Among William Burges’s watercolours is an early 1860s medieval fantasy depicting the sacramental borderlands of life and death (Fig. 1). Titled Reliquary Chapel Scene, it appears to show a dying man surrounded by a small group of people within a highly ornate Gothic private chapel, perhaps an oratory or a side chapel within a larger church. Light streaming through the stained-glass window creates a polychromatic pattern on the floor in front of a lady, presumably the man’s wife, tenderly reaching towards the man’s body. The presence of the bed anticipates a memorial which would, in time, transform this space into a chantry chapel. In the background, an image of the Last Supper is depicted in high relief above what appears to be an ornate cupboard, Gothic shutters opened to reveal a series of objects, presumably reliquaries. It could serve as a polyptych, but there is no altar in sight. There is a small organ on the left, and to the right Burges has included a priest in a chasuble, saying Mass at an unseen altar beneath the stained-glass window. A curtain is visible above, theatrically pulled back. The scene is perplexing. The ornate Gothic vaulting that initially provides architectural logic to the scene poses more questions than it answers, and the relationship between the bed, the relics, and the priest suggests blurred boundaries of sickness and death. No one is paying attention to the liturgy if one is indeed in progress. As delicate colours play across the floor and in the clothing of those who have gathered around the tiny monochromatic figure, both in the foreground and blending into the background, the relationship between the Eucharist and salvation permeates the image.

An 1852 Burges watercolour provides a ‘reconstruction’ of the feretory of Edward the Confessor, produced (perhaps a little provocatively) during a period of controversy regarding Burges’s contemporaries: the controversial re-emergence of Roman Catholicism, and Westminster Abbey’s unique place in British and imperial Christian identity on either side of the Reformation (Fig. 2).¹ Burges’s image is a revivalist fantasy, dreaming of what could have been. He imagined its surroundings, including ornate riddel posts with angels holding candles (a distinctively English medieval detail), textiles with images of saints, a lavish embroidered altar frontal, and a hardstone structural polychromatic altarpiece beneath a shrine separated from its outer casing, encrusted with gems and a golden glowing image of the Madonna and Child attended by saints, microarchitecturally housing the holy saint’s remains. As the casing is lifted in this scene, it provides a particularly sacred, privileged view of the imagined shrine. Burges’s watercolour depicts a Mass in progress, complete with acolytes, and monastic ministers each holding the cloth of the celebrant’s chasuble as he lifts the Host. Burges’s image resonates with A. W. N. Pugin’s illustrations of Masses in Gothic fantasy sanctuaries, published in the previous decade. In Burges’s watercolour, the vestments are blue — likely an indication of Edward the Confessor’s devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary and, perhaps, suggesting that this Mass in Burges’s nostalgic medieval image would be for one of the Marian Feasts in English liturgical colours (blue rather than white). Time and eternity blend together. He depicted the moment of the consecration — the epicentre of the Eucharistic liturgy and its mystical transformation of mere bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. When the priest holds the Host low, as Burges depicts, the implication is that this is the portion of the liturgy when the celebrant speaks Christ’s own words of consecration: ‘This is my body.’

Fig. 1: William Burges, Reliquary Chapel Scene (early 1860s). RIBA Collections.

Fig. 2: William Burges, A Reconstruction of the Feretory of Edward the Confessor, (1852). RIBA Collections.

Burges depicts an intimate service but not a private one: there is a shadowy figure on the far left. It is a weary pilgrim in the presence of the sacrament, and yet apparently oblivious to it. The viewer can see the priest raise it; the pilgrim cannot, even as the mysterious figure catches the attention of the acolyte on the left. We see this acolyte’s face, and the pilgrim does not. The reredos, like Burges’s fantasy reliquary cabinet, contains a niche with its shutters open, this time revealing a small Crucifixion embedded in the stone. Even when he worked on a large scale, Burges’s work demonstrates his deep interest in detail, ornament, and spaces within spaces, considering what could be revealed and concealed for different reasons and at different times. This scene of a medieval Mass at Westminster Abbey contains numerous layers, many — but not all — of which are opened and revealed in Burges’s image, with the implication that they would only be glimpsed temporarily. Burges’s interest in Catholic liturgy and theology was an important factor in his work long before his major commissions for wealthy Catholic patrons. Small-scale Eucharists among glowing images of Christ, within the inner layers of consecrated space, and the vessels, textiles, and rituals required for them, were a source of fascination and study for Burges from his earliest years as an architect and designer.

While working on numerous projects simultaneously, Burges developed his practice’s theological sensibilities and sources within his wide variety of projects. In opening this doorway onto an under-researched area of Burges studies through close attention to two early images, his dreamlike yet historically rooted approach to sacred medieval themes and spaces takes shape in a freshly focused way. In overall themes and precise details, Burges’s depictions of Christ in the 1870s, which was one of his most productive and groundbreaking phases, were a crucial part of his successes with Roman Catholic patrons. A reliquary and altar cross, both of which have received little scholarly consideration, are considered within the broader context of Burges’s ornate and highly complex private memorial chapels.

Burges’s ecclesiastical commissions are among the most well documented and intriguing — and eccentric — of the Gothic Revival in Britain. Whether working on a monumental chapel or an intricate reliquary, Burges’s designs in Christian contexts emphasize the interconnectedness of creation, as he simultaneously critiques what can be the all-too-artificial divisions between sacred and secular. Simeon Solomon’s painting on the Great Bookcase of an angel indicating the different and radiantly multicoloured tones which were the raw building materials for the heavenly New Jerusalem are just as at home as symbols of the zodiac and ‘ages of man’ incorporated into Burges’s religious architecture. Among the wide range of ecclesiastical projects Burges undertook, there is fresh value in focusing on his relationship with the image of Christ as a way of considering his unique interaction with Christianity and visual theology. In his diverse commissions for British Roman Catholic convert private patrons, new purchase on Burges’s vision and negotiation of layers of history as well as Christology emerges with fresh insight. Many of Burges’s images of Christ are iconographically, materially, and aesthetically mainstream within the Gothic Revival, but some are not, and often it is the combination and juxtaposition of elements that creates the most intriguing results. Mordaunt Crook observed that ‘somehow he manages to balance the precision and delicacy of the Puginian era with a severity and exaggeration which is characteristically High Victorian’.² After Burges died, there was a service for him at Cork Cathedral. The bishop preached on the passage, ‘Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with all thy might.’³

