A Feared Mass, Filed as Plate 16

The plate begins where these survey sheets always begin: a powdered resin ground bitten in stages to hold the grey of stone and shadow, the etched line laid down first to fix every baluster, and only afterward the small army of hand-applied washes—the pink of a cloak, the lemon of a kneeling cushion, the gilt of the altar plate—brushing colour over a printed crowd much as a lubok workshop would, though one doubts the metropolitan trade would have owned the resemblance. The line work is genuinely fine. The dome recedes, the paired columns take real weight, the upper galleries fall away in measured, walkable perspective. It is a room you could step into. That is exactly the difficulty.

See where the architecture has set the worship down. The bishop and altar shrink to mid-distance under a soft painted gloria, candles small as pins, while the foreground belongs to a kneeling, jostling, faintly comic congregation, and the galleries above lean over the rail like the cheaper seats at a benefit night. The figures are wonderfully alive—the hand that staffed this room adored a crowd—and that liveliness does the quiet work. A Mass becomes a thing watched. The faithful turn into picturesque incident, the human texture a civic inventory needs to certify a building is occupied.

And inventory is the operative word. This was, in 1808, a nervous congregation; emancipation lay decades off, and a packed Roman chapel was not yet a neutral fact of the street. So the survey performs its one reflex on anything that might unsettle: it assigns a number. Sixteen. The dome is correct, the taste is impeccable, and the sectarian dread is tucked so smoothly into the turn of a balustrade that apprehension can be mistaken for connoisseurship. This is not calm. This is fear that has learned to hold a teacup. The polish is the symptom.

One notices, fondly, the housekeeping around it—trimmed, mounted, endowed by a fund, shelved under Interiors, Chapels—every measure taken so the room would keep, which is its own small anxiety about lasting. What I cannot quite settle is whether the crowd in the galleries came down to pray, or climbed up to make certain the praying stayed somewhere it could be watched. — PS