Is a church really the safest place for a Titian?
A discovery by an art historian has sparked an age-old debate, says Florence Hallett
Damp, cold and often deserted, churches don’t seem the best places to keep works of art. But the recent discovery in a Ledbury church of a painting believed to have been made in Titian’s workshop is a dramatic reminder that churches have long been repositories of the arts, as rich in sculpture and stained glass, paintings, metalwork and textiles as many museums.
The art in England’s churches, however, is chronically underappreciated and often neglected. While the knee-jerk reaction may be to consign it to museums, it may be that looking after it better in situ could revive local economies by drawing visitors and funding. And for museums seeking new ways to display and care for their collections, loans to churches could bring new audiences as well as new, perhaps more authentic settings for works of art.
Historically, hanging onto treasures hasn’t been easy for places of worship. Museums the world over are filled with their altarpieces, fittings and even architectural elements. Now, though, the Uffizi Gallery in Florence is developing plans to return Renaissance art to Italian churches, in a move that would release paintings from storage and disperse museum crowds that, post-Covid, are more undesirable than ever. A similar scheme in this country could aid the recovery of the heritage sector, but parish churches are struggling to safeguard the art in their care. Eddie Tulasiewicz, head of communications at the National Churches Trust, which provides grants and advises on the care of church buildings, says: “In Italy you can find Caravaggio paintings and similar in churches all over the place. But the resources of the police in the UK are stretched, especially in rural areas. They can’t stop lead being stolen from church roofs, let alone someone making a beeline for a work of art.”
High security can be financially and even philosophically incompatible with a church setting, and while some churches have reported a drop in vandalism and theft during the past year’s lockdowns, valuables from 400 London churches were moved last spring to the Tower of London to avoid “lockdown looting”.
“Paintings need to be conserved and looked after in the appropriate place,” adds Tulasiewicz, though he emphasises that deciding whether that places is a church or a museum rests with the individual parochial church council.
Security is just one concern for churches wishing to display works of art. “Temperature and relative humidity are the biggest threat to paintings in churches, and then light, but regular monitoring would obviate the risk of any lasting damage,” says Ronald Moore, the art historian and conservator who identified the Ledbury Titian. “It’s easily done: you can get cheap humidity cards and digital hygrometers. Art should stay in churches – it’s absolutely vital.”
The history of art in England’s churches is a catalogue of destruction, beginning with the Reformation and the Civil War. So comprehensive was the vandalism of the 16th and 17th centuries that English altarpieces, especially painted ones, are vanishingly rare. Though much has been lost, English churches are, Tulasiewicz says, “the nation’s museums, and there’s one around the corner from everybody. There are Norman fonts, memorials to the dead, even the woodwork – they’re repositories of amazing stuff.”
Modern art is represented too, and All Saints’ Church in Tudeley, Kent has an array of stained-glass windows by Marc Chagall; his window at Chichester Cathedral, meanwhile, is one of several modernist furnishings there, by artists including John Piper, Cecil Collins and Graham Sutherland.
“The strong preference of the Church Buildings Council is for artworks to stay in churches,” says Dr David Knight, senior church buildings officer at the Church of England. But without a comprehensive survey of all the art in English churches, chronic underfunding means that even important works such as the Ledbury painting can be neglected.
One 15th-century panel painting, The Kiss of Judas, survived the Reformation by having its back repurposed as a painted board, but then it languished for centuries, dirty and covered in bat faeces. Unable to raise funds to conserve and maintain the painting, St Mary’s Church in Grafton Regis, Northamptonshire sold it to the Fitzwilliam Museum in 2012, using the cash to pay for roof repairs.
Such difficult decisions are inevitable as churches struggle to fund basic repairs. Dr Lucy Wrapson, senior conservator at the Hamilton Kerr Institute at the Fitzwilliam, carried out the conservation work on the panel. “I don’t think that the current model for funding churches to maintain historic fabric and furnishings is working, nor is it sustainable in the long term,” she says. “But if the church is not maintained in a day-to-day way, the capital projects end up so large they are unsustainable, and the cycle of deterioration continues.”
Ultimate responsibility for the upkeep of church fabric and furnishings lies with the congregation, and as churchgoing continues to decline, the burden increases. The closure in 2017 of what was the Heritage Lottery Fund’s “Grants for Places of Worship” scheme has exacerbated the problem, explains Rachel Morley, director of the Friends of Friendless Churches, a charity that saves churches from demolition. “For the first time in about 45 years, there isn’t a dedicated funding stream for parish churches, and they are up against every other heritage building in the country. But churches are different, because they’re managed by local people, they don’t have professional fundraisers and they don’t have the skill-sets needed to access grants.”
When churches are forced to close, the future of fixtures such as wall paintings hangs in the balance. Last year, campaigners removed a mural by Hans Feibusch from St Elisabeth’s Church, Eastbourne before it was demolished; last month, the Manchester Evening News reported that a mosaic by émigré artist George Mayer-Marton could be lost altogether, if the now-abandoned church that houses it is redeveloped.
It’s a problem set to get worse, according to Sarah Robinson, director of conservation at the Churches Conservation Trust. “I think that a number of churches will struggle, post-Covid, to find enough money from the congregation to support the building and to keep it open, and that means that pieces of artwork will be at greater risk.” Even so, donations towards works of art are more forthcoming than the mundane-but-necessary costs of guttering and roof repairs. “Our experience is that it’s more of a challenge to keep the building watertight.”
For Morley, the crisis in the cultural heritage sector calls for a joint response. “I wonder if there is some sort of unexplored partnership between parish churches and museums, to see if we can’t get some of that art in storage out into parish churches, and increase tourism to these places. There are lots of great churches that could facilitate the display of art.”
The V&A and National Gallery have declined to comment, but such an arrangement would not be unprecedented: in 2003, the Fitzwilliam conserved and then returned the Thornham Parva Retable, a medieval altarpiece, to its home in a Suffolk church, while a long-standing collaboration between the National Portrait Gallery and the National Trust has enabled contemporaneous portraits to be displayed at Montacute House, an Elizabethan mansion in Somerset.
But building partnerships and sharing resources is more than a survival strategy – it’s key to a future in which the improved care and understanding of cultural heritage goes hand in hand with thriving local communities.
‘Police can’t stop lead being stolen, let alone someone making a beeline for art work’