Plates 3.10-11: Lincoln Minster
This series of two plates depicts the West Front of Lincoln Cathedral. They were engraved by James Basire, Sr. (1730-1802) after the designs of William Lumby (c. 1755-1804). The plates include details of the towers, arcades, and tympanums.
Basire was commissioned to produce four plates featuring Lincoln Cathedral for Vetusta Monumenta, two of which were delivered. The master antiquarian engraver gave an estimate for engraving the drawings. Sir Henry Englefield, Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, played a leading role in advancing the commission with Basire. The plates were published in 1791.
Plate 3.10 presents an imagined, truncated view of the West Front, including a cross-section of the cathedral’s interior stone bulwarks. Plate 3.11 gives a parallax view featuring details of the right tower, accompanying tympanum pattern of ornament, and column capitals that correspond to Lincoln Cathedral’s West Front. Interesting among them are revisions to classical Dorian and Corinthian archetypes. Portal doors also feature alongside their program of decoration. A cross-section of Lincoln Cathedral as a totality with spires appears at the bottom left with cathedra featured right.
Objects:
These two engravings depict Lincoln Cathedral, one of England’s most architecturally significant and symbolically resonant ecclesiastical structures. Plate 3.10 presents the cathedral’s West Front in elevation, emphasizing its monumental asymmetry, layered façade, and Gothic verticality. Plate 3.11 offers a series of detailed views, including sections, decorative capitals, arch forms, and speculative reconstructions of now-lost spires and vaulting systems.
The drawings were prepared by William Lumby, Clerk of the Works at Lincoln, and engraved by James Basire. Originally intended as part of a four-plate series, only two were published in Vetusta Monumenta in 1796. These plates reflect the Society of Antiquaries of London’s growing interest in visual media as a tool for documenting—and shaping—architectural heritage.
Lincoln Cathedral, begun under Bishop Remigius de Fécamp shortly after the Norman Conquest, exemplifies the hybrid architectural lineage of Anglo-Norman and later Gothic forms. The structure was built using local limestone and sits atop a site of layered civic and religious history, including Roman and Anglo-Saxon phases.
The plates combine technical precision with historical imagination, offering not only a record of the cathedral’s appearance but a visual argument for its place in Britain’s architectural and antiquarian canon.
Transcription:
Plate 3.10:
Top right of plate:
Vol. III. Pl. X.
Fig. 3.
A, B, D, E, H, I, L-P, R, T, U, W, X, Z
[Scale of feet]
Fig. 2.
Situation of stone balk
A-G
Fig. 1.
A-I, K, L, Z
Bottom of plate:
Lumby del.
Basire Sc.
Sumptibus Soc. Antiquar. Londini.
Publish’d according to Act of Parliament 23 April 1791.
Plate 3.11:
Top right of plate:
Vol. III. Pl. XI.
Fig. 4.
A-G, L, O
Fig 5.
A-B
[Scale of feet]
Bottom of plate:
Lumby del.
Basire Sc.
Sumptibus Soc. Antiquar. Londini.
Publish’d according to Act of Parliament 23 April 1791.
Original Explanatory Account: Click here to read the original explanatory account for Plate 3.10-11.
Commentary by Jacob Henry Leveton:
The Plates, the Cathedral, and Its Transformation
These two plates refigure Lincoln Cathedral as both object and agent within an antiquarian ecology of inscription and reception. The Gothic west front is central to how medieval architecture is imagined and visualized—indeed, it is the most likely form that comes to mind when one imagines Romanesque or Gothic architecture. That Lincoln’s is the only such example included in Vetusta Monumenta is striking. The plate’s vertical composition accentuates a sense of accumulated ascent—both architectural and archaeological—guiding the viewer’s eye heavenward while simultaneously grounding that upward movement in the deep historical substrata upon which the cathedral stands. The result is a transposition of monumental elevation into the intimate format of the bound volume.
It is no surprise that Lincoln Cathedral was chosen to represent the Gothic form in Vetusta Monumenta. Constructed in the late eleventh century following the Norman conquest, it rises atop the residual presence of an Iron Age settlement, a Roman legionary fortress, and an Anglo-Saxon church. As an exemplar of antiquarian multiplicity, the cathedral embodied a richly hybrid form of medieval architecture—one that synthesized continental motifs with local conditions and traditions before radiating outward in new ecclesiastical permutations.
