‘Take away, utterly extinct and destroy all shrines … pictures, paintings and all other monuments of feigned miracles, pilgrimages, idolatry and superstition so that there remain no memory of the same in walls, glass windows…’. These were the instructions handed down to churches in the reign of Edward VI, the death-knell for medieval church wall paintings following the wholesale destruction of the monasteries in his father’s time.
That any church art survived this state-sponsored barbarism some five centuries ago seems extraordinary, and its rarity makes...
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