I’ve been thinking more about the west frontage of Norwich Cathedral, although I suppose there are worse things to overthink. Some people worry about careers, pensions and the long-term future of civilisation, but I have been thinking about where the spirelets of Norwich Cathedral have gone. The problem began when I found Daniel King’s seventeenth-century print of the west front, which shows a much more elegant and symmetrical arrangement than the one visible today.
I therefore asked AI to help create a modern photographic impression of what the cathedral might look like if the frontage had retained more of the arrangement shown in King’s engraving. This took a little persuasion. AI understood “Gothic cathedral” very confidently, but was rather less enthusiastic about counting statues correctly, which is a minor drawback when the entire point is having two figures on each side of the doorway. Several attempts produced one statue either side, extra figures in odd places or something that looked like a confident cathedral that most certainly wasn’t from Norwich. It still has the main portal wrong as the door has been shrunk right down, but there’s a limit to how much time I want to spend debating the matter.
I’ve decided I definitely like it more as it was. But I feel that I’ve exhausted this line of worry now and I’ll just have to accept what’s there.