Gothic Pride: The Story of Building a Great Cathedral in Newark

Interior Scheme: Artistry from Here and Abroad

The compressed timetable for completing Sacred Heart meant that thematic decisions about decorative arts could be deliberate but not overworked. Early in their discussions, priests on the cathedral planning committee stipulated a single-level sanctuary platform and a “liturgical style” (freestanding) altar. Newark’s Church leaders were open to progressive ideas encouraging fuller congregational participation in worship, and these arrangements reflected it.1 The designers then confronted the challenge of how to make the main altar the focal point in Sacred Heart’s immense interior. The solution was a large canopy on columns over the altar called a baldachin, or baldacchino, as Professor Raggi, in his Italian-inflected English, would almost sing. The model for it, which had been inspired by Robert of Anjou’s tomb in S. Chiara in Naples, was in Saint Patrick’s in New York, designed by Charles Maginnis and installed in 1942.2 Looking at Maginnis’s bronze baldachin, Raggi rendered a similar one in marble.3 The idea of a stone screen, dividing the narthex, or entry, from the nave, germinated in the 1920s, when Isaac Ditmars said it would be “treated similar to a rood screen or a magnificent reredos.”4 Paul Reilly took the design for the one that he and Ditmars had submitted in 1930, and added to it citations to the celebrated sculpted portals of High Gothic cathedrals. Unlike a portal, however, it was to face the inside of Sacred Heart. The inversion would have the e¤ect of elevating the symbolic significance of walking through the narthex screen and departing from the cathedral. An unorthodox idea, Reilly’s equally personal extemporization on its models became 19 Interior Scheme Artistry from Here and Abroad 191 the interior’s most novel feature—the kind of signature that the diagonal towers were on the outside.5 Stained Glass: The Chartres Standard When the planners set their sights on the glazing for Sacred Heart, they soon declared that it was to be based on the stained glass in Chartres Cathedral . Of the myriad Gothic precedents in Sacred Heart, no historic model was named more openly, save for Ditmars’s arcade capitals. With the most spectacular cycle of stained glass surviving from the Middle Ages, Chartres set the enduring standard. The Newark planners embraced Cram’s conclusion about the Chartres glass makers: “They reached a point beyond which there was no possibility of progress. . . . With all our boasting, we have added nothing to their work. We cannot even make some of the glass they made. We can make very wonderful substitutes that have certain splendid qualities of their own. All we can do is to use this as they would have used it, following implicitly their principles and their ideals.”6 F. X. Zettler of Munich received the huge Newark commission, the largest in the firm’s history. The impressive nineteenth-century revival of stained glass production in Germany was centered in Munich, and for years the eponymous Munich Style was prized in many quarters around the world, especially the American Catholic church market. Franz X. Zettler founded the firm in 1870s, and it had become a subsidiary of the Franz Mayer Studio in 1939, a little more than a decade before the completion phase of the Newark project began. Both firms shared a lineage stemming from the patronage of King Ludwig I of Bavaria and other proponents of the German religious revival.7 The painting of the major portions of Sacred Heart’s glass was assigned to Karl Jung and Franz X. Braunmiller, associates of the Zettler firm. Jung was a Munich native who had studied at its Academy of Arts and, more broadly, was a product of Bavaria’s formal art culture; Braunmiller was steeped in the same tradition.8 They, like Raggi, were facile artists capable of turning out a variety of historic modes, as taste and clients’ demands shifted throughout their careers. As was also true with Raggi’s historically inspired work, few trained eyes could mistake the Munich windows in thirteenth-century style for true medieval glass painting. After receiving the Newark commission, the principals of the two firms, Oscar Zettler and Adalbert Mayer, along with artists Jung and Braunmiller , visited France to study medieval examples, making the invariably 192 Completing Sacred Heart awe-inspiring pilgrimage to Chartres to study the major iconographic schemes and placement of subjects, but especially the painting and...