Ralph Adams Cram: An Architect's Four Quests- Medieval, Modernists, American, Ecumenical

7. Mediterranean Inspirations

7 MEDITERRANEAN INSPIRATIONS All true opinions are living, and show their life by being capable of nourishment; therefore of change. But their change is that of a tree—not a cloud. —John Ruskin 35- The igzos began for Cram with a half year's sojourn in Spain and ended with aspectacular Mediterranean cruise. Cram (at far right) on Mount Athos with one of his young men (at far left) attending upon the ArchimandriteMitraphan (center) at St. AndrievskySkete, 1919, during the cruise he and Bess Cram took with John Nicholas Brown. That well-known Bohemian of Boston and Istanbul, Thomas Whittemore, is next to Cram, whose host on the cruise is on the other side of theArchimandrite. Women, then as now, were never granted admission to Mount Athos. ONCE upon a time," Gore Vidal once wrote, "the highest American distinction that could befall fifty-two men and women in a given year was to have one's face on the cover of Time magazine." On 13 December 192.6, this fate befell Ralph Adams Cram, who as Vidal observed thereby became "a permanent, for good or ill, member of the world's grandest vanity fair."1 Assuredly,Cram's time had come, though doubtless, to some of his admirers, confusedly. Angelica Gerry, for instance, to whom in connection with the design of the reredos for St.James, Lake Delaware, Cram wrote in 192.3, "These sketches I will either send you, or, if you can get to Boston from Newport, we can talk them over here, where I can show you the Spanish reredos I have in the office."2 Spanish. It is not clear whether it is the same reredos John Nicholas Brown enabled Cram to buy for St. Elizabeth's Chapel,Sudbury. But that it should have been Spanish requires some explanation. What, pray, had Ralph Adams Cram to do suddenly with Spain? Or with the reredos of 1917 at St. Paul's Church, Brooklyn, where if the reredos statues Cram commissioned were still Anglican enough—they included (in the wake of Saints Alban and Augustine of Canterbury and Thomas Becket) Charles I; two fathers of the Oxford Movement , Edward Pusey and John Mason Neale; and two American high churchmen, Bishops Samuel Seabury and Charles Grafton—they were also vividly enough polychromed for any Italian or Spanish village church.3 Nor was this work exceptional for Cram: at the same time even the Norman austerities of All Saints', Peterborough, by no means precluded him from installing a lady chapel altar of red Numidian and Bufneati marble inlaid with lapis lazuli and colored mosaics. Indeed , the 19205 began for Cram with a blaze of color: the murals commissioned from Robert Wade of Boston for the chancel of the Brown family church, Emmanuel , Newport. Eenedicite, omnia opera Domini IO allyou works of the Lord bless the Lord—so begins the canticle sung there by the three young men Nebuchadnezzar ordered into the fiery furnace, sung at Newport by Wade, in the midst of which John Nicholas Brown, in the robes of a Brown University undergraduate, attends his mother, who holds a model of Emmanuel before the biblical burning bush. Tiers of gloriously colored saints and heroes—an architect among them— stand witness on all sides of Cram's splendid chancel. The perceptive reader will, perhaps, have seen it coming—and even before Cram's Mediterranean adventure at Rice. As early as in the 18905 Cram had introduced George Hallowell's color into Ashmont and Middleborough, after all, and in 1907 he had made quite a point, writing about St. Paul's Cathedral, Detroit, to 2-47 M E D I T E R R A N E A N I N S P I R A T I O N S emphasize that "color has been used in the cathedral more than is usuallythe case, and the ceilings of the nave and transepts are examples of richness of effect. . . The panels are filled with coats of arms and emblems."4 Yet after Rice the volume gets, so to speak, very much louder. In 1912 came the striking polychromy of the ceiling of Fourth Presbyterian, Chicago, and of the lady chapel altar at Calvary, Pittsburgh , which prompted this declaration from Cram: The churches of the middle ages were, in their original estate, far different in appearance to what they are now!Not only have they been robbed of many essential...