Constructed in the late eleventh century following the Norman conquest, Lincoln Cathedral was initiated under the episcopacy of Remigius de Fécamp (c. 1030s–c. 1067), whose transcontinental biography materially shaped the building’s Anglo-Norman identity. His role was central not only to the cathedral’s foundation but to the Society of Antiquaries of London’s later investment in its engraved representation. In a council meeting of June 1790, the Society explicitly framed the proposed publication as “the drawings of Remigius’ Church of Lincoln” (SAL Council Minutes III.122). Yet while historically anchored, this attribution also obscures the centuries of architectural accretion that followed—and which William Lumby’s drawings seek neither to erase nor to prematurely resolve.
The plates were originally commissioned as part of a four-print series from the workshop of James Basire, with the estimate set at just over £2. That only two were ultimately produced likely reflects both material limitations and the representational complexity of the West Front itself. The challenge was not merely technical—it was historical and interpretive: how could one image capture a structure whose very form was shaped by centuries of transformation? To understand what was at stake in this act of visual transmission, we must return to the cathedral’s earliest phase of construction and its foundational entanglements with conquest and reform.
While the precise date of Remigius’s building campaign remains uncertain, it likely followed soon after the 1072 relocation of the episcopal seat from Dorchester-on-Thames to Lincoln. Appointed Bishop after his support for William the Conqueror at Hastings, Remigius was the first Norman cleric to be granted a bishopric on English soil—his architectural legacy is therefore deeply entwined with conquest, ecclesiastical reform, and the transnational flow of materials and styles. Lumby’s rendering of the West Front captures not a single phase of this history, but its cumulative and composite logic. The structure emerges not as the static output of Remigius alone but as a palimpsest of later interventions, embedded in the visual culture of Anglo-Norman hybridity. Taylor’s recent work frames this architecture as neither wholly Norman nor purely Gothic, but as “a grammar of overlap,” a striated surface whose material vocabulary reveals more through its discontinuities than through its coherence (Taylor 2024, 67–69).
In this light, the plates do not attempt to restore an idealized Remigius-era version of the façade. Instead, Lumby’s draughtsmanship takes seriously the building’s present state—including its asymmetries, accretions, and unresolved gestures. This is particularly clear in the vertical composition of Plate 3.10, where the left tower extends beyond the plate’s edge—a compositional decision that underscores both the physical scale of the cathedral and the conceptual difficulty of containing it within a single frame. The omission of the original needle spires—removed in 1807 for structural reasons—further heightens the engraving’s sense of compressed sublimity (Pevsner and Metcalf 1985, 221). As Pevsner elsewhere notes, the only diagonals interrupting the composition’s axial rigor are the pinnacles and turret spires of the West Front itself—details which Lumby and Basire render with subtle emphasis (Pevsner and Metcalf 1985, 198). The result is a form that gestures skyward but also registers its material constraints—a façade both aspiring and contingent.
The asymmetries of the towers further amplify this logic of layered history. The left tower reveals a denser rhythm of arcading and window openings, while the right remains more austere in articulation—its surface less elaborated, its proportions subtly distinct. Rather than suppress these divergences, the engraving preserves them, allowing difference to register not as error but as evidence of time’s work. In doing so, Lumby’s drawing resists the lure of a singular, idealized past. Instead, it visualizes the cathedral as an evolving composite, shaped by repair, improvisation, and the slow negotiations of architectural life.
Such complexity was not lost on the antiquarians. In the accompanying explanatory account, Sir Henry Charles Englefield notes that “in what are called the remains of Remigius’s church there are two distinct styles of architecture,” subtly acknowledging the interpretive challenge posed by the West Front (Englefield 1796, 1). While Englefield’s commentary stops short of fully theorizing that hybridity, Lumby’s drawing performs it visually. The plates thus provide a richer historiographic resource than the commentary alone—inviting modern viewers to engage the very entanglement of form, meaning, and memory that shaped their production.