In much of Burges’s work, apparently minor details can be theologically capacious. The brass vestry door at St Mary’s, Studley Royal features an image of a fourteenth-century-inspired Madonna and Child in a garden (Fig. 3). It weaves together layers of time in ways that resonate with the fantasy watercolour interiors discussed above. At the base, among the highly decorative patterning, there is a small woven fence and vegetation. This references the medieval tradition of describing the holy purity of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the singular importance of her status as God-bearer with the whole of salvation present within her sacred womb as a hortus conclusus — an enclosed garden. The origin of the Latin phrase is the Song of Songs, in which the Beloved, the bride, is compared to a glorious garden full of life and yet private and set apart.⁴ A typological interpretation of this, in which the meanings and emotive spiritual bonds of Mary, Christ, the Church, and the Christian worshipper are ingrafted into the Hebrew Bible’s love song, has a long history. Representations of Mary the Mother of God in a garden, or referenced in garden imagery, became exceptionally popular in medieval art and theology from the fourteenth century onwards.

Fig. 3: William Burges, vestry door, St Mary’s, Studley Royal (1876). Photograph by Madeline Hewitson.

The door, which Burges donated, has the look of a scaled-up aumbry (a small cupboard for the reservation of the consecrated Host), rather than a door — another example of playing with size and materials in order to create a sensation of spatial reimagining, remixing a medieval toolkit to produce something new and unexpected. As the partition between a space for preparation and for the liturgy itself, the threshold of a vestry door, in particular, is significant. The vestry is a practical working space as well as a place of private prayers before services. The sanctuary is the ‘garden enclosed’. The vestry is more like the toolshed. The ministers assemble and dress for the liturgy, and the parallel between the door and the aumbry imagery would provide a double link across different scales between the meaning of the ritual, the sacrament of the Eucharist, and Mary as the church’s patron, connecting the Madonna and Child and Adoration motifs together with the inevitability of the Pietà and the prospect of the Resurrection.

In a Catholic chapel designed as a memorial for a beloved lost son and brother, this large and prominent Virgin and Child within the sanctuary for this particular purpose is evocative of a mother’s tenderness at the threshold of the human and the divine. Even on a small scale, the meanings and implications for a project’s interpretation as a whole could present themselves. Additionally, there is a possible connection between this iconography and the altarpiece at Christ the Consoler, Skelton, subtly linking them as a unique pair. In the centre of the altarpiece, the Madonna and Child receive a gift from one of the Magi. At Studley Royal, the gifts of the Magi remain at Christ’s feet in the garden with his Mother — an echo, perhaps, not only of the Magi’s devotional presence, but also of the different rendering of the same story in Skelton’s altarpiece.

Burges’s best-known ecclesiastical work includes Cork Cathedral, the chapel at Worcester College Oxford, an Anglican church in what is now the Czech Republic, a crozier for the Bishop of Dunedin in New Zealand made by Jes Barkentin, the restoration of the Chapter House at Salisbury Cathedral, All Saints in Fleet, St Michael and All Angels in Lowfield Heath, fittings for St Andrew’s, Wells Street in London, and a substantial portion of St Michael and All Angels in Brighton. In each case he attempted something new, both ecclesiastically and artistically. One of the most pressing concerns he articulated in 1868 was, simply, that dull and boring architecture would not lead people to transcendence or lead them to support the arts:

To conclude our survey of the modern churches, we may remark that they are all more or less alike; that there are no works of art which would induce a stranger to enter them; and that what little painting and sculpture they may possess has no life, and is hardly worth seeing, except as a warning not to do the like. In fact, when we have surveyed the outside, there is no occasion to go inside, except for the purposes of devotion.⁵

Scarce, lifeless, and uninspiring: these were among Burges’s chief concerns regarding the state of church architecture. He was determined to improve by example, if he could.

Eclecticism — far more intensive that his contemporaries — was crucial to his approach. His neo-Byzantine design won the competition for the Crimea Memorial Church in Constantinople in 1856 despite the competition’s own stated preference for Gothic. Ambitious from the start, in the mid-1840s, at the very beginning of his career, he produced work for Westminster Abbey, Glasgow Cathedral, and Lambeth Palace Chapel.

In these commissions and many more, at every scale, Burges’s work depicted Jesus Christ continually. From Madonna and Child scenes to images of Christ’s baptism by John the Baptist, the Crucifixion, Christ in Majesty, and everything in between, in Heaven, on earth, surrounded by saints, and alone, in stone, glass, paint, and metalwork. Burges’s integration of sources from historical wellsprings in literature, art, architecture, and scripture, particularly in relation to the Middle Ages but not exclusively so, resulted in an eclectic kaleidoscopic approach to iconography which was often as playful as it was intellectual. A late 1860s domestic commission for Lord Bute at Cardiff Castle demonstrates the point. Burges designed a series of fish plates for him in 1867. When Bute converted to Catholicism he began eating fish on Fridays, which was an expectation of his new faith. However, he despised fish, and so Burges made the discipline more palatable.⁶ Each plate features a playful seafood pun. Four eels weave themselves into a writhing portcullis design; the perch is a fish with wings on a branch, looking disconcertedly out of place; the tunny in a barrel plays on a rope swing. There is also a mock-majestic ‘Sole ala Cardinal’ [sic], wearing an ostentatious cardinal’s hat with its knotted fringe extending across the plate as a quasi-fishnet (Fig. 4). The sole’s tail is raised in the same manner as a medieval chasuble at an altar, held aloft by a solemn attendant anchovy. Sole alla cardinale is a stuffed sole served with a lobster and anchovy sauce.

