Old St Paul's

The diptych that shows Old St Paul's was given to the Society in 1781. The outer panels depict a royal procession on the way from Southwark to St Paul's, while the inner panels show the cathedral in a state of disrepair, and then newly built with angels thronging the spire.

The paintings were inspired by the imaginative fervour of Henry Farley, who showered the Crown with poetic petitions written in the ‘voice of the cathedral', asking for the steeple to be rebuilt following its destruction by fire in 1561. One of Farley's poetic petitions, entitled ‘The Complaint of Paul's', employs the trope of the poet falling asleep and dreaming that he sees the new cathedral arise like a phoenix from the flames. The poet is depicted in the diptych lying on a cloud.

John Gipkyn, the artist, was no Michelangelo, and even his depiction of St Paul's is based on Speed's erroneous engraving, but his depictions of James I and the royal family are nevertheless recognisable as accurate portraits. Gipkyn was a pageant engineer as well as an artist, responsible for designing fantastical animals and special effects for the masques that Middleton, Jonson and Munday produced almost annually for the royal court during the first two decades of the seventeenth century. In the pageant of 1613, he was called upon to create a fog or mist – not unlike the hillock-like cloud depicted in the diptych on which the poet lies. His was an interesting vocation: making realities out of other men's fantasies.

These and many other fascinating insights into St Paul's in the Jacobean period are to be found in this analysis of the Society's diptych, about which almost nothing was known until the authors undertook this study.

• 76pp, 14 b/w illustrations plus frontispiece, 8 colour plates
• £15 paperback. Published June 2004
• Available from the London Topographical Society

Jacket illustration: the Society of Antiquaries' diptych of Old St Paul's 1616