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

The marble font just within the west door is one of several fittings carved by Losh herself
and decorated with lilies, butterflies, vines and pomegranates, all emblems as Lonsdale
noted, of ‘purity, transition to a new life, the ineffable union betwixt Christ and His
Church’, but all with similar, pre-Christian meanings. 191 The Greek word for butterfly,
for example, as Losh would have known, is ‘psyche’ or soul. The top part of the font is
carved in a neo-Norman zig-zag, its base decorated with Greek fluting. The combination
of styles is certainly not accidental. It might be taken to imply the idea of Christian truth
growing out of pre-Christian beliefs. 192 In the stained glass in the nave there are Egyptian
scarabs, pomegranates, a bird eating a frog –which may refer to another Egyptian
reincarnation myth and various others. There are also fragments of French medieval
glass and Italian woodwork which will be discussed in a later chapter. 193 Overall the
meaning, however, is coherent. It is not exactly pantheistic, for nature and the religions of
the past are held, literally and metaphorically, within a Christian, indeed a specifically
Anglican framework. But it is a Christianity that excludes ideas of death and punishment
in favour of renewal out of the forces of nature.
This symbolism extends to the plan of the building itself. St Mary’s is designed
like a pre-Reformation church, with the focus on the altar at the East end, rather than a
Protestant Georgian ‘preaching box’ with the emphasis on the pulpit. Here again, in the
year after the first publication of The Ecclesiologist, Losh was using historical
consciousness to make a statement that was peculiar and topical, personal and universal.
‘Ecclesiology’, the study of the form of churches, was strongly promoted by the Oxford
and Cambridge societies, particularly the latter, as a matter of historical correctness in the
conservation of old and the construction of new church buildings. Behind the avowed
objective of a formally appropriate context for the liturgy of the Anglican Church,
however, lay a barely concealed programme to revive the rituals of the pre-Reformation
Catholic church for which medieval buildings had been designed. For the ecclesiologists
191
Londsdale, The Worthies of Cumbria, p. 225.
192
A similar combination of classical and Gothic, which may be susceptible to a similar interpretation,
occurs in John Cosin’s remarkable furnishings for Durham Cathedral in the 1660s, including the font and
canopy. Losh would almost certainly have seen these and possibly Cosin’s other furniture designs.
193
See Chapter 4.
90