Fig. 4: William Burges, ‘Sole a la Cardinal’ plate design (1867), in Designs for Fish Plates to Be Executed for Lord Bute, intr. by J. Mordaunt Crook (Thomas Heneage Art Books, 2012).

Complex multi-artist designs, such as the Great Bookcase and the Yatman Cabinet, also provided opportunities to make links between sacred and profane, deliberately collapsing distinctions between these worlds with an approach which consistently remains on the side of affectionate irreverence rather than iconoclastic or secularist critique. Burges’s designs are inherently ludic. It is far more pleasurable and satisfying to encounter Burges’s work with a mind full of Dante, French cathedrals, Victorian contemporary artists and architects, Graeco-Roman mythology, medieval furniture, and Christian theology than to turn up with minimal familiarity of these sources. Burges’s designs make high demands of their viewers, even as they often do so with a comical sparkle.

In ecclesiastical architectural commissions, the richness of references and layers of visual theology take on a solemnity which, ranging across the widest possible breadth of emotions and Christian references, interlacing desolation and consolation, are no less polyvalent. Burges had a unique perspective to offer on the depiction of Christ and the significance of the Eucharist within private commissions in the early 1870s for his most prominent Roman Catholic convert patrons: a reliquary (1871) (Fig. 5) and an altar cross (1871) (Fig. 6) for Lord Bute’s chapel at Cardiff Castle; and two memorial churches for Lady Mary Vyner and Lord Ripon in Yorkshire: Christ the Consoler in Skelton (1870–76) and St Mary’s, Studley Royal (1870–78). The budget for the churches was determined by the £32,000 ransom Lady Mary and Lord Ripon would have paid to free Frederick Vyner, Lady Mary Vyner’s youngest son. Murdered by his captors in a state of panic and confusion, the money became a horrifying echo of this sudden and brutal loss. Memorial chapels were a fitting response for a grieving Christian family.

Fig. 5: William Burges, reliquary for Lord Bute (1871), in R. P. Pullan, Architectural Designs of W. Burges, A.R.A., ed. by R. P. Pullan (Batsford, 1883).

Fig. 6: William Burges, design for altar crucifix for Lord Bute (1871).

The circumstances of what became known as the Dilessi Massacre were a cause for criticism and concern in Parliament.⁷ The churches were, of course, highly bespoke and personal projects with deep stories to tell of both faith and family. They were also lavish opportunities for Burges to express the views of religion and architecture he articulated in two publications: his 1865 manifesto Art as Applied to Industry and ‘Art and Religion’, an essay in Orby Shipley’s 1868 volume of his popular High Anglican series, The Church and the World. The former’s emphasis on materials and medieval examples, and Burges’s lament at their destruction, included limited discussion of Christianity but a very clear knowledge of liturgy and ecclesiastical art in relation to ritual and tradition. Burges was not as prolific a writer as some of his contemporaries, so the texts he has left behind are particularly useful in understanding his art and architectural work.

The essay in Shipley’s 1868 volume is a call for better and richer (in both senses of the word) patronage of ecclesiastical Gothic Revival art and architecture. It is also an account of his views on Pugin, Ruskin, The Ecclesiologist, and the Cambridge Camden Society’s first years. Burges’s purpose above all in this text is to educate — even at his most cursory or exasperated — and he begins by observing that

there is a great difference between a Religious and an Art revival; that, whereas it is possible for the Religious revival to be of comparatively quick growth, the progress and decay of all phases of Art have always been very slow; while the culmination is generally correspondingly short.⁸

Relationships across the arts were, for Burges as for many of his contemporaries, a key that could unlock an evolution from the problem of ‘copying’ medieval examples in the arts to the more contextually and imaginatively sophisticated application of medievalism to a new Victorian world:

If we copy, the thing never looks right, however servilely the mouldings, e.g. may have been imitated. The same occurs with regard to those buildings which do not profess to be copies: both they and the copies want spirit. They are dead bodies; they don’t live. (p. 575)

Declaring the need for lively, dynamic and imaginative architecture, Burges lamented on behalf of his whole profession:

We are at our wit’s end, and do not know what to do. It is bad enough to see our faults, and to know how to correct them in future work; but there is probably no more depressing sensation than to feel the presence of faults and not to know how to correct them. (p. 575)

Burges’s solution was a full reintegration of art and architecture, closely aligned with both secular and sacred art of the Christian Middle Ages. Burges concluded, ‘The fact is that we have separated the Arts instead of making them mutually assist one another’ (p. 575). ‘Again, a Religion never suddenly creates a new style of Art; on the contrary, it uses the contemporary Art, and insensibly modifies it’ (p. 574).

Burges argued for better architectural education (especially among clergy) and stronger collaboration, turning ultimately towards a possible revival of guild systems to build both competence and confidence in the arts. Within a series of books particularly popular among the clergy, Burges wryly concludes with a reference to Psalm 45, an evocative love song between God and his worshippers, characterized as a resplendent bride. Burges invokes the Bible as a way to connect the promise of the New Jerusalem in Revelation, the eternal city of God, with the need to improve the quality of Victorian architecture, no matter the cost and the time. Burges wrote, ‘perhaps, in one or two generations, we might hope to have a domestic architecture of which we need not be ashamed, while the King’s Daughter by that time would indeed have become glorious’ (p. 598).

For Burges, the progress of the beautification and improvement of the Church, the ‘King’s Daughter’, also relied on the relationship between public access, understanding, and prayer. Churches, he believed, should be open in order to encourage people to realize the essential bond between faith and the arts, and therefore ensure that visitors and worshippers would work to preserve, commission, and pay for them.⁹ Burges did not just bemoan a problem, however. He also proposed a strategy: education for potential clients; courage in architects; clergy keeping their churches open. This strategy is just as needed in the twenty-first century, though much like in Burges’s own time, there are strong examples of imaginative and bold sacred architecture.