If anything, the Society’s decision to feature Lincoln Cathedral in Vetusta Monumenta signals a tacit endorsement of the kind of hybrid architectural lineage that Lincoln uniquely embodies. While Gothic forms appear elsewhere in the series, the Lincoln plates stand apart for their complexity, scale, and the degree of institutional investment they represent. As James Essex declared in a 1775 address to the Society, “under whatever denomination... whether we call them Goths or Free-masons,” builders like those of Lincoln Cathedral had created a system “more perfect... than the Greek or Roman has been by modern architects” (Essex 1778, 159). His insistence that even Inigo Jones and Christopher Wren had failed to recapture such sublimity positioned medieval ecclesiastical architecture above classical imitation—and aligned the Society’s antiquarian ambitions with a renewed transvaluation of Gothic values.
It is within this shifting hierarchy of architectural meaning that Lumby’s intervention gains particular resonance. His design does not displace Remigius, but rightly resituates him as one node in a longer genealogy. The drawing resists the false promise of restoration to an origin point. Instead, it embraces what William Blake might have recognized as the building’s prophetic unfolding across time. Lumby’s rendering is, in this way, an act of historiographic care, not of historical erasure. It recognizes the West Front as a site where Gothic aspiration, Norman importation, and English re-imagination are materially entangled.
This layered entanglement finds formal expression in the visual sequence that brings the plates into being. The image-world created by the Vetusta Monumenta Lincoln Cathedral prints emerges through a generative progression: beginning with Lumby’s preparatory drawing, passing through the incised matrix engraved by James Basire, and culminating in the printed plate. As Deanna Petherbridge notes, “the very nature of drawing as a responsive and labile poetics militates against rigid codification of style and hand,” underscoring the distributed agencies at work in both creation and interpretation (Petherbridge 2010, 9). Through this lens, the plate becomes not simply a reproduction but an epistemic device—a hybrid form through which architectural knowledge, historical memory, and visual imagination are co-constituted and transmitted, without ever fully settling into a single authoritative account.
The resulting prints carry a striking physicality: the deep incisions into the copperplate matrix lend the West Front a visual force that seems to rise from the page itself. This distributed authorship continues in the movement from drawing to plate, where the act of engraving introduces another interpretive layer—materializing decisions that are at once technical, aesthetic, and historiographical. As Antony Griffiths notes, prints are not simply images but “images that are multiplied,” dependent upon an originating support—“a matrix”—that transforms drawing into a system of reproducibility (Griffiths 1996, 9–10). The plate, in this sense, is not a transparent translation of its source but a site of mediation where fidelity, interpretation, and material constraint converge. This logic of transformation, shaped by both technical process and conceptual vision, is ultimately transmitted to the viewer—where the engraved West Front becomes not a fixed image but a recurring site of visual, temporal, and interpretive negotiation: drawn, incised, and circulated through Vetusta Monumenta as distributive apparatus.
Yet it is no surprise that Lincoln’s West Front is the one chosen to stand in for the form’s adapted expression in Britain: extending across the British Isles and beyond, its engraved presence animates the poetics of space and reverberates through the antiquarian imagination across the long nineteenth century.
As the only depiction of a cathedral in Vetusta Monumenta, these plates both underscore its Lincoln’s exceptional standing within antiquarian discourse and embody the layered processes through which it was imagined, mediated, and re-inscribed into historical consciousness. As Noah Heringman notes, the engraved objects in Vetusta Monumenta are not simply preserved—they are “highly mediated and uniquely redolent of the intimacy in which their humans lived with them” (Vetusta Monumenta: An Introduction). The Lincoln Cathedral plates operate in this very register: they do not merely depict the building’s architecture but recast it as a living object of antiquarian devotion—imbued with historical intimacy, and mobilized across networks of desire, circulation, and reception.
Nineteenth-Century Reception
This dynamic is evident in the reception of Lincoln Cathedral by the post-Romantic critic John Ruskin, who described it as “out and out the most precious piece of architecture in the British Isles and roughly speaking worth any two other cathedrals we have” (Ruskin 1851, Letter). While Ruskin’s direct experience of Lincoln remains uncertain, it is likely that Vetusta Monumenta shaped his perception—mediating the cathedral’s significance through engraved form rather than immediate observation. Ruskin demonstrably engaged with at least Volume Four, citing it in relation to an engraved Roman helmet found at Ribchester in Lancashire (Ruskin 1851, 424). This intersection between antiquarian print culture and architectural reception reveals how Vetusta Monumenta not only documented the past but participated in its imaginative afterlife.
