Introduction
The wodewose
Seven Deadly Sins
The day of Doom
A medieval zoo
A hungry dragon
The pelican
Iconoclasm
A wealthy benefactor
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Have you ever looked upon the face of Christ? The good folk of late-medieval Stanningfield did. In fact, since photos were unknown and mirrors rare, they probably knew His face better than they knew their own - at least, the interpretation of it that presides over this magnificent 15th-century Doom painting.
So familiar are we with images of all kinds, surrounding us in print, on screens and hoardings, that it is hard for us to imagine, but it is quite likely that many medieval villagers never saw any other representation of the human form than those they saw in church. For some, this may have been the only picture they ever saw in their lives.
It is a conventional scene, one that would have been found over many chancel arches across the land, though its survival into the 21st century is rare. The only finer example in Suffolk is that at Wenhaston, where the painting was done on wood and is no longer in its original position above the heads of ordinary churchgoers.
Here Christ, seated on a rainbow, presides over the Judgment Day while angels to his right and left sound the last trumpets. Below his feet, the dead rise from their graves, some naked, some in burial shrouds. They are bound either for the city of heaven at top left (the saints on Christ's right hand), or for the mouth of hell, now obliterated in this version, but which would have been at lower right.
The painting was hidden from view for some 300 years after being whitewashed over, probably by Protestant reformers in the 1940s. Ironically, this preserved it - while well-meaning Victorian efforts to preserve it did the opposite. The colours we see now are only the base cartoon and some of the red from what would originally have been a full-colour painting. Better-informed preservation techniques were applied in the 1990s, and it is now clearer than it had been before that - but I am told small pieces of plaster still occasionally fall, and it seems this wonderful piece of art and heritage will not be with us forever.