In H. S. Goodhart-Rendel’s English Architecture since the Regency, published in 1953 as an attempt to interpret Victorian architecture with both a positive and somewhat eccentric flair at a time when it was derided and frequently demolished, the architect and critic described Burges’s work as ‘pervaded with the most peculiar and amusing fancy’.¹⁰ Eccentricity was a reason to cherish it. Goodhart-Rendel described Burges’s work at Skelton as ‘one of the most remarkable churches of the 19th century, and to my thinking one of the most beautiful’.¹¹ In Paul Thompson’s 1971 monograph on the Gothic Revival architect William Butterfield, he ventured that Burges was ‘the embodiment of optimism, a jovial Bohemian figure […] apparently untroubled by religious or moral problems’.¹² A century earlier, the towering figure of John Ruskin had an ambivalent relationship with Burges, whose work — blending meticulous historical research with playful innovation — may have been counted among what Ruskin dismissively and somewhat aggressively referred to as ‘Frankenstein monsters of, indirectly, my own making’.¹³ For most Gothic Revival scholars, Burges’s chronology, training, networks, and approach to the Middle Ages situate him within the canon of High Victorian, assertively bold mid-century designers. C. M. Smart’s survey of Victorian architecture categorizes Burges among ‘The Form Givers’: William Butterfield, G. E. Street, and J. L. Pearson; the title Muscular Churches taking its cue from the potent phrase ‘Muscular Christianity’, first coined in the 1850s with connotations of masculine vigour and heroism in relation to Christian morality.¹⁴ In Burges’s view, visual diversity as a kind of serious play, both rigorous and joyful, allowed innovative approaches to architectural style and genres to emerge. Eclecticism was a potent methodology, to be handled with great care.

Though his work is notoriously multidirectional, Burges was especially inspired by thirteenth- and fourteenth-century France in his architectural designs, rather than turning to Spain or Italy with the energy of Street and indeed Ruskin in his quintessential advocacy for Venetian Gothic. He was highly intentional regarding the incorporation of Islamic forms beyond European examples, though much of this was loose rather than scholarly. That said, an Italian influence is prevalent too — his consistent focus on Dante, in particular, was only paralleled by the Pre-Raphaelite painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti. For Burges’s Catholic patrons, in the small and major commissions discussed in this article, works of art and architecture and the divine power of Christ expressed in Lucca, Rome, and Assisi are all crucial reference points.

Burges’s 1868 essay was an opportunity to advance his own beliefs and principles, building on the brief texts he had contributed to The Ecclesiologist in previous years. He desired a wide readership and to transform and improve public perceptions of architecture’s capacity to create a better world and society. It was also an opportunity to roundly and freely criticize his contemporaries whose deployment of Gothic details and strategies was regularly compared with his own in the architectural press. Regarding his famous contemporary Alfred Waterhouse, well known for his civic projects, Burges lacerated his ‘abuse of foliage […] covering the building or object until it looks like a petrified arbour’ as well as his ‘barbaric’ patterns and details that seemed ‘worked to death’.¹⁵ Perhaps Burges’s irritation was partly due to his desire that his own ornamental work express deep meaning and purpose, singing with life via the opportunities that decorative art provided, particularly in sacred contexts. Waterhouse, like Burges, celebrated the diversity of animals and plants. Burges believed that Waterhouse got this wrong, and that he was right because of proportion, narrative, and above all, multilayered meanings. Any detail could be a portal to an imaginative world beyond the sum of an object’s or a building’s components.

Lord Bute converted to Roman Catholicism in 1866, and Burges’s interweaving of religious references and sacred art designs are a crucial part of Bute’s self-fashioning as a devout convert within a time still marked by anti-Catholic views and criticism. In addition to his private chapel design commissions, Bute also commissioned Burges to produce gloves for Cardinal Manning and candelabras for the Brompton Oratory as pious gifts for public Catholic life. In the reliquary Burges produced for Bute, to house his relic of the column where Christ was bound and tortured hours prior to the Crucifixion, the scene is witnessed by figures either side of the vulnerable yet resplendent Son of God. With Christ tethered to a glass cylinder by shining, violent rope, the composition is striking and there is a resonance with another controversially High Anglican ecclesiastical object Burges had designed in 1866, for Bishop Henry Jenner, who was to become bishop of the new diocese of Dunedin in New Zealand. He was consecrated at Canterbury Cathedral but never enthroned in Dunedin, due to the unacceptability of his controversial Anglo-Catholicism to the diocese. Jenner held his ivory crozier, designed by Burges, at the Canterbury liturgy, and even had official portrait photographs produced with it, but he never carried it in New Zealand. The connection between the ivory crozier and the flagellation column reliquary is Burges’s use of restraints — the ropes around Christ and around a figure on the neck of the bishop’s crozier.

The subject — St George slaying a dragon and rescuing a princess — was a valiant symbol of conquering evil and attaining purity. It was conscientiously deployed, as it amplified the Englishness of the Church of England for a distant imperial Anglican context. Burges’s design locks the saint and the beast in perpetual combat, capturing the moment of drama above the passive figure of the long-haired young woman who languishes against the ivory trunk. The battle’s drama dictates the shape and details of the ecclesiastical item, which is a symbol of the Church’s power and the bishop as a representative of Christ as the ‘Good Shepherd’. The young woman is lashed to Burges’s crozier as though it were a mast and a place of violent torture, not unlike the treatment of Christ bound to the column of transparent glass containing the fragment of his flagellation site in Jerusalem. Burges’s use of ropes and restraints in the thick of trauma has an uncanny resonance with John Everett Millais’s painting, The Knight Errant, which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1870. The reliquary commission took place at the same time as this work was shown.

