French Medieval wall paintings hidden for more than 500 years in the Angers cathedral have been digitally restored, according to the Hamilton Kerr Institute Bulletin.
The late 13th century paintings were whitewashed following a mid 15th-century fire at the cathedral and subsequently boxed behind woodwork by 1786, which protected them from iconoclasts and vandalization during the French Revolution. In 1980, they were found by a priest who had been using the small area for storage. Though French experts restored the work, they had previously only been recorded in partial black and white images.
The vibrant paintings depict the life and miracles of Saint Maurille, a bishop of Angers during the fifth-century whose relics were once housed in a silver shrine within the cathedral. Legend has it that Saint Maurille failed to raise a child from the dead and, as a result, fled to England where he penitentially worked for the king as a gardener. Saint Maurille later learned that the child was in fact alive and he returned to the site of the cathedral to bless the boy, who became Saint René.
The paintings are still concealed behind wall panelling, which forms part of the choir loft. As such, it took a team of UK–based art historians and conservators more than a decade to fully capture an image of the wall painting, which was digitally constructed through the combination of more than 8,000 photographs of the curving walls.
The Angers region was home to the Plantagenets who ruled England for centuries. The paintings may have been commissioned by Isabella la Blanche, half sister of the English king Henry III, or her son Maurice.
The team believes the paintings were made by two groups of painters using oil, and note similarities between the rendering of a young king in the banquet painting and the portrait sculpture of Henry III on his tomb in London’s Westminster Abbey. These similarities, combined with the narrative of cross-Channel travel between the English and French, they believe, are not coincidental. There appears to be a shared knowledge among the painters of material use and styling that may be connected to those of Henry III’s court.
