Fig. 2. Part of a face from the destroyed Coventry Cathedral.
A new exhibition featuring medieval glass from the pre-Second World War Coventry Cathedral will open on 6 August at the city’s Herbert Art Gallery and Museum in Jordan Well.
Called Faces in Glass Live it features some of the thousands of pieces of mainly fifteenth-century glass that have been discovered in recent years and which were featured in Vidimus no. 33.
Visitors will be able to watch conservators from the Crick Smith consultancy at work, and each Thursday at 3.00pm a conservator will give a 30-minute talk about the glass. An exciting bonus is the application of software technology designed to piece together shredded Cold War documents to suggest possible matches and alignments for the shattered fragments; similar technology was used at Princeton University to help reconstruct original scenes from equally jumbled fragments of ancient frescos at Akrotiri (Cyprus).
When the glass has been conserved, it is hoped that a selection of pieces will be displayed in the crypts below the former cathedral. Funding is being organized by the World Monument Fund (Britain) and the chapter of Coventry Cathedral.
Admission to Faces in Glass Live is free, but the event will close on 31 October. For more information, visit the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum’s website.