Most art historical depictions of Christ in this narrative are not frontal, like Burges’s, but side on. The frontality Burges chose recalls Ecce Homo — ‘behold the man’ — imagery as well as the long tradition of depicting Christ frontally, dead and often in the presence of grieving angels, present but not yet emerging from the tomb. The column itself, from which Bute’s fragment came, is in the church of S. Prassede in Rome. Here, its casing is relatively simple, wood and glass like a traditional museum vitrine. The relic, which is the size of a large bollard, is tucked into a corner of the church rather than being a primary focus for devotion at the high altar. The reliquary design for Bute’s tiny stone fragment may have a range of sources, both architectural and artistic, at multiple scales. The figure of Christ could be inspired by Lucas van Leyden’s print Christ Tied to a Column, which also features a rare frontal image of Christ for the viewer’s devotion. At the top of Burges’s reliquary, an angel holds an inscription, echoing the paper label wrapped around the relic, itself a sign of authenticity and age. The angel’s inscription reads ‘de columna flag’ — it is likely that the illegible tiny paper within the glass cylinder has the same text. Stone encased by glass and metal, this relatively minor and obscure project is just one of a wide array of commissions that demonstrate Burges’s interest in reliquaries, from ornate microarchitectural metalwork to painted wooden caskets. Both the reliquary and the altar cross for Bute were illustrated in Pullan’s 1885 edition of Burges’s designs, demonstrating the quality and value of these items in particular.¹⁶

In 1871, while he was simultaneously designing the memorial chapels for Lady Vyner and Lord Ripon at Skelton and Studley Royal, Burges produced a crucifix for Lord Bute’s chapel at Cardiff Castle. Its iconography is a theological tour de force, combining typical and rare iconography to produce a distinctive Eucharistic theological view. The base of the crucifix, designed to stand on an altar, features a central figure with a halo and arms spread wide: St Dismas. Tradition has given him a name and descriptor — the ‘good thief’ or ‘penitent thief’ — although he is not named in the Bible. In Burges’s reliquary he is still bound to his cross. The Gospel of Luke describes Jesus being flanked by two men who were sentenced to death on the Cross as well. One proclaims his faith in Christ, asking the Son of God to ‘remember me when you come into your kingdom’. Jesus responds, ‘today you will be with me in paradise.’¹⁷ On Burges’s crucifix, angels stretch out a cloth in front of him, indicating that his soul is being transported into Heaven. The geometrical knop directly above his head features an image of the arma Christi, the instruments of Christ’s Passion. These include the crown of thorns, the spear that pierced Christ, the dice soldiers used to gamble for Christ’s tunic, and the column at which he was flogged prior to the Crucifixion. On the crucifix, the knop’s symbols of Christ’s Passion could have been placed in any order. Notably, the tiny representation of Christ’s tunic is visible on the outermost surface, adjacent to Dismas. The thief’s soul is clothed. The tunic — its removal and use as a Roman soldier’s prize as a symbol of the violence of humiliation — implies the nakedness of Christ exposed on the Cross, and his imminent murder. Directly above this, Burges placed a miniature chalice in high relief. There is a strong medieval tradition of angels catching drops of Christ’s blood in chalices, hovering in mid-air. Here, the chalice is positioned beneath Christ’s feet, as a vessel into which the blood will drain.

Unlike many images of the Crucifixion, Christ is sumptuously clothed in dazzling jewels as well as a crown — an image of mystical triumph of the Son of God as high priest and the Great High Priest — fully human and fully divine. The clothing here does not refer to the New Testament’s accounts of the Crucifixion but offers a conflation of the Hebrew Bible’s description of Israelite priests — particularly Aaron. In these Crucifixion images of Christ as triumphant priest-king, ‘Christus Rex’, however, Jesus is usually depicted as physically strong, looking out towards the viewer. This aligns not only with the theological notion of Resurrection triumph, but also with the description of Christ in Majesty, reigning in Heaven as in the Book of Revelation. This work of sacred art was produced at around the same time as the designs for Skelton and Studley Royal. Burges’s interest in vestments, which is such a key aspect of the crucifix he produced for Bute, was apparent in many of his related designs. For Bute’s bedroom at Cardiff Castle, for example, Burges produced a small devotional sculpture of St John the Evangelist, referencing Lord Bute’s own name. The presence of Bute’s ‘name saint’ would be a sign of protection — a bond between the heavenly and earthly namesakes. Unusually, Burges’s St John wears a dalmatic with a Byzantine-style bird’s head design and a maniple, as well as a jewelled breastplate inspired by Old Testament descriptions of priestly garments.¹⁸

Unexpectedly, despite the radiant garb, Christ’s body in Burges’s Crucifixion is limply weighed down, his head bowed and shoulders slumped under the force of gravity and the horror of death. A possible source for this figure is the Volto Santo, a miraculous large-scale wooden and metal sculpture of the Crucifixion in Lucca (Fig. 7), long associated with a belief that it was made by Nicodemus, who was a somewhat incognito follower of Jesus (coming to him by night), and present at the entombment. The Lucca Crucifixion sculpture has been dated to the ninth century and has a reputation for miraculous events, revered as one of the ‘true likenesses’ of Christ, with a similar status to the Turin Shroud.¹⁹ It was and is a major pilgrimage site, was widely publicized, and it is likely that Bute — and indeed the Marquess of Ripon too — knew about it and its legendary power, and may have visited Lucca to see it.

Fig. 7: Volto Santo Crucifix, Lucca (9th century, with later additions). Wikimedia Commons.

This Crucifixion takes its cue from the long tradition of Christ as reigning from the Cross, a figure of high priestly triumph over death, even in the midst of the violence and humiliation of public torture. However, Burges’s approach, in referencing and miniaturizing the miraculous Crucifixion at Lucca, does something different. By contextualizing the Lucca imagery within the wider iconographical programme of the reliquary, Burges interlaces the suffering and the triumph of the Son of God alongside the miraculous associations with Lucca. There is, in Burges’s rendering, a tension running across tragedy and hope, and death and life, that resonates with the promise of Christ as Consoler, connecting Burges’s theological sensibilities across his work with two main Catholic patrons, Lord Bute and Lord Ripon.

