As I’ve managed to get an Art Fund pass at a discounted price, there will now be a year’s worth of posts about places that I can get in for free. One of them is Norwich Castle, recently re-opened following a substantial refurbishment and renovation. More on this later, but the changes weren’t as bad as I expected and there are some definite positives about the investment that has been made here.
Having noted that, this room seems to me though as something of an incoherent mess in terms of the history, it’s unclear to me what they’re trying to show here. They’ve put a throne into the chapel and the relatively undamaged original sanctuary is in the corner. I’m struggling to believe that the chapel would have once had a large throne looking at the window and no other furniture or religious paraphernalia other than a lectern. I know that we wouldn’t have had rows of pews in here, but the layout seems odd to me.
I’m also unsure why they’re suggesting that the Caen stone was painted white so it would have had the appearance of Victorian toilets. Unless this is their interpretation of what new Caen stone would have looked like, but that seems aspirational in terms of the brightness. In other locations it was just left as it was, it’s an off-white or cream coloured stone anyway and so why would they paint an interior wall with what I assume the castle is suggesting is limewash? They might have wanted to use bright colours in the way that Norwich Cathedral was decorated, but I’m not convinced they chose white. But, I’m sure they’ve done this for a reason, but it’s a shame they haven’t explained anyway (either in the room or online) their logic here.
The museum might have been better trying to use graphics to show what the room might have looked like, I just find it unlikely the Normans made their chapel in Norwich different to everywhere else. AI can be very over-rated, but I ran the images of this room through Gemini and ChatGPT, both of them concluded that this was a medieval function room where visitors would have been welcomed by the gentry. This is what it looks like to me, I’m very much struggling to understand this as a chapel layout.
Anyway, that aside.
This is the sanctuary, so the original Norman architects were using this as the chapel’s altar although it’s at an odd angle. But, when you’re the King, you have the option to do things as you want.
I can’t find out whether this is entirely new stained glass for the new project, but it’s rather beautiful.
What the project has delivered is some beautiful lighting so that graffiti is easily visible, here’s what I assume is Mary.
There’s certainly a variety of graffiti here, the museum thinks these date from a period of over several hundred years.
Some of these are really quite complex.
The decorated capital.
And a nice little touch.