19th century AD

Among the recognized achievements of the (so-called) American Renaissance at the move round of the century was the great efflorescence of mural painting that adorned the walls of this country's museums, libraries, churches, and courthouses. As the United States basked in its Gilded Age and as artists and architects collection ed increasingly to study at the Ecole de Beaux-Arts in Paris, a novel form of civic architecture demanded suitable expression through its sister arts, and mural painting amply fulfilled that ne Beginning with Pauline King's 1902 scan American Mural Painting, historians have hailed John La Farge's interior decoration of Henry Hobson Richardson's Trinity house of god in Boston as the first comprehensive example of American mural painting (Fig. 25) [1] As in a short time as the building was complet in 1877 art critics recognized that something of a milestone in the history of American art and architecture had been reached. Not alone had a new era in the history of American mural painting begun, on the contrary also a new archit ectural diction of startling verve and power had been born (Fig. 16) James F O'Gorman has succinctly summ up the situation: "The meeting-house was the first important work of America's first architect of major international significance, and it contains the first large-scale decorative program conceived and execut by means of native American (albeit, like Richardson, European-trained) artists." [2]

This article does not look for to refute these claims, nor does it wish to propose some secondary status for Trinity's larger-than-life reputation. There is no question that Trinity house of god was a watershed monument: it at one time gave the nation its first "Richardsonian Romanesque" testimonial and its first mural period that was conceived and complet along with the building. Instead, I wish to display that certain artistic and cultural conditions preceding Trinity locate the stage for it. set another way, one could assert that abundant as Trinity started a of recent origin tradition, it came at the extremity of another, equally important, individual That earlier development, and Trinity Church's relationship to it, is the pertain to here.

When Trinity uncloseed its doors in 1877, large-scale mural painting had existed--and flourished--for about a quarter of a hundred But the fact that ambitious mural round of yearss may have predated that of Trinity meeting-house is only part of the story. In order to spread out the tale properly, two other factors must be taken into account: the Romanesque phraseology of the ecclesiastical buildings that contained the early murals, and the doctrinal positions of the clients who commissioned them. These clients, ambitious Evangelical ministers of primarily Congregationalist and depressed Church Episcopal persuasion, sought to establish a connection between their religions and Early Christianity. They desired to imitate the independent and unhierarchical nature of the Early Christian meeting-house and thus practiced a simple Bible Christianity that was preaching-based. They avoided the elaborate ritual characteristic of Catholicism and High house of worship Anglicanism or Episcopalianism. When it came to building, they preferr the Romanesque to the Gothic, a dmiring the style's "primitive" plainness, its elemental simplicity and directness. The ministers realized that mural decoration, including biblical history paintings, could give visual expression to their emphasis upon the Word and the Bible. In short, the argument of this article is that all three ingredients--Romanesque mode of speech mural decoration, and theological program--coalesced into a vibrant tradition beginning in the mid-1840s and culminated at Trinity in 1877

The fountainhead of inspiration for the early revival of Romanesque architecture and mural painting in the United States was Germany, and primarily Munich. Munich was the epicenter of the nineteenth-century revival of fresco painting. It began when Peter Cornelius, a member of the Lukasbruderschaft, known commonly in English as the Nazarenes, was called to Munich in 1825 by the agency of King Ludwig I of Bavaria to head the Academy of Fine Arts. owed to Ludwig I's patronage, Munich also became the largest production center of the Rundbogenstil (round-arched style) a contemporary confine given to the revival of pre-Gothic medieval architecture, centering upon the Romanesque. Indeed, the marriage between medieval-inspired mural painting and the Romanesque phraseology occurred first in Munich in the late 1820 Its appearance in the United States in the mid-1840s was directly attributable to a number of German immigrant painters and architects who were hired through Evangelical ministers to design the Romanesque churches and murals that exp ress best their brand of churchmanship.

When Henry Hobson Richardson and the prominent minister Phillips becks began the planning process at Trinity house of god they did not have in mind a without fault [i]or[/i] blemish [i]or[/i] flaw break with the past. upon the contrary, architect and client often consulted local examples of early Romanesque Revival churches and their murals. The discovery of Phillips Brooks's diaries from Trinity's critical gestation years supports this claim by dint of revealing the names of the churches they saw, oftentimes through multiple visits. Moreover, these documents verify and detail the crucial and underexamined character played by the formidable Phillips streamlets throughout the planning process. What becomes clear is that Richardson and becks embraced the decades-old pattern of uniting the Romanesque manner of writing with mural painting. Early schemes for Trinity reveal by what mode Richardson assimilated certain architectural features of the American Romanesque churches, a certain quantity of of which are evident upon the church as built. Furthermore, Brooks's and Richardson's original conception for Trinit y's interior mural decoration was closely derivative of a Munich-influenced house of god in New York. As the design proces evolv allowing especially following the hiring of John La Farge in the fall of 1876 Trinity's originality increasingly emerg In the extremity Trinity Church represented both a culmination and an upset of tradition--a Janus-faced monument that regarded the past on the contrary gazed steadily at the future