Secrets unveiled as College’s iconic Great Gate is restored to glory
Every 50 years The Great Gate of St John's requires restoration to keep it looking spectacular
The striking Great Gate of St John’s is an iconic feature of the streetscape of Cambridge and is the backdrop of countless photographs taken by locals, tourists and members of the College. It is decorated with Lady Margaret Beaufort’s coat of arms and the animals on either side are yales – mythical beasts with antelopes’ bodies, goats’ heads and swivelling horns. A statue of St John the Evangelist features with an eagle, which is his symbol and now an emblem of the College. Every 50 years The Great Gate requires restoration to keep it looking spectacular.
Dr Frank Salmon, Associate Professor of the History of Art, College Director of Studies in the History of Art, and Fellow of St John’s, inspects the gate now it’s been given a fresh lease of life – and reveals some new secrets.
If you were in Cambridge this summer you will have noticed the street front of the Great Gate was covered in scaffolding. When the scaffolding came down at the end of September, what was revealed was a completed programme of conservation and restoration of the carved decoration of this, the College’s second most photographed feature after the Bridge of Sighs.
The Great Gate’s stone and paintwork naturally deteriorates over time through exposure to the elements and needs thorough attention roughly every half-century. The last restoration took place in 1982, using a colour scheme devised in the mid-1930s by Royal College of Art professor Ernest Tristram. For the present work the College has been fortunate to have had the skills of conservator Matthew Beesley, whose approach has been to blend his expert scientific understanding of the geology of stone and the chemistry of paint with his equally expert aesthetic sense of the Tudor approach to polychromy (the art of painting in several colours, especially when applied to ancient pottery, sculpture or architecture).
Matthew carried out his proposals solo, under the watchful eye of the College’s Building Committee, Maintenance team and Henry Freeland, of architects Freeland Rees Roberts.
Tristram had painted the entire background landscape green and used extensive gilding. Matthew’s approach has been to let the carved stone speak for itself, deploying the 24-carat gilding sparingly, in order to catch the light on details. He used strong colours sparingly, too, mostly for organic elements such as the roses and, of course, the marguerites.
Conservation techniques for historic carved stonework are now very sophisticated. Matthew stabilised the stone where it was flaking and used careful tonal layering and stippling when repainting, to enhance the relief of the sculpted forms. Four layers of ultraviolet-protective varnish were applied, followed by a hydrophobic nano layer at the end that causes water to bead up and roll off, rather than to soak in. The new scheme should therefore survive and hold its colour for decades to come.
Eagle-eyed observers (pun intended) will note the difference between our Great Gate and that at Christ’s College, restored in 2017. There the paint used is likely to be acrylic rather than lime-based as here at St John’s, and its unmodulated application and stronger colour (as well as the solid gilding used throughout) means that the end result looks very different.
Three things to look out for. First, the figure of St John has regained his long-lost right index and second fingers, so that, once again, he is blessing those who enter the College through its portal. At the same time, Matthew has given the viper curling around the chalice its head back, together with some new orangey spots.
Second, the fox dragging a goose or chicken into its den just above the snout of the right-hand yale is now not getting away with it so sneakily, as it has become far more visible from the ground by being rouged up.
And third, note the white petals at the centres of the red roses. When I wrote an account of the Great Gate’s decoration in Johnian News back in 2016, I reported that, in the 1930s, no trace had been found of white paint and that the roses were therefore presumably intended solely as Lancastrian symbols. Matthew’s observation that the inner petals of the roses are carved in a continuous circle, differently from the individual outer petals, has inspired us to believe the flowers were indeed intended as Tudor roses – that is as symbolising the union of the Houses of Lancaster and York. So the central petal circles are now painted white.
Today, the Great Gate therefore once again embodies the particular openness to all Ä¢¹½ÊÓƵÏÂÔØ°²×¿, east and west of the Pennines, from the English counties that lie north of the River Trent, as set into statute on behalf of Lady Margaret Beaufort at the time of the gate’s 1511-1516 construction.
Published: 18/10/2024