The Chapel, Castle Howard, North Yorkshire
Address
The Chapel, Castle Howard, Castle Howard Estate, York, YO60 7DARecommended by
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The Annunciation windowArtist, maker and date
Designed by Edward Burne-Jones and made by Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co, 1874.Reason for highlighting
Burne-Jones has produced a deceptively simple looking scene of the Annunciation, but with one key element which is highly unusual. A tree stands in the middle between Gabriel and Mary, and wrapped around this tree is a snake. The snake curls around the tree where its head lies at the bottom of the trunk, but the snake has a woman’s head.
In scenes of Adam and Eve in Eden there was an iconography used in the Middle Ages and Renaissance where the snake was depicted with a woman’s head and sometimes torso, which can be seen in works by Michelangelo for the Sistine Chapel or a fresco by Raphael in the Vatican. But this is unknown in images of the Annunciation as far as I am aware.
Genesis 3:15 has been translated with subtle but important differences. The Douay-Rheims translation, popular with Catholics conveys it as God saying to the serpent “I will put enmities between thee and the woman, and thy seed and her seed: she shall crush thy head, and thou shalt lie in wait for her heel.” This was then interpreted in connection to Mary, who was understood as being the New Eve. Where Eve had been tempted by the serpent, causing the Fall, Mary heeded God’s word, crushing the serpent’s head, as foreshadowed in Genesis 3:15.
Burne-Jones has depicted the Annunciation almost as a mirror image of Michelangelo’s Fall, with the woman-headed serpent at the top of the tree taunting Eve replaced by Mary standing triumphant over the defeated snake which now lies at the bottom.
Artist/maker notes
Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones (1833-98) was born in Birmingham and studied at Exeter College, Oxford where he met William Morris, with whom he developed a lifelong friendship. Together they created hundreds of stained glass windows that collectively stand as one of the finest artistic achievements of their time. The stature of this formidable artist and designer was recognised after his death when he became the first artist to be given a Memorial Service at Westminster Abbey.
Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. (1861-74) or ‘the Firm’, as it was colloquially referred to, was founded in 1861 by William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ford Madox Brown, Philip Webb, Peter Paul Marshall and Charles J Faulkner. ‘The Firm’ and its later iteration, Morris & Co., would go on to create some of the most influential stained glass of the 19th century, creating new aesthetics and themes that artists in both the Arts and Crafts Movement and the big glass companies would learn from.
It was an artists’ collective born of Morris and his friends’ enthusiasm for decorating his new marital home, Red House in Bexleyheath, near London, designed by Philip Webb. Morris was quite arrogant about his ambitions for design in churches, saying, ‘You see we are, or consider ourselves to be, the only really artistic firm of the kind, the others being only glass painters in point of fact, or else that curious nondescript mixture of clerical tailor and decorator that flourishes in Southampton Street, Strand; whereas we shall do — most things.’
Stained glass became one of the main stays of the company, with most designs by Burne-Jones, and, later by the 1890s and after Morris and Burne-Jones’ deaths, John Henry Dearle, the Firm’s chief designer.
Philip Speakman Webb (1831-1915) was one of the most influential architects of the Arts & Crafts movement. He joined the office of George Edmund Street in 1852 and was joined there by William Morris in 1856. He became one of the founding partners of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. Ltd, and with Morris founded the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings in 1877. He built the Red House (National Trust) for Morris in 1859 and the Church of St Martin, Brampton, 1878, which is filled with stained glass by Morris & Co.
Sources:
For a brief overview see Morris & Co on Wikipedia
Angels and Icons: Pre-Raphaelite Stained Glass by William Waters and Alistair Carew-Cox (Seraphim Press, 2012)
Burne-Jones Special Issue, The Journal of Stained Glass, Vol. XXXV, 2011
Damozels & Deities Pre-Raphaelite Stained Glass 1870-1898 by William Waters and Alastair Carew-Cox (Seraphim Press Ltd, 2017)
Morris stained glass: ‘an art of the Middle Ages’ by David O’Connor in William Morris and the Middle Ages ed. Joanna Banham and Jennifer Harris (Manchester University Press, 1984)
The Last Pre-Raphaelite: Edward Burne-Jones and the Victorian Imagination by Fiona McCarthy, Faber & Faber, 2011.
The Stained Glass of William Morris and his circle by A Charles Sewter (Yale University Press, 1974)
William Morris: A Life for Our Time by Fiona MacCarthy (Faber & Faber, 1994)
Philip Webb on wikipedia
St Martin’s, The Making of a Masterpiece by Arthur Penn (Published by David Penn at millyardstudios.co.uk, 2008)
Other comments
Castle Howard was built in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, with the first phase designed by Vanbrugh and the second wing added by Hawksmoor. Within the fabulous stately home is a beautifully adorned chapel, remodelled in the 1870s and fusing the baroque architecture of the house with all the best of Victorian Gothic Revival embellishments. The set of windows designed by Edward Burne-Jones are excellent examples of this fusion, incorporating neo-classical elements like pillars and putti into the architectural framework of the design. Some of these elements were designed by Philip Webb. There are four figurative windows here plus one decorative, giving an account of the infancy of Christ. The rest of the chapel is decorated by Kempe.
Castle Howard was also later where Brideshead Revisited was filmed, standing in for the titular estate, in both TV and film versions.