Consecrated in 1876, the chapel of Christ the Consoler was built in Skelton-on-Ure as a memorial for Frederick Grantham Vyner. Lady Mary Vyner and Lord Ripon wanted to ensure that Vyner, murdered in Greece in 1870, would be honoured and prayed for in a church bearing a title with strong connections to eternal life and comfort for those who mourned him. Lord Ripon’s social identity and political outlook transformed significantly across the course of his life. Having once adhered to Christian Socialism and describing aristocracy in England and monarchy as ‘dead dogs’, he later became Viceroy of India and very much took up the opportunity of participating and leading in the highest circles of British imperial and societal power.²⁰ The combination of his Catholic convert faith (which attracted strong public controversy), wealth, and commitment to medievalism as both nostalgic and forward-looking led him to fantasies including the restoration of Fountains Abbey (which he had inherited) as a working men’s college. ‘Don’t that make your mouth water!’, he wrote to Tom Hughes in 1853.²¹

In 1876, with the memorial church underway, he did consider the prospect of restoring Fountains with Burges, but the idea went no further. Medieval romanticism persisted, however. The abbey was an important site for the Ripon Millenary Festival, a highly complex and ornate medieval pageant including plays, music, processions and food in Ripon and at the abbey.²² The festival began in 1886 with strong support from Lord Ripon, and in 1896 Lord Bute was among the guests for this immersive pageantry. With wistfully devout longing worthy of Pugin, Lord Ripon later wrote to J. Hungerford Pollen:

I wept when I remembered the days when the Abbey lived, and was the glory of the country; when the poor were fed and warmed in the wintry cold, when ‘hospitality’ was kept, and all men rejoiced in the Catholic Faith. The times were rude, violence and injustice were not unknown, but heroic penances, noble works of charity, loyal service, were known also.²³

Like Bute, Ripon also commissioned reliquaries from Burges, including one for a fragment of the True Cross in 1877.²⁴ Ripon’s piety and wealth led to his purchase of the Franciscan church of S. Damiano in 1870, a radical mark of religious philanthropy, ensuring that it would be preserved and protected when in a state of significant disrepair.²⁵ That said, a condition was Ripon’s refusal to allow it to be restored, perhaps wary of the prevalence of aggressive nineteenth-century techniques deployed by Victorian architects within Gothic churches and cathedrals across Europe.

Among centuries-long memorial chapel traditions there was also a more recent and much admired precedent for Ripon’s and Bute’s architectural commissions for Burges: the Earl of Shrewsbury’s patronage in support of the Catholic architect Pugin resulted in St Giles in Cheadle, Staffordshire. The plan of St Giles is, as Mordaunt Crook observes, very similar to Studley Royal. The church, within the wider story of the Earl’s enthusiasm for the Gothic Revival and Catholic Victorian life, is a manifesto not only for Catholic liturgy and sacramentally driven art and architecture, but also for a specific kind of revivalism. Roderick O’Donnell explains that in his ecclesiastical vision, Pugin ‘set out to re-create an English Medieval parish church of the year 1300, including its full decorative repertoire’.²⁶ Burges was less interested in bringing such a specific moment back to life, as ever a proponent of eclectic combinative originality, but was nevertheless keen to ensure that the opportunities for Catholic patronage presented at Skelton and Studley Royal could speak simultaneously to the past and present through the lens of Catholic theology.

The dedication to Christ the Consoler is a rarity. Christ the King, even before this title for Christ was declared a feast day in the early twentieth century, has long been a more typical descriptor and patron for places of worship. The image of Christ reigning in majesty following the Ascension, eternally at the right hand of God the Father, is as frequent as it is monumental, both theologically and iconographically, and Burges worked with it regularly as did numerous Victorian architects. At Skelton, this iconography was included within a wider framework that focused on loss, mourning, and tenderness. Consolation is an apt theme, considering the circumstances of the Vyner commission for this chapel, as is the theme of Madonna and Child for Studley Royal. That said, the origin of the decision to select the Consoler title as the patronage for the chapel is uncertain. Biblically, the association with God and consolation is found primarily in two places: Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians, and Jesus’s words to the disciples before his death in which he promises the Holy Spirit as life-giving divine consolation.²⁷ Jesus is not identified with consolation as such, though the offer of consolation in the figure of Christ, particularly in the Eucharist and in the promise of eternal life through his Resurrection, underpins a core Christological way of interpreting and living in response to Christ’s character and mission. There were artists, albeit a small number, taking up the title of Christ as Consoler, though it is uncertain whether Burges or Ripon’s family knew of them.

Nikolaus Pevsner’s description of Skelton’s interior emphasizes its ‘great opulence’ while critiquing its ‘somewhat elephantine calibre’.²⁸ When its design was publicized, The Builder ‘dated’ it to c. 1270.²⁹ The images of Christ — particularly interior and exterior sculpture — provide a composite theological account of consolation. The exterior features Christ as the Good Shepherd, a lamb around his neck (Fig. 8). Here, the unusual detail is that Christ wears a crown of thorns, which merges the Gospel metaphor Jesus offers about himself in relation to love and inclusion in a community of faith, and the ultimate expression of that love in the Crucifixion. It is both tragic and tender. Inside, the dramatic use of red in the chancel arch extends the impact of the high relief yet further. It is a depiction of the Ascension, with the Apostles looking upwards to form a quasi-frieze, creating an intermediate layer between worshippers making their way from the nave towards the sanctuary for the Eucharist and the image of Christ’s closest followers, who were promised the Holy Spirit as the source of long-awaited consolation. At Ascension, Christ’s worshippers anticipate but have not yet received the Holy Spirit (also a source of divine consolation and advocacy) at Pentecost. It is a threshold moment, which Burges placed in a transitional space between the nave and the chancel. Typically, this is where a Last Judgement scene would be found in a medieval church. Burges’s decision is intriguing, particularly in conjunction with the themes of the west rose window, which depicts everyday people and the quotidian tasks of daily life. The relationship between the main external and internal images of Christ creates a multilayered vision of Christ’s life and death, leading ultimately into the sanctuary itself with the altarpiece that takes the worshipper back into the origins of Christ’s presence: the relationship with Mary.

