Category: Sculpture

The Font Race

It’s a well-known fact the more it snows (tiddely pom) the colder the toes. Less well known is under lockdown the more it snows the more bonkers I become.

Gee-Gee

Grinling Gibbons sounds like the sort of oath Captain Haddock might roar, probably preceded by “great”, when enraged. Yesterday I pointed out his, I thought, quite rare stone font in St James’ Church, Piccadilly.

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Categorised as Sculpture

Look and Learn

Look and Learn seemed to me inferior in every respect to a good novel and I only read it if there was absolutely nothing else available. These days Aquila is the go-to mag for a grandparent wanting to give a present that will not be well received. It’s why Aquila advertises in The Oldie.

A Columbarium

A columbarium is an old-fashioned name for a dovecote with nesting holes but it has gained another meaning in ecclesiastical architecture. You will have seen columbaria on San Michele in Venice and in many Catholic cemeteries in Spain and Italy where space is limited. They are those chests of drawers where bodies are interred, not… Continue reading A Columbarium

St James’s Square

Garden squares in London are sometimes called London’s best kept hidden secrets, not without good reason. Some gardens are private, only accessible to key holders living around the square.

Sweetness and Light

“The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light … He who works for sweetness and light united, works to make reason and the will of God prevail.“ (Culture and Anarchy, 1869, Matthew Arnold)

The Queen’s Beasts

Sometimes I talk almost complete rubbish and this happened on Saturday at Holland Park. I was talking to somebody who works at Kew Gardens and she feigned interest that the ten Queen’s Beasts outside the Palm House had been designed by my great-uncle to stand outside Westminster Abbey at the Queen’s coronation.

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Categorised as Sculpture

Double-chamfered

This spectacular monument, in Pevsner’s opinion but I concur, is in the south aisle of St Mary Magdalene in Great Offley, Hertfordshire.