A ROMANESQUE CAPITAL FROM
CANTERBURY AT CHARTHAM
GEORGE ZARNECKI
A freestanding Romanesque capital, which was re-used in the
nineteenth century to support a sun-dial in the garden of Deanery
Farm at Chartham near Canterbury, has recently been correctly
identified by Mr. Tim Tatton-Brown of the Canterbury Archaeological
Trust. F-le very generously invited me to write the present note, and for
this, I am most grateful to him. I am also indebted to the owners of
Deanery Farm, Mr. and Mrs. D. G. Day, who allowed me to inspect
and photograph the capital. The drawings reproduced here as Fig. l ,
a-d, were made by Mr. David Gilbert, of the Canterbury
Archaeological Trust, to whom my thanks are due for permission to
publish them.
The capital is fairly large, each face measuring 58 cm. at the top; the
present height is 33 cm. but, originally, it was some 5 cm. or more
taller, before the bottom portion, including the necking, was cut away.
The carved decoration is well preserved on two of the adjoining sides
(faces no. l and no. 4, Fig. l a and d, Pls. I-IV), but the weathering of
the other two sides, particularly of face no. 3 (Fig. le, Pl. III) is well
advanced.
The motifs used for the decoration are well-known in Romanesque
art in all media. On face no. 1 (Fig. la & Pl. I), two addorsed birds
turn their heads inwards, preening their wings. Birds and animals in
Romanesque art are seldom sufficiently individualized for their species
to be satisfactorily identified. 1 The birds on the Chartham capital have
the appearance often given by Romanesque artists to eagles, and yet
the closest parallel for them is provided by a relief from Reading
1 An interesting recent study by C. Dauphin, 'Byzantine Pattern Books' (Art History, i
(1978), no. 4, 400 ff.) deals with the identiification of animals, birds, fish, insects etc. on
mosaic pavements of the fourth to seventh centuries. For a brief discussion of the same
problem in Romanesque art, see my paper 'Late Romanesque Fountain from
Campania', The Minneapolis Institute of Arts Bulletin, Ix (1971-3), 7-17.
N
Fig. I. Romanesque Capital from Chartham (Scale: 1/5)
ROMANESQUE CAPITAL FROM CANTERBURY
Abbey, fonnerly in the Victoria and Albert Museum, but now in the
museum at Reading (Pl. V), which, in all probability, is a "pelican in its
piety".
According to medieval bestiaries, the pelican fed its young with its
own blood from a self-inflicted wound, thus symbolizing Christ's love
for the Church.2 In a late twelfth-century bestiary from Revesby
Abbey in Lincolnshire, there is a representation of fulica, the coot,
preening its wing (Fig. 2).3 The Chartham representation uses a very
similar design, merely adding one more bird in a mirror-image
composition. Such doubling of representations of birds and animals in
bestiaries is quite frequent, and undoubtedly the result of influences
exercised by oriental textiles on Romanesque art.4 Whether the
Chartham birds are derived from bestiaries cannot be proved. There is
still a bestiary preserved in the Cathedral Library at Canterbury, but it
is of a late thirteenth-century date. 5 The earliest (c. 1120) surviving
bestiary (as distinct from the Physiologus, from which the medieval
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Frontispiece 1979
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