HOW to Build a Cathedral (Monday of last week) was the part of BBC4’s medieval season which I really looked forward to, and its panning shots of the glories of Lincoln, Ely, and York did not disappoint.
There was no modesty about how we were a poor relation at the outermost tip of Christendom: Gothic may have been invented by Abbot Suger at St Denis, but England took up the new concept and demonstrated a level of invention that no one else approached.
Nor was this merely an aesthetic approach, seeing our great churches as isolated art-objects divorced from their purpose. We were shown how the extraordinary west front of Wells was not only an astonishing realisation of the Kingdom of heaven, with row upon row of saints and angels painted in lifelike colours: it was also designed with hidden galleries and concealed acoustic trumpets, so that on Psalm Sunday the choir could bring it to life with music and sound.
But . . . but . . . at so many levels, the programme failed to satisfy. Why on earth was this exposition of Wells illustrated not with plainsong, or organum of the period in question, but Allegri’s Miserere? Again and again, the music was achingly of the wrong period or the wrong style. Swelling Dvorák and gorgeous Sibelius is terrific, but inappropriate when the intention is to help us understand the Middle Ages in its own terms.
It was excellent to hear about the technical work behind the marvels of Gothic construction; to celebrate the international master masons, glass-painters, and quarrymen. It was first-rate to hear an analysis of how the buildings stay up (they are not, on the whole, marvels of ingenuity: most of them are built well within the parameters of safety). But it failed to satisfy.
No distinction was made between the monastic and the secular foundations; and the segue into the Renaissance was poorly handled. Our guide took us through the marvels of Ely, austere Romanesque giving way to the glorious flowering of the Lady Chapel. But it was not the Renaissance that stopped people building cathedrals — what about Bishop West’s chantry chapel in the east end, with its mannerist panels? What about St Paul’s Cathedral?
The relationship between the Renaissance and the Reformation, and the impetus to create great buildings to the glory of God, is far more complex than was allowed here — and far more interesting.
Another marvel that straddled that divide was the subject of Stephen Fry and the Gutenberg Press (BBC2, Friday). There was rather too much Fry and too little press, however, for my taste. This was, with the invention of movable type, the machine that made us what we are: we had the ability to create identical copies of the same text, the same information. It was the source of the explosion of knowledge to which we are all heirs.
Impressively for our concerns, Mr Fry’s aim was to reconstruct Gutenberg’s machine so that it could print one page of his initial print run — which was, of course, a Bible. Here, the Renaissance and the Reformation come together with a vengeance. We have all gained by being able to possess copy after copy of the holy scriptures — but have we thereby lost the need to build great churches?
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