Fig. 8: William Burges, exterior sculpture, Christ the Good Shepherd, Christ the Consoler, Skelton (1870–76). Photograph by Madeline Hewitson.

In his 1868 essay, Burges wrote primarily for a clergy audience about altarpieces, describing them as ‘the place where the most careful and delicate work should be placed, because it is the eye or centre of the church’.³⁰ The altar as sacramental epicentre is a basic tenet of Christianity. The notion of an altarpiece — visual art which provides a symbolic context for aspects of the Eucharist — as an eye is both powerful and unusual, suggesting a perplexing relationship between the artist, the viewer, seeing, being seen, and God’s presence in the bread and wine — Jesus’s mystical body and blood. The altarpiece as an eye suggests God’s own gaze — from Heaven, from the Cross, within the soul. At Skelton, Burges’s overall design is comparable with his 1865 design for the altarpiece at the radically Anglo-Catholic St Michael and All Angels in Brighton, though the iconography is different (Fig. 9). In the centre, one of the Magi presents a gift to the infant Christ in a pared back Adoration, making a link between the altar, the aumbry (and perhaps the Madonna and Child image on the aumbry at Studley Royal), gentiles’ recognition of Christ as the Son of God, and the Eucharist. On either side, where one might expect images of saints or Apostles, Burges has included a series of Old Testament prophets, their faces turned towards the central scene as a visual typology. From left to right, Burges depicted Ezekiel, Jeremiah, Isaiah, and Daniel. At the west of the church, the font includes a monumental cover, within which is a depiction of John the Baptist baptizing Jesus, who genuflects to receive the water and the divine blessing as ‘the beloved’. The relationship between Vyner’s early death, family grief, and the anticipation of Jesus’s ministry in the Gospels following his baptism is made clear in the unusual iconography on the bowl. Here too, there is theological advocacy for the practice of infant baptism. Beneath the memorial inscription, three children appear to emerge from animated water (which can also be read visually as heavenly cloud), and they hold a scroll in English with the words of Christ from Matthew 19. 14: ‘Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven’ (Fig. 10). The triad of children holding the banner of Christ’s promise of companionship and eternal life for children extends to all baptized people as the past, present, and future Body of Christ, incorporating the Vyners’ loss within the sacramental theology of baptism and eternal life.

Fig. 9: William Burges, altarpiece, Madonna and Child, Christ the Consoler, Skelton (1870–76). Photograph by Madeline Hewitson.

The second chapel in memory of Vyner’s death was St Mary’s, Studley Royal, near Fountains Abbey. As at Skelton, the Gothic plan is relatively simple and compact, but the decoration is lavish, and the intensity of colour and symbolism is even higher than at Christ the Consoler. The contrasts are more striking too, with a strong demarcation between the nave’s relatively unadorned stone and burst of glowing colour in the chancel and sanctuary. Mordaunt Crook has described the effect of the interior as ‘like stepping inside a reliquary or a jewelled casket’:³¹ the delicate treatment of microarchitectural devotional works of art, exponentially made gigantic.

Fig. 10: William Burges, font, Christ the Consoler, Skelton (1870–76). Photograph by Madeline Hewitson.

Dedicated to the Mother of God, with close involvement in the design from Vyner’s mother as well as his sister and brother-in-law, the church teems with images of the life of the Virgin Mary along with images of angels and a decorative programme reflecting on death, grief, and resurrection through the lens of ‘Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained’.³² The font, so different from Skelton, features secular allegories of the ages of man, weaving the Christian sacrament of baptism as a lifelong flow of participation in the Body of Christ into a literary and philosophical tradition with a unique Burges twist. The irony is melancholic too, as Vyner’s early death denied him and his family the full arc of a life’s phases and opportunities depicted around the font.

A mother’s love for her murdered son permeates the site’s symbolism. Among the glittering stained glass, angels, and painted ceilings, the chancel’s and sanctuary’s details exert particular theological meanings. The floor mosaics include representations of the four rivers in Genesis, sometimes seen in font iconography (George Gilbert Scott’s font at St Mary Abbots, Kensington is a Victorian example). Placing these on the floor creates a link between water and earth, Genesis and the New Jerusalem’s own promise of flowing water and Christ’s own baptism, together with Jesus’s promise of ‘living water’ to the woman at the well he meets in the Gospels. Within this liquid world, mosaics in the sanctuary make connections between this family memorial church and a much wider Christian story. In the chancel, sites of Christ’s Passion, including the Garden of Gethsemane and Golgotha, with three empty crosses starkly depicted in the tesserae, are framed by holy pilgrimage sites of death and resurrection for both Mary and Jesus: the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Church of the Resurrection, and the Tomb of the Virgin (Fig. 11). Additional mosaics of the Golden Gate and the Temple provide a veritable map of Christ’s Jerusalem and the Passion and Resurrection within it. This visual narrative flows through into the sanctuary, which focuses on imagery relating to the New Jerusalem. The mosaic inscription on the chancel step underscores this, interlacing biblical typology alongside both text and image: ‘We will go into the house of the Lord; our feet shall stand in thy gates O Jerusalem.’³³ Earthly Jerusalem, from the Temple to Gethsemane, gives way via the rivers of Genesis into a new Eden, which — represented near the altar — is glimpsed and promised in the Eucharist as a redemptive gift that overturns Adam’s fall through Christ’s triumph.

Fig. 11: William Burges, sanctuary mosaics, St Mary’s, Studley Royal (1870–78). Photograph by Madeline Hewitson.

