"A Month in the Country"

[fiefoe]

J. J. Carr tells an unsensational story of a young veteran staying at a Yorkshire church uncovering its medieval wall paintings.

• The costume would tell me within ten or twenty years; dress fashion didn't change all that quickly .. I said that kirtles went out and snoods came in about 1340... After the Black Death, when surviving magnates were swallowing dead neighbour's estates at disaster prices.. sweating out some of their profits
• It was bound to be a Judgement because they always got the plum spots where parishes couldn't avoid seeing the God-awful things that would happen to them if they didn't fork out their tithes.. It would be S. Michael weighing souls against Sin,..
• Medieval wall-paintings keep to a well thumbed catalogue. There are the three voluptuaries displayed in jolly dissipation..; there is Christopher wading through fishes and mermaids with the Christchild on his shoulder...
• And no cinnabar on the lips; that was a measure of my painter's calibre: excitingly as cinnabar first comes over, he'd known that, given twenty years, lime would blacken it.
• My departed colleague's lad... would do his best with a slab of flat marble and scrape his knuckles grinding spaynishe  white, Baghdad indigo, Cornish malachite, terre verte.
• It was the most extraordinary detail of medieval painting that I had ever seen, anticipating the Breughels by a hundred years. What, in this single detail, had pushed him this immense stride beyond his time?
• ...like all truly great works of art, hammering you with its whole before beguiling you with its parts.
• He had a very very good line in hands, his speciality being knuckles and wrists. His hands spoke to each other and were answered. But he wasn't much good at feet.
• Hairs kept turning up where his beard had prodded into tacky paint.