The final celebration of the revitalised windows, with a festival of voices and outreach art therapy, is planned for the spring and summer of 2024. THE cleaning and repairs will begin next February. (A local benefactor, Emma Chadwick Villers-Wilkes, put up the money for two of the windows, but she had strong opinions about the designs, insisting that there be no cows in the Nativity scene and no blood in the Crucifixion.) There will be light displays, workshops for schools, and costumed interpreters, explaining how the subjects for the windows were chosen. Then they can start to understand the storytelling in the windows, and even get close to the conservators as they clean a century of grime off the glass. The renovation team wants to encourage some of the 20,000 people a day who usually pass by outside to step into the cathedral and see the gorgeous colours inside. Burne-Jones took the job here not out of a sense of nostalgia, however, but because he wanted to do “my best to illuminate the contemporary darkness” of his home city. This project was a sort of homecoming: he was born in Birmingham in August 1833 and baptised in St Philip’s. They intend to raise awareness of these remarkable windows in the city centre, and to preserve them for future generations - or, as Burne-Jones put it, the “thousand ages of them that come after us”.īURNE-JONES had always hoped to present his art on this grand scale, in “public buildings and in choirs and places where they sing”. St Philip’s, which became the cathedral of the newly created diocese of Birmingham in 1905, has now been awarded £641,000 by the Heritage Lottery Fund for their Divine Beauty initiative. In 1885, a massive Ascension window was installed in the chancel of St Philip’s, Birmingham, followed by a Crucifixion and Nativity in 1887, and, finally, Burne-Jones’s monumental Last Judgement in 1897. We should keep this stark and demanding claim for his art in mind when we consider a new project to conserve some of his last great works.

He went on: “It is giving back her Child that was crucified to Our Lady of Sorrows.” Through his designs, he said, he was “making God manifest”.

TOWARDS the end of his life, the Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones was asked about the purpose of his work.

Last supper stained glass