Cork 2005: 'Few buildings that pre-date the 20th century possess such a complete record of their own creation as does St Fin Barre's," writes curator Richard Wood, in his introduction to the illustrated catalogue for the exhibition on the architect William Burges at the Public Museum from October 6th, writes Mary Leland
Conserving the Dream - Treasures of St Fin Barre's Cathedral will be formally opened by Jimmy Page, founder and lead guitarist with Led Zeppelin, a Burges enthusiast who lives in the home the eccentric Victorian designed for himself in London.
The exhibition is based on the archive of working designs in paper and plaster which - as the building, begun in 1865, was unlikely to be completed for several years - Burges left as a kind of insurance that work would be carried out according to his own original plans. An almost full set of coloured cartoons for the stained glass windows and the mosaics remains, along with plaster maquettes for the statuary, both inside and outside the cathedral. In a way, the exhibition itself is an unfinished work, in that it is a reduced version of a proposal for Cork 2005 which would have brought precious examples of Burges designs for furniture, house and castle interiors, altar plate and jewellery from the UK and Europe to Cork. When this proposal was refused, City Manager Joe Gavin ensured the restoration of the archive with the support of the property developer Tom Coughlan.
This may have been the most decisive intervention the cathedral and Burges scholars could have desired: the prime achievement is the conservation, with Paul Curtis working on the paper archive and Jason Ellis on the maquettes.
It was the late Dean of Cork Maurice Carey who first drew attention to their importance, and moved them to better quarters. Now the paper archive will be lodged at the new library at UCC, whose Boole Library archivist Carol Quinn is a contributor to the catalogue.
Designed by Wendy Williams and commissioned by Richard Wood, this offers a unique collaboration of theology, art and conservation, with the opportunity for the first time to study the designs in comparison to the actual sources from which Burges took his inspiration.
David Lawrence writes on the methods, styles, materials and meaning of ecclesiastical stained glass, Ann Wilson on the sculpture of Gothic revivalism and the application of the visual vocabulary of a very different era to ours - or indeed to that of Burges himself.
The Dean of Cork, the Rev Michael Burrows, sees Burges as confronting the perceived doctrinal clarity of Victorian Protestantism and anticipating the travails of the church in more recent times.A passionate medievalist, Burges, according to his biographer J Mordaunt Crook, was animated by the "high Victorian dream", conceived by Pugin, painted by Rossetti, sung by Tennyson, but built only by Burges. As Crook writes in the catalogue, he translated the essence of early French architecture into a language uniquely his own in Cork.
