Mural and Other Paintings,in English Churches

In 1825 Lewis Nockalls Cottingham removed Romanesque carvings from the spandrels of the great west window at Rochester Cathedral as part of a comprehensive programme of restoration and repair. The architect's preliminary drawings for this project (held by Avery Architectural Library at Columbia University in New York) permit the accurate reconstruction of these spandrels, and this reconstruction, in turn, reveals some of the principles which guided this important early nineteenth-century restorer. It can be shown that in attempting to clarify the several styles of medieval building at Rochester, Cottingham repressed some features which he saw as hybrids and emphasized others which he judged insufficiently prominent. This desire to make the fabric history more clearly legible as a sequence of stylistic cues reflected recent advances in the writing of architectural history, in particular the taxonometric approach pioneered by Thomas Rickman.