Antiquaries in the Age of Romanticism: 1789-1851 - Queen Mary ...

Figure 10 St Peter's Chapel, Winchester
One of the three illustrations of his chapel [fig:10], which Milner published shows
it through this open doorway, framed by the arch, which is now described as ‘Norman’. 69
It is a typically romantic picturesque composition, showing the view from one space into
another, discrete but semi-visible space. This was exactly the configuration to which
Payne Knight attributed to the particular effect of Gothic, ‘dim and discoloured light
diffused…through unequal varieties of space, divided but not separated… thus effects
more imposing have been produced, than are, perhaps to be found in any other works of
man’. 70 This was precisely what Wyatt had destroyed at Salisbury. The image is also in a
simple way symbolic. We are to understand the modern chapel through its antecedents. In
its co-dedication to St Swithun and St Birinus (as well as St Peter), saints who had local
associations with Winchester and again in its details, ‘illustrative of different antiquities
relating to this city’ Milner was seeking to weave his chapel seamlessly into the fabric of
the past. 71 When he published the description of it in his History of Winchester he placed
it at the end of the second volume, as a continuation of the ‘Survey of Antiquities’. From
a chronological point of view it belonged at the end of Volume One, the History Civil
and Ecclesiastical, which concluded with the latest buildings in the city, the ‘several neat
and elegant houses and shops’ in what Milner caustically dismissed as the ‘the bowwindow-
style’ and the new gaol. 72 But for him it belonged with the cathedral and with
69
Milner, The History Civil and Ecclesiastical and Survey of the Antiquities of Winchester, 2, p.242, and
plate between pp. 240-241.
70
Knight, An Analytical Enquiry into the Principles of Taste, p.177.
71
Milner, The History Civil and Ecclesiastical and Survey of the Antiquities of Winchester, 2, p.240.
72
Milner, The History Civil and Ecclesiastical and Survey of the Antiquities of Winchester, 1, p.448.
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