Knight & Dei
Sir Ninian Comper: An Intorduction to His Life and Work
With Complete Gazetteer
and Of the Atmosphere of a Church
by Sir Ninian Comper
by Anthony Symondson, S.J., and Stephen Arthur Bucknall
Spire Books & the
Ecclesiological Society, 2006
(available in the U.S. via David Brown Book Company)
(336 pages, $60.00, paperback)
reviewed by Matthew G. Alderman
When the Anglican architect Sir Ninian Comper passed away in 1960 at age 96, it seemed that the dwindling Gothic revival died with him. Within a decade, the moral and aesthetic landscape that he had known—a world of Latin plainchant and the Book of Common Prayer—had utterly vanished. This cheerful white-bearded Victorian seemed the deadest of dead white males.
Comper’s legacy is not merely historic, however. While he worked for Anglicans (and a few English Catholics), for whom Gothic was the only conceivable option, his designs drew their visceral potency from the liturgical art of Christian antiquity. Understanding his work may prove a crucial step in implementing an architecture that draws on both traditional forms and the ideals of Vatican II.
Unity by Inclusion
Sir Ninian Comper, the first book-length treatment of its subject, is the fruit of decades of research by Jesuit priest Anthony Symondson, the world’s foremost authority on the great Gothicist. It includes Comper’s classic essay “Of the Atmosphere of a Church” and an exhaustive gazetteer of his projects compiled by his grandnephew Stephen Bucknall.
Symondson divides Comper’s career into two periods: his early works, characterized by “unity by exclusion”—an exacting, if imaginative, recreation of a medieval Northern European past—and his later work, eclectic Mediterranean designs that sprang from his conversion to “unity by inclusion” after visits to Rome and Sicily in 1900 and 1905.
On his return from the south, Comper realized that the artistry of each Christian era pointed equally towards the beauty of holiness. No longer was Gothic England the single standard, but part of a continuum that embraced the faded frescoes of the catacombs, the solemn mosaics of Romanesque Palermo, and the ornate classicism of Renaissance Spain.
As Comper’s stock of architectural precedents expanded, his liturgical sensibilities also deepened. For him, Symondson explains, the altar was the most essential part of a church building. Its placement had to express both the intimacy and grandeur of God.
Never is this ideal more apparent than in Comper’s late-in-life masterpiece, St. Philip’s at Cosham in Hampshire, described in 1939 by critic John Betjeman as one of the six best new buildings in England. (Strangely enough, another of the six was the modernist penguin pool at the London Zoo.)
In a luminous, bone-white space equally Gothic and classical, Comper’s altar stands beneath a richly burnished gold canopy, known as a ciborium, crowned with a Renaissance-style figure of the risen Christ. Freestanding and set close to the congregation within a shallow chancel, the altar’s placement was taken from a ruined church at Theveste seen on a 1925 tour of Roman North Africa.
Matthew G. Alderman is a freelance writer, liturgical artist, and contributor to several blogs, including www.thenewliturgicalmovement.blogspot.com and www.holywhapping.blogspot.com. He was recently named an assistant editor for Dappled Things, an online literary magazine for young Catholic writers. A graduate of the University of Notre Dame, he lives in Manhattan, where he works in the field of architecture and attends the Catholic Church of Our Saviour.
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