Scholars unveil decoration plans for Cathedral
By Mark Greaves
23 May 2008

Westminster Cathedral

For the full blueprint click here.

Some of Britain's leading Catholic scholars have prepared a blueprint for the decoration of Westminster Cathedral.

The design, modelled on Byzantine churches in Italy, provides a guide for covering the Cathedral's immense ceiling with mosaics. At present almost 90 per cent of the interior brickwork remains bare.

It begins with the creation of the world at the front of the cathedral and culminates at the building's east end with the return of Christ and the establishment of the Kingdom of God.

Its vast eschatological sweep is emphasised by a pattern of colour that proceeds from green and blue through to red and finally, at the consummation of the world, to gold.

Alongside pagans such as Plato, Lucretius and Zoroaster, the design also includes a representation of Buddha.

The blueprint, which still needs final approval, was hammered out over several meetings by Mgr Mark Langham, the former administrator of the cathedral, Fr Aidan Nichols, a theologian at Oxford University, Dr Eamon Duffy, a historian at Cambridge, and Andrew Wilton, a distinguished art historian and research fellow at Tate Britain.

The decoration of the cathedral has been put on hold for two years while £3 million worth of restoration work is carried out to the brickwork and electrical system.

It is understood that a donor has given £500,000 to fund the repairs so that work can begin more quickly in decorating the apse with mosaics. Seven of the 11 side chapels have been decorated since the Cathedral was built in 1903 but no work has yet been done on the domes and main ceiling.

The world's grandest scheme of Byzantine mosaics can be found at St Mark's Basilica, Venice, and focuses solely on representing the life of Christ.

The Westminster blueprint is partly modelled on this scheme but also introduces a number of modern elements, including a stronger representation of women.

The three women Doctors of the Church - St Catherine of Siena, St Teresa of Avila and St Thérèse de Lisieux - are grouped together in the fourth dome representing the return of Christ.

The medieval mystic Julian of Norwich, who has not yet been canonised, is also presented in this final dome as one of the English Doctors of the Church.

Dr Eamon Duffy, Professor of the History of Christianity at Magdalen College, Cambridge, said that devising a scheme for the Cathedral was a "terrifying responsibility".

"It is a great building and a lot of people are attached to its holy gloom," he said. "Also, modern mosaic schemes are often frightful, like something out of Walt Disney."

He said they wanted to replace the randomness of most church decoration with a system that was logical and that reflected the structure of the Bible and the liturgy.

"In a lot of Catholic churches there is no particular reason why it should be one saint rather than another and what we wanted was a framework that had an inner logic to it.

"We felt it should be catechetical and that it should unfold as you walk through the cathedral from one end to the other," he said.

Dr Duffy said that the depiction of pagan figures conformed to traditional Christian art and pointed to the prominent role of pagans in Dante's Divine Comedy.

He explained: "Dante was led by Virgil [a Roman poet] and he finds the great pagan teachers in a place of non-suffering."

Fr Aidan Nichols, the John Paul II Memorial Visiting Lecturer at Oxford University, said the scheme was meant to be inspiring as well as useful for catechesis. He explained that the pagan figures were represented because they had "pointed to revealed truth".

The Cathedral's architect John Francis Bentley had intended to fill the ceiling and domes with mosaics but he died before he could devise a scheme.

In England at the time there were few mosaic experts and so famous painters such as John Singer Sargent and Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema were asked to consider designs for particular chapels.

Neither of them took up the offer and instead the first mosaics were designed by an unknown artist called W C Symons. His mosaics were the only ones present when the Cathedral first opened and can still be seen in the Holy Souls Chapel.

It is estimated that covering the Cathedral in mosaics would take at least two and a half years and cost about £12 million.