1825.] Ancient Paintings in Westminster Abbey. &c. with oil. The art it appears was invented in the Byzantine empire about the year 800. For a long time Constantinople furnished all Europe with artists through the medium of Venice, and to this city the art of Oil-painting seems soon to have passed; hence its progress to Lombardy, where a book was written by Theofilus, probably a Grecian Monk, about the year 1000, which gives directions for oil-paintings, and is called Tractatus Lombardicus.' Eraclius, another old author, proves its use anterior to Van Eyck, to whom Vasari has attributed its invention. Vide Raspe's Essay on Oil Painting, London, 1781, 4to. "The most ancient pictures in the Musée Royal at Paris, 1814, are said to have been painted at Prague about 1357, being figures of St. Ambrose and St. Augustin, by Theodoric de Prague; and the Crucifixion, by Nicholas Wurmser de Strasbourg; while the portraits on these panels bear every indication of having been executed at the time of the opening of the new Church for Divine Service, 18th October, 1269; at which time the choir appears to have been completed, being in the fifty-fourth year of the reign of Henry III." That front of the stalls which faces the Ambulatory, has always been open to view; and is engraved in Dart, Ackermann, and Neale. It was not so splendidly ornamented as the principal front; but like it exhibited four figures. These paintings have faded away and peeled off under the public eye, being visible to all entering the Church at the most frequented and, tili lately, public door, that of Poet's Corner. The four figures they represented are said to have been St. Peter, St. John the Baptist, King Sebert, and King Edward the Confessor. Weever tells us that verses, by way of question and answer, were placed underneath the figures; that St. Peter was represented talking to King Se bert; and that the inscription under him was these Leonine verses: Hic, Rex Seberte, pausas; mihi conbita per te Hare loca lustravi, demum lustrando bicabi. One of the panels, which was doubtless the first (that stands fourth on the other side, and contains no remains of painting), was (says Mr. Gough, in the Introduction to his Sepulchral Monuments, p. xcii.) deprived of its remaining colours, when it was taken out to form "a passage to some of the Royal Family, who were seated in this tomb GENT. MAG. October, 1825. 305 at Coronations." This fact we do not find noticed by Mr. Moule. The other panels, Mr. Gough continues, "have been the sport of idle boys, and are completely scratched out. One, however, undoubtedly representing King Edward the Confessor, was so far perfect in 1791, that Mr. Schnebbelie was able to make a drawing of it (see Plate II.) and it was engraved in his Antiquaries' Mu seum. King Edward is represented clothed in a tunic and loose robe; his head crowned, and surrounded by a nimbus or glory; his beard long and curled. In his left hand he bears a sceptre, and in his right his constant symbol, the ring, which, according to his wellknown legend, he gave to St. John the Evangelist, when that saint, in the form of a poor man, asked alms of him at the foundation of a church dedicated to the saint, at Clavering in Essex. In the next compartment, as there can be no doubt, St. John stood to receive the gift, and to him we may conclude King Edward's legend was addressed, as King Sebert's to St. Peter. There is a stone figure in Henry the Seventh's Chapel, which represents King Edward in the same manner. In a woodcut in the Golden Legend printed by Winkin de Worde, 1527, we have him drawn exactly in the same fashion. The Chapel of Romford, Essex, in which parish the King's Palace of Havering-atte-Bower was situated, is dedicated to the Virgin Mary and St. Edward the Confessor; and in the East window of the South aile, as we are informed by Weever, were "the pictures of Edward the Confessor and the two pilgrims," who brought him back the ring when returned by St. John, with this inscription: Johannes per peregrinos misit Regi Edwardo [the rest broken out with the glass]. A portraiture of King Edward, as renewed in 1707, under the direction of "John Jarmin, Chapel-Warden," still remains in the chancel window of Romford Chapel, but "the costume of this figure," Mrs. Ogborne informs us, in her History of Essex (which History, by the bye, we muc wish she would proceed with), appears to have assumed more from the taste and fancy |