Cathedral one

We have been visiting Ely Cathedral over the past few days, and, as always, we have turned up some stuff which is new to us. I share two bits of such stuff.

First, a tomb, illustrated left. Most of the tombs arranged around the eastern ambulatory are those of Bishops of Ely, so rewarded in death for services in life, but one is a knight in armour, the first Earl of Worcester, executed in 1470, in the course of the Wars of the Roses, A highly educated chap who went on to be the Judge Jeffreys of his day, beheading (and worse) large numbers of his master's opponents. He also went through three wives, two of whom are lying in effigy next to him. His own effigy is completed with an Earl's coronet on the head and with some kind of large, possibly domestic, animal at his feet. A useful reminder that a fancy education is not necessarily a bar to barbarity.

Second, some bubbles. I have been reading in Buzsáki about how brain waves exhibit a lack of scale, in that they have interesting features at all scales. See reference 2.

I think it fair to say that this cathedral exhibits a similar lack of scale, with features in inches and features in hundreds of feet, with everything in between. So on one of the tombs on the other side of the chancel from that illustrated, we have carvings of the heads of animals which are about an inch across. Then we have towers, arches, columns and pilasters of all sizes. We have great sweeps of stonework without much decoration, only shape. Then areas with a great deal of decoration. The amount of decoration increases as we move from west to east along the church.

One can even see something of this within the confines of the tomb illustrated - which is, after all, what lack of scale means. One does not need to look at the whole.

Even the mistakes and accidents exhibit the same lack of scale. One of the west towers is missing, having fallen down at some point. In lots of places there were changes of mind and the design is not orderly or symmetrical in the way that was no doubt, originally, intended. Perhaps the left hand pinnacle to match the right hand pinnacle is missing. Perhaps one end of a stretch of arcading has been fudged to make way for something thought of after the arcade had been started. In some places there are missing columns, base and capital present, column itself missing - incidentally illustrating the point that while the eye likes to think that such columns are holding something up, are doing something useful, this need not actually be the case. Sometimes, some piece of detailing is a bit careless, has not been finished off properly. Perhaps the master mason was out to lunch, leaving his chaps to finish off as best they would.

One could make some measurements, but I suspect that most modern buildings do not do this, do not exhibit this indifference to scale and lack visual interest in consequence. They might impress by their size, their height or the opulence of their cladding - but they are not going to impress and interest in the way of this cathedral.

Acknowledgment 1: the illustration was taken from the wikipedia entry for the first Earl of Worcester and is, I think the work of one Andrew R. Abbott, quite possibly the one to be found at http://www.abbottphotography.org.uk/.

Reference 2: see reference 4 at http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/09/consciousness-of-choice.html.

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