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

a church was a symbolic building, a series of sacred spaces imbued with religious
meaning. A Camdenian church had a western baptistery, representing entry into both the
mystical and the physical church. The nave ended with the rood screen, separating it from
the chancel, secular from sacred, which partially concealed and partially disclosed the
climax of the building, the altar, site of the mystery of the sacrament. It was a diagram of
belief, a space designed be experienced sequentially, the parts understood in relation to
the whole. It was a sacred version of a programmatic picturesque walk through those
discrete spaces which Milner had fought in vain to preserve at Salisbury.
Losh was well aware of these ideas. Her friend, neighbour and fellow antiquary
Philip Howard of Naworth had just commissioned the little Roman Catholic church of
Our Lady and St Wilfred at nearby Warwick Bridge, from A W N Pugin. It was that
church which for Pevsner marked a period in the Gothic Revival, another product of the
annus mirabilis: ‘It is here and more or less precisely in 1841 that archaeological
accuracy begins in English church design’ he wrote. 194 Our Lady and St Wilfrid is a
perfect example of ecclesiological correctness. In Losh’s church the same principles are
present, adapted to her own unorthodox ecclesiology. Over the chancel arch, where in a
medieval church the doom would have been painted, depicting the last judgement, the
subject she found so unsuitable for representation, even by Michelangelo, she placed
instead a choir of carved angels between trees, while under the arch the north and south
corbels are carved to represent two heads, a man and a woman.
The transition from nave to chancel is marked not by the rood, the crucified Christ
with Mary and St John under the doom, portraying between them the Four Last Things:
death, judgement, heaven and hell or by a screen. At Wreay the communicant passes
instead between human figures. The male and female principles, perhaps, which recur in
many religions. In Losh’s church there is no sudden division between this world and the
next, no death and no judgement. Arguably the most striking aspect of the symbolism of
St Mary’s is the symbol that is missing, there is no depiction of Christ crucified.
194
Pevsner, The Buildings of England, Cumberland and Westmorland, p.198.
91