George Edmund Street: Unpublished Notes and Reprinted Papers

by George Edmund Street

Besides this porch there is little to notice in the exterior, save that the brick work of the transept front over the porch savours of the Italian mode of treating gables with deep cornices and traceries, and that the two great brick steeples at the west end are fine examples of a kind of steeple of which the city possesses however others much finer. The spires are not ancient; the whole exterior is of red brick.

In the interior of the church the most interesting features are the choir-screen and loft, and the rood. The screen stands at the east side of the transept crossing, whilst the rood is supported on an elaborately carved beam, which spans the western arch of the crossing, and the effect is most singular and certainly very piquant; the whole being in a very late but good style, with figures remarkably well sculptured. Under the screen is an altar, and on either side still remains another. They are of stone supported on brick work, and there is no mark of piscina, or of lockers, or places for relics in them. The rood, and the figures of SS. Mary and John, are on a very large scale, so that altogether, with their supports, they reach nearly the whole height of the arch under which they stand.

There are also throughout the nave of the cathedral a number of very curious seats; they vary a good deal in detail, but their outline is similar, and their effect rather striking; I confess, however, that I was sorry to see examples of fixed seats of such a date in a cathedral church. In the nave there are some pendents for candles; one an angel holding a light, and strongly reminding one of those beautiful angels with candles above the stalls in the choir of S. Laurence at Nuremberg; and the other, a much more elaborate composition, and coloured richly in gold, red, and blue; it has two sitting figures of Bishops under canopies, and bears three very large candles. One of the great treasures of this church is the magnificent brass to Bishop Johann von Mull, and Bishop Burchard von Serken, who deceased in 1350 and 1317. I was unable to make so careful a rubbing of this magnificent brass as I could have wished, but I have done enough to show how grand it is, and how very similar in its details to the famous Flemish brasses which remain at Lynn, S. Albans, North Mymms, Wensley, and Newark. Like two of these, of which we fortunately possess rubbings, it is remarkable for being one great engraved plate, and not, as was the English custom, a plate cut out to the shape of the figure, and then inserted in an incised slab; and compared with the S. Albans brass, which hangs by its side, it will be seen that the detail is so exactly similar, that there can scarcely be a shadow of a doubt that they were both engraved by the same man. It is perhaps altogether the finest of the whole, and if so, perhaps the finest brass in Europe. It is appreciated by the sacristan, who demands a fee for lifting up a cover which he keeps on it, and whose temper was of so difficult a kind that I almost despaired being allowed to rub it. However, by persevering, I at last succeeded.

Lastly, there is in a chapel on the north side of the nave a most magnificent triptych by Memling, almost unequalled by any work of his I have ever seen. It has double shutters; on the outer, figures of SS. Blaise, Giles, John, and Jerome, and inside are painted the Crucifixion, and a number of subjects from the Passion of our Lord, all worked together into one grand picture in a manner favourite with painters of Memling’s time, and not to be contemned because no longer the custom of our artists, inasmuch as Memling, Van Eyck, Giotto, and their contemporaries all did it, and what they did we may well believe not to have been done without good reason. The expression of all the faces is most careful, and the skill with which portraits are preserved throughout all the subjects, as e.g. of S. Peter, of Judas, and of our Lord, is very marvellous. They were obviously painted from actual faces, and not imagined. The colour of the whole is generally very rich and deep, the drawing very vigorous, and the whole forms one of the most magnificent specimens it is possible to imagine of the early German school.

I have forgotten to say that the font in the cathedral is of metal. It is a bowl arcaded and supported on four figures of angels; but it is not very good in its character; perhaps we might think much of it here, but in northern Germany, where I had just been seeing the wonderful fonts at Münster, Brunswick, and above all at Hildesheim, the metal fonts at Lübeck struck me as looking very poor.

I happened to come in for the end of a week-day sermon here, and was rather amused, after it was finished, to find the Prediger descending from the pulpit, and directing his steps towards me, whilst the people went on singing: however, he turned into a great sort of glazed pew in the choir-aisle, and there, having shut himself in, he enthroned himself in a comfortable chair, waited for about ten minutes until the sound of singing and music had died away, and then stole back and out of the church at the west. It is curious, in northern Germany, to observe how entirely, in public ministrations, the Lutheran ministers seem to consider preaching their only work; going in after the preparatory hymn is sung, and going away as soon as their sermon is finished, without regard to the hymn which always winds up their functions. In Lübeck there was a curious madness about preaching: every morning, between eight and nine, there seemed to be sermons going on; and as the congregations are infinitesimal, they do all they can to keep a stray listener, when they can have him within their walls, by locking the doors. Happily, I escaped, by judicious management, the sad fate of listening to a sermon from any of these divines in black cloaks and immense white frills, who look like so many repetitions of their great prototype, Luther.

And now I must leave the cathedral, and getting over the difficulties of the horrible pavement which distinguishes this end of the city as well as may be, take you to the Marien-Kirche; the church which, in one’s first view of Lübeck, one naturally takes for the cathedral, from its central position and general grandeur. The whole church is built of red brick, though unfortunately, internally, it has been daubed all over with a succession of coats of whitewash. I was able to measure the ground-plan, which may be taken as a type of the ground-plan most in favour in Lübeck, and indeed generally in this part of Germany. All the columns, arches, groining-ribs, and even the window tracery, are built of moulded bricks; and, as will be seen from the detail, the piers and arches are particularly well moulded and good. Not so the window tracery, which is very plain, and like all brick window tracery, most unsatisfactory, consisting as it does of three arched heads within the window arch, without cusping or ornament of any kind to relieve its baldness. The transepts hardly show on the ground-plan, and externally they are finished with two gables instead of one, and are so insignificant, consequently, as hardly to deserve notice. Between the buttresses all round is a row of chapels, their external walls being flush with the face of the buttresses. Among other good features in this church are the Lady-chapel to the east of the main apse, and the late turret over the intersection of nave and choir; and lastly, the two grand steeples at the west end. This kind of steeple was not an invention peculiar to Lübeck, but is a kind of which one finds many examples throughout northern Germany. The earliest with which I am acquainted are at Soest and Paderborn cathedrals, both of them very fine, and much earlier in date than the Lübeck examples; and these clearly have some affinity to the Lombard churches on the Rhine, save that the continual repetition of stage above stage, exactly alike, is a feature of their own, and one which the builders of the great brick steeples in the fourteenth century always had before them. Certainly, the two western steeples of the Marien-Kirche are very noble, and make one admire immensely this kind of spire, which, as you will see, rises from the angles of the tower and the points of the gables, which are so great a feature as a finish to each face of the tower. These great gables are generally filled in with tracery, without much regard to uniformity or symmetry, but sometimes, as in the noble steeple of S. John, Lüneburg, most effective: the spires in this case, and indeed almost always, are of timber covered with copper.

It will be seen from the plan that the dimensions of this church are very grand. The length is 280 English feet; height to vault, 108 ft.; height of aisles, 59 ft.; the spires, 344 ft.

The church was founded circa A.D. 1276, the north-west tower in 1304, and the south-west in 1310; and the whole may, I think, from its mouldings, etc., be taken as an example of Lübeck middle-pointed.

In the interior arrangement there is no very distinct triforium, though the clerestory windows have their inside arches lengthened down to a string-course above the main arcade, and in the choir there is a pierced parapet above this string.