In the early 1870s Burges’s major Catholic convert patrons presented him with opportunities to consider Christian imagery and theology in new ways. The crucifix and column reliquary for Lord Bute are a fusion of references that work together to tell the story of the Passion and the hope of resurrection for a patron’s private devotion. In Burges’s visual telling of the Crucifixion, Christ may be resplendently clothed, but his body — inspired by a far larger, older, miraculous Italian sculpture — bespeaks sacrificial compassion. In the reliquary Christ’s agony is luminously expressed in a glass depiction of the column itself, containing a fragment of a stone in Rome housed within a jewelled microarchitecture that both reimagines and honours the scene of torture. Private devotion took on a more monumental form in Lord Ripon and Lady Vyner’s memorial to a man who had died young and violently. At Studley Royal and Skelton, the intensity of both interiors claims the image of Christ as both Consoler and beloved Son, uniting the churches into a pair with symbolism — in the detail as well as in the overall effect — that makes strong theological claims about the power of resurrection, time, and eternity.

Notes

1. Nicholas Roquet, ‘Life in Costume: The Architectural Fictions and Anachronisms of William Burges’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, McGill University, 2011), p. 56 <https://escholarship.mcgill.ca/concern/theses/cz30px867> [accessed 9 February 2026]. [^{^}]
2. J. Mordaunt Crook, William Burges and the High Victorian Dream, rev. edn (Frances Lincoln, 2013), p. 342. [^{^}]
3. Ecclesiastes 9. 10. [^{^}]
4. Song of Songs 4. 12. [^{^}]
5. William Burges, ‘Art and Religion’, in The Church and the World: Essays on Questions of the Day in 1868, ed. by the Rev. Orby Shipley (Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1868), pp. 574–98 (p. 585). [^{^}]
6. Lynsey Nairn, ‘The Bute Archive and Family at Mount Stuart: Past and Present’, Art & the Country House, 20 November 2020, doi:10.17658/ACH/MSE554. [^{^}]
7. [Ioannis Gennadios], Notes on the Recent Murders by Brigands in Greece (Cartwright, 1870). [^{^}]
8. Burges, ‘Art and Religion’, p. 574. [^{^}]
9. Ibid, p. 578. [^{^}]
10. H. S. Goodhart-Rendel, English Architecture since the Regency: An Interpretation (Constable, 1953), p. 113. [^{^}]
11. Quoted in The Strange Genius of William Burges, ‘Art-Architect’, 1827–1881, ed. by J. Mordaunt Crook (National Museum of Wales, 1981), p. 101. [^{^}]
12. Paul Thompson, William Butterfield (Routledge, 1971), p. 374. [^{^}]
13. The Works of John Ruskin, ed. by E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, Library Edition, 39 vols (Allen and Longmans, Green, 1903–12), X: The Stones of Venice Volume II (1904), p. 459, emphasis in original. Available online at <https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/the-ruskin/the-complete-works-of-ruskin/> [accessed 22 December 2025]. [^{^}]
14. C. M. Smart, Muscular Churches: Ecclesiastical Architecture of the High Victorian Period (University of Arkansas Press, 1989). The most famous early example of the phrase is a review of Charles Kingsley’s novel Two Years Ago, published in 1857. [^{^}]
15. William Burges, Art as Applied to Industry: A Series of Lectures (Henry and Parker, 1865), pp. 117, 116. [^{^}]
16. R. P. Pullan, The Designs of William Burges, A.R.A ([n.pub], 1885), plates 13 and 14. [^{^}]
17. Luke 23. 42–43. [^{^}]
18. The Strange Genius of William Burges, ed. by Crook, A.60 and A.61. [^{^}]
19. Ricardo Drusi, ‘Giovanni Lami e il Volto Santo di Lucca’, Saggi e memorie di storia dell’arte, 42 (2018), pp. 143–51 <https://www.jstor.org/stable/45433496> [accessed 22 December 2025]; see also Elisabetta Povoledo, ‘A Long Revered Relic Is Found to Be Europe’s Oldest Surviving Wooden Statue’, New York Times, 20 June 2020 <https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/19/world/europe/christ-statue-lucca-italy.html> [accessed 22 December 2025]. [^{^}]
20. Quoted in N. C. Masterman, John Malcolm Ludlow: The Builder of Christian Socialism (Cambridge University Press, 1963), p. 136. [^{^}]
21. Crook, William Burges and the High Victorian Dream, p. 202. [^{^}]
22. The full festival archive is available at ‘Ripon Millenary of 1886’, The Thoresby Society, Leeds Library, 2011 <https://www.thoresby.org.uk/content/treasures/ripmill.php> [accessed 22 December 2025]. [^{^}]
23. Crook, William Burges and the High Victorian Dream, p. 202. [^{^}]
24. Ibid., p. 209. [^{^}]
25. Pamela Tudor-Craig, ‘Christ on the Altar and in the Manger’, Church Times, 24 December 2004. [^{^}]
26. Roderick O’Donnell, ‘“An Apology for the Revival”: The Architecture of the Catholic Revival in Britain and Ireland’, in Gothic Revival: Religion, Architecture and Style in Western Europe, 1815–1914, ed. by Jan De Maeyer and Luc Verpoest (University Press Leuven, 2000), pp. 35–48 (p. 39) <https://kadoc.kuleuven.be/pdf/publicaties/kbe001470.pdf> [accessed 22 December 2025]. [^{^}]
27. I am grateful to Paula Gooder for her insights on this topic from a biblical studies perspective. [^{^}]
28. Quoted in The Strange Genius of William Burges, ed. by Crook, p. 101. [^{^}]
29. Crook, William Burges and the High Victorian Dream, p. 207. [^{^}]
30. Burges, ‘Art and Religion’, p. 585. [^{^}]
31. Crook, William Burges and the High Victorian Dream, p. 210. [^{^}]
32. The Strange Genius of William Burges, ed. by Crook, p. 102. [^{^}]
33. Psalms 122. 2. [^{^}]