London. Medieval wall paintings hidden in a French cathedral were revealed in digital images by a team of art historians and conservators from the United Kingdom, the newspaper reported yesterday Artnewspaper.
These paintings, considered the best of their kind surviving from late 13th century France and having close stylistic links to the court of Henry III, have been displayed in all their multi-coloured splendor for the first time in more than 500 years.
However, the walls remain hidden behind panels at Angers Cathedral in western France.
The team of British art historians and conservators has worked for a decade creating the first full-colour image of paintings of the life and miracles of Saint Maurille, the 5th-century bishop of Angers whose relics were kept on an altar of silver in the aforementioned cathedral, indicates the source.
The image was created by digitally stitching together more than 8,000 photographs of the curved walls, taken in the basement behind the panels that could not be dismantled, because they are part of the choir stalls.
These thousands of team photographs, distorted by access problems and the curvature of the wall, were digitally stitched together to form a coherent whole by Chris Titmus of the Hamilton Kerr Institute in Cambridge, a job that took years.
The project, funded by a grant from the John Fell Fund, was published in the most current edition of the Bulletin of the Hamilton Kerr Institute (November 2024).
The legend of Bishop Maurille tells how he blessed a barren woman who gave birth, but did not intervene when the child died.
Penitent, he threw away the keys of his church that were providentially swallowed by a fish, and sailed to England, where he worked for the king as a gardener until the fish and keys were miraculously served at a banquet.
The scientific team dates the paintings to around 1270 and believes they may have been commissioned by Elizabeth the White, half-sister of the Englishman Henry III, or by her son Maurice, who may have been raised partly at Henry’s court.