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Terms and conditions applyWestminster Abbey Chapter House: the history, art and architecture of 'a chapter house beyond compare'
, Warwick Rodwell and Richard Mortimer
Product details
Format: Book
Pages: 302
Publisher: Oxbow Books Ltd
Date Published: May 2010
Stock Code: 71566
ISBN: 9780854312955
Binding: Hardback
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Description
This volume tells the complete story of the Westminster Abbey chapter house, which ranks as one of the spectacular achievements of European Gothic art and architecture, which is precisely what its builder, King Henry III, intended. Begun in the mid-1240s, and completed within a decade, its pre-eminence was recognised in its own day, when the chronicler Matthew Paris described Westminster as having 'a chapter house beyond compare'.
Papers by leading scholars in the field of medieval art and architecture reveal the reasons for the construction of the chapter house and trace the possible influences upon the master mason in charge of the project. The subsequent history of the structure is revealed as it evolved from a meeting place of the king's Great Court, the predecessor of the English Parliament, a royal treasury into a repository for government archives after the Dissolution, home to the Public Record Office until the late 1850s, and its subsequent restoration at the hands of Sir George Gilbert Scott.
Now under the care of English Heritage, the chapter house has just been cleaned and restored again, leading to the spectacular light-filled building that we see today, to which full justice is done by this richly illustrated book, filled with pictures of the architectural and sculptural details, the medieval tile work and the wall painting that justify the motto inscribed in the chapter house floor: 'as the rose is the flower of flowers, so is this the house of houses'.
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