St John's College Chapel (Cambridge)
The St John's College Chapel is the chapel of St John's College of the University of Cambridge in Cambridge (UK). The neo-Gothic chapel , built between 1866 and 1869, is located to the northwest of the “First Court” of the college grounds and stands on the site of a medieval monastery church from the 13th century.
history
In 1861, the administration of the university commissioned the architect Sir George Gilbert Scott to build the chapel, the short work on the chapel of the previously University of Oxford belonging Exeter College in Oxford had ended. As with the chapel in Oxford, Scott was inspired by the Sainte-Chapelle , a neo-Gothic chapel of the former royal residence Palais de la Cité (French: Palace of the City) on the Seine island Île de la Cité in Paris .
White sandstone from Caen in northern France , which was transported across the English Channel , was used to build St John's College Chapel .
The patron Henry Hoare offered £ 3,000 to help finance the construction of the chapel and promised an additional £ 1,000 annually if a tower were added to Scott's original plans. Work began, but because Hoare died in a railroad accident, the college lacked the promised donations. Nevertheless, the 50-meter-high tower with shutters was completed, which was based on the tower of the Abbey of Pershore - but was erected without tower bells . The tower can be climbed and is accessible via a small door on the First Court, but was closed in 2016 due to extensive structural repairs to the pinnacles and the roof.
The vestibule of the chapel contains statues of Margaret Beaufort and John Fisher. Inside the building there is a stone vault , at the end of which hangs the "Deposition of the Cross", completed in 1777, by the German painter Anton Raphael Mengs from Bohemia . The paneling comes in part from the old chapel, dating to the year 1516. The chapel contains glass from the 15th century, most of it was, however, about 1869 of stained glass made repairers as Clayton and Bell, Hardman & Co. and William Wailes. Free-standing statues and plaques commemorate the college's benefactors like James Wood, principal from 1815 to 1839, as well as alumni like William Wilberforce , Thomas Clarkson and William Gilbert .
The chapel is surrounded on three sides by large tabernacles that are part of the outer buttresses ; each contains the statue of a prominent college alumni or sponsor:
- Sir William Cecil , first Baron von Burghley
- Lucius, Viscount of Falklands
- John Williams, Archbishop of York
- Thomas Wentworth , first Earl of Strafford
- William Gilbert , natural scientist
- Roger Ascham , educator and teacher of Elisabeth I.
- Mary Cavendish, Countess of Shrewsbury
- Richard Bentley , classical philologist
- Edward Stillingfleet, Bishop of Worcester
- John Overall, Bishop of Coventry, Lichfield and Norwich
- Peter Gunning, Bishop of Chichester and Ely
- Sarah Alston, Duchess of Somerset
- Thomas Clarkson , abolitionist
- Brook Taylor , scientist and mathematician (namesake of the Taylor series )
- Thomas Linacre , founder of the Royal College of Physicians
- Two unused sockets
- Thomas Baker, historian
literature
- Geo. F. Reyner: The New Chapel of St. John's College. Cambridge University Press, 1869 ( digitized ).
Source references
- ^ The New Chapel of St John's College ( en ). Cambridge University Press, 1869, p. 3.
- ^ Tim Rawle Associates: A History of St John's College ( en ). Cloister Press,, p. 11.
Web links
- The New Chapel. St John's College, University of Cambridge.
Coordinates: 52 ° 12 ′ 29.8 ″ N , 0 ° 7 ′ 3.7 ″ E