Malcolm Sinclair

What is this life if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare.

Category: Churches

MementoMori, Death History, Stained Glass, Dooms & Wall Paintings, Gothic and its Revival, Ecclesiastical & Biblical Art, Wiltshire Churches.

The Dauntsey Doom

October 12, 2023 /

Wiltshire's Medieval Doom Board Painting

Probably dating from the mid 15th Century, the Doom at the Church of St James the Great in Dauntsey, North Wiltshire, is one of only five such paintings on wooden boards in England. Portraying The Last Judgement, the Doom was restored in the 1990s and sits where it was first positioned around six hundred years ago over the rood screen between the nave and chancel of the church.

The Dauntsey Doom

Wiltshire has two significant Doom Paintings, one at Dauntsey, the subject of this blog, and the other in Salisbury. Whilst the latter is the county’s most artistically impressive Doom, painted on the chancel arch of St Thomas’s Church, it is the Dauntsey Doom that is for me the more interesting of the two. Having studied it during my recent Masters Degree in Medieval Studies, and also having given a public talk on it at the church in 2023 to nearly a hundred people, I wanted one of my first posts on this website to be about the Dauntsey Doom.

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Memento Mori – the gift that keeps on giving.

October 11, 2023 /

Some of my future blog posts will be tagged as relating to Memento Mori. Translated from Latin, this means remember death, or remember you must die. In art, literature, and funerary monuments, it has a more specific meaning, referring to particular symbols, such as hourglasses, skulls, bells and coffins. These are often used in paintings, memorials and gravestones to represent death.

Skull with crossbones and an hourglass - grave at Holy Cross Church, Seend, Wiltshire

For me, such morbid representations are often the most interesting finds in any church I visit, along with the contrasting beauty of stained glass. Occasionally of course, both combine, when death is represented in glass, with most windows memorialising someone who has died tending to show Biblical scenes or saints, with a smaller inscription in memory of the dear departed. Such use of windows for remembrance became popular in Victorian times, often replacing the larger carved tablets on the walls of churches (see below for examples of these).

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