Wall monument, Cashel, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Religious Objects
On the south wall of St. John's Church of Ireland Cathedral in Cashel, near the south-west corner, a limestone monument is mounted that is not quite what it appears.
It looks, at first glance, like a unified memorial, but the five pieces that make it up may never have belonged together at all. A carved Passion panel, a fragment of a graveslab, a heraldic plaque, and two decorative brackets have been assembled onto a tiered corner plinth, each piece possibly from a different original context and perhaps a different century. The panel now sitting at the top of the composition is thought more likely to have originated at the base of an altar tomb, or to have come from a separate monument entirely.
The Passion panel, though missing its outer edges, retains a central Crucifixion scene in which Christ on the cross stands over a skull and crossbones representing Golgotha, the site of the crucifixion. Flanking figures, crudely carved within raised rectangular frames, may represent Our Lady holding a rosary and St. John the Evangelist. Blossoming floral motifs fill the spaces around them, one side better preserved than the other. Below this sits a small graveslab fragment, dating from the sixteenth or seventeenth century, bearing only the word HIC, Latin for "here," the opening of what would once have been a longer funerary inscription in raised black-letter script. The armorial plaque is the most precisely datable element. It carries a heraldic shield of the kind known as heater-shaped, impaled to show the arms of both a husband and wife, with the initials I S and M C. The crest above the shield depicts a pelican in her piety, a heraldic image of a bird feeding her young with blood from her own breast, rising from a gentleman's helm. The decoration on the volute brackets, scroll-shaped ornamental supports carved with leaf patterns and a blossoming plant, deliberately echoes the floral motifs on the Passion panel, suggesting whoever assembled the monument had an eye for visual coherence even across mismatched fragments. The coat of arms is almost identical to a marriage-stone on the Market House in Cashel, dated 1631, which bears the same initials, anchoring this element to an identifiable couple active in the town in the early seventeenth century.