigiano roundel of Jesus was taken from the Abbey. It may have been during the Reformation, or in the 1640s under the Commonwealth. It turned up at Sudbourne Hall, Suffolk, in 1871, when it was bought by Sir Richard Wallace, who transferred it to his collection, now housed in Manchester Square, London.
As suggested in the drawing of the Islip Roll, the roundel originally had gilt rays emanating from the head of Jesus. The two remaining rays have been blackened to match the background.
Prof Sherlock would like a request to be made to the Wallace Collection for the return of the Torrigiano head to the Abbey, so that “the figure of Jesus might once again preside over visitors and pilgrims as they gather, fulfilling Islip’s vision for a religious community devoted to the worship of God”.