The Westminster Retable

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 2005 by Miriam Kramer

A retable is a frame enclosing decorated panels; in a Gothic church or cathedral it was normally situated above the back of the altar. The one made for Westminster Abbey in London dates from about 1270 and was part of an elaborate scheme for the reconstruction of the abbey commissioned by Henry III. Its position behind the altar meant that it would have been seen principally by those officiating at mass within the enclosed choir of the church. It was, therefore, produced for an elite, and was made to the highest standard by court painters and craftsmen.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The Westminster Retable is divided into five panels. The central one depicts Jesus holding a miniature representation of the earth (Salvator Mundi). He is flanked by the Virgin Mary and Saint John the Evangelist who are, in turn, surrounded by portrayals of Christ's miracles within eight eight-pointed stars. The aim was to make the retable look like precious metalwork, and although it was to be contained within a building in the French Gothic style it was enhanced by exotic motifs of Islamic origin.

The retable survived both the dissolution of the monasteries and the Reformation, but in the 1770s it was vandalized and partly painted over to make a case for the wax effigy of William Pitt the Elder. Luckily, a few years earlier the eighteenth-century antiquary George Vertue had recorded its original appearance in his notebooks and a sketch (now in the British Library, London). Its importance, however, was only realized later when it was rescued by the abbey's surveyor in 1827 and photographed in the 1890s. The decline in its condition accelerated in the twentieth century, and in 1998 the decision was made to under-take major conservation work, which was supported by the Getty Foundation and the Heritage Lottery Fund. The work was done over the course of five years by the Hamilton Kerr Institute of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. Specialists in many fields restored the retable and in the process revealed much of the exquisite detail that had been obscured over the centuries.

This past summer there was a display devoted to the retable and its conservation at the National Gallery in London of which the curator was Susan Foister. The retable is now on permanent display at the Westminster Abbey museum; a small leaflet about its construction and history, written by Paul Binski, may be ordered by telephoning 44-20-7654-4920.