The New Murrey and Blue blog

“….UK conservators knit together thousands of pictures taken at Angers Cathedral of Saint Maurille paintings….”

It was while reading this article—https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2025/01/03/medieval-wall-paintings-hidden-in-a-french-cathedral-revealed-in-digital-imagery—that I learned of a worthy decade-long project by UK conservationists that has revealed some magnificent medieval wall paintings “….in all their multi-coloured splendour for the first time in more than 500 years….”  The paintings, at Angers Cathedral in western France, date from late 13^th-century and have a great deal to do with the court of Henry III, see https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofEngland/King-Henry-III/. The connection to him is inferred from an image of a young king (see below), which bears an uncanny resemblance to the effigy on his tomb in Westminster Abbey:

The paintings are, however, hidden behind panelling and the UK-based art historians have been working on producing the first full-colour image of the paintings which illustrate the life and miracles of St Maurille, a 5^th-century bishop of Angers, see https://www.johnsanidopoulos.com/2019/09/saint-maurilius-bishop-of-angers-426.html. “….The image was created by digitally stitching more than 8,000 photographs of the curving walls, taken in the crawl space behind the panelling which could not be dismantled as it forms part of the choir stalls….”

The team were Lucy Wrapson, Paul Binski and Emily Guerry, and their photographs were “….digitally stitched into a coherent whole by Chris Titmus of the Hamilton Kerr Institute in Cambridge, a job which took him years….” A grant from the John Fell Fund assisted the project, and their full report (together with many photographs) is published in the November 2024 issue of the Bulletin of the Hamilton Kerr Institute, see https://www.hki.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/files/hki_bulletin_number_10.pdf.

The result of this project is a glimpse of the astonishing beauty, colour and descriptive artistry of the 13^th century, and of the close links between France and England.