page_title: St Michael, Cornhill
section_title: Victorian alterations
hierarchical_section_title: St Michael, Cornhill / Victorian alterations
caption_attribution_description: English: The sculpture by John Birnie Philip depicting "St Michael disputing with Satan". in the tympanum of the church of St Michael Cornhill in the City of London.
context_page_description: St Michael, Cornhill, is a medieval parish church in the City of London with pre-Norman Conquest parochial foundation. It lies in the ward of Cornhill. The medieval structure was lost in the Great Fire of London, and replaced by the present building, traditionally attributed to Sir Christopher Wren. The upper parts of the tower are by Nicholas Hawksmoor. The church was embellished by Sir George Gilbert Scott and Herbert Williams in the nineteenth century.
context_section_description: In the late 1850s, the Drapers' Company, motivated by legislation that would have forced them to hand certain funds over to the Ecclesiastical Commissioners if they were not spent on St Michael's, decided to fund a lavish scheme of embellishment, and asked George Gilbert Scott to carry out the work.
  Scott demolished a house that had stood against the tower, replacing it with an elaborate porch, built in the "Franco-Italian Gothic" style (1858–1860), facing the street of Cornhill. It is decorated with carving by John Birnie Philip, which includes a high-relief tympanum sculpture depicting "St Michael disputing with Satan". Scott inserted Gothic tracery to the circular clerestory windows, and into the plain round-headed windows on the south side of the church. New side windows were created in the chancel, and an elaborate stone reredos, incorporating the paintings of Moses and Aaron by artist Robert Streater from its predecessor, was constructed in an Italian Gothic style. A contemporary account of the work explained that this was appropriate since "the classical feeling which pervades the Italian school of Gothic art enabled the architect to bring the classical features of the building into harmony with the Gothic treatment which our present sympathies demand". The chancel walls were lined with panels of coloured marble, up to the level of the top of the reredos columns, and richly painted above this point. It was said that Scott "proposes to brighten all the roof with colour... and he fuses the vaulting into something transitional between Pointed and Italian. And he inserts tracery in all the round-headed windows, and the great ugly stable-like circles of the clerestory become roses under his plastic hand."
  Stained glass by Clayton and Bell was installed, with a representation of Christ in Glory in the large circular east window. Its splays were enriched with inlaid and carved marble, with four heads in high relief enclosed in medallions. The other windows contained a series of stained glass images illustrating the life of Christ, with the crucifixion at the west end.
  A further campaign of medievalising decoration was carried out in the late 1860s by Herbert Williams, who had worked with Scott on the earlier scheme. Williams built a three-bay cloister-like passage, with plaster vaults, on the south side of the building, and in the body of the church added richly painted decoration to Wren's columns and capitals. The reredos was enriched with inlaid marble, and the chancel was given new white marble steps and a mosaic floor of Minton’s tesserae and tiles. In what the Building News described as a "startling novelty", a circular opening was cut in the vault of each aisle bay and filled with stained glass, and skylights installed above.
  Few original furnishings were retained in its Victorian re-imagining, but the 1672 font given by James Paul survived, although a new balustrade was added.
caption: J. B. Philip's tympanum sculpture St Michael disputing with Satan
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