Through their afterlife, these plates align with Jane Bennett’s theory of vibrant matter, Karen Barad’s theory of intra-action, and Vicki Kirby’s diffractive anthropology—frameworks that reveal objects as agential forces within entangled networks of meaning, materiality, and inscription. Through this lens, the material force of the text is not merely representational but actively circulates in the world, shaping and being shaped by conditions of reception. As Bennett observes, “if matter itself is lively, then not only is the difference between subjects and objects minimized but the status of the shared materiality of all things is elevated” (Bennett 2010, 13). Following this line of thought, the Vetusta Monumenta engravings do not merely represent Lincoln Cathedral; they elevate its material status, embedding it within an extended network of antiquarian attention and cross-institutional significance. This network, in turn, unfolds across the temporal and spatial dimensions opened by the collection itself, ensuring Lincoln Cathedral’s circulation as an enduring antiquarian object.
On this interactive level, Barad’s illuminating work is key. As they observe, agential realist accounts of physical-cultural phenomena emphasize the “notion of intra-action” as a cornerstone of their framework, setting into motion “the mutual constitution of entangled agencies” (Barad 2007, 33). Space, place, and time do not remain fixed in Lincoln Cathedral’s representation; rather, they expand outward as the images are received, transformed, and multiplied across the post-antiquarian critical and creative horizon—by Ruskin, of course, but also by the Chartist poet Thomas Cooper, who celebrated it as a point of radical disjuncture, giving material form to spiritual elevation against clerical decadence and peasant dispossession in his 1829 poem dedicated to Lincoln Cathedral:
For Cooper, Lincoln Cathedral embodied the force of the Gothic—not merely as a monument of somber grandeur, but as a troubled agent of historical contradiction. It towers not only above the city’s physical terrain but over the moral ambiguities of its time, entwining spiritual aspiration with the weight of institutional betrayal. His opening phrase, “Great sepulchre of haughty gloom and grandeur,” casts the cathedral not as a failure of form, but as a form haunted by the excesses of those entrusted with its care. The critique falls not on the architecture itself, but on the clerical class whose consolidation of wealth and power undercut the very spiritual aspirations the building embodied. The building becomes a site where sublime vision and hierarchical decadence uneasily cohabit.
Great sepulchre of haughty gloom and grandeur—
Bestriding earth, like as thy shrinèd dead,
While living, did bestride the human mind—
Thy veritable being, which thy frown
Stamps on our consciousness so solemnly,
Would seem, like shapes in fables of thy times,
A phantom too unreal for our belief,
Were we not witnesses that oft the mind,
Disordered and oppressed by strong disease,
Creates, in throes of thought, its images
Of gorgeous dress and stature giantlike—
Dwarfing the voluntary portraitures
Sketched by Thought's pencil in the hours of health (Cooper 1877, n.p.)
This tension crescendos in Cooper’s metaphor of the mind “disordered and oppressed by strong disease”—a mind shaped by the distortions of ecclesiastical power and economic injustice. The “images of gorgeous dress and stature giantlike” conjure the spectacle of power severed from its spiritual foundation, a monstrous grandeur erected atop dispossession. And yet, within that very spectacle, Cooper locates the possibility of recognition. The cathedral, despite all, retains a spiritual-material force: an architecture that gestures skyward, straining beyond the corruption around it.
Crucially, Cooper knew the cathedral not only through imagination but through proximity—having lived in Lincoln, he walked its shadowed precincts and traced its outlines with his own eye. But his reading of the West Front’s grandeur was likely shaped, too, by its circulation in print. The Vetusta Monumenta engravings, with their careful attention to architectural complexity and asymmetry, contributed to the interpretive atmosphere in which the Gothic could be both mourned and reimagined. In their composite logic—the hybrid vision of Lumby and Basire—the plates offered not only a record, but a mode of reckoning. They gave material form to the very tensions Cooper channels: grandeur shadowed by decay, vision tempered by grief, and structure that remains, not because it is whole, but because it holds.
Even amid critique, Cooper does not relinquish the Gothic as merely a relic or ruin. Instead, he allows its very grandeur—its excess and scale—to intimate another kind of force: one that exceeds its historical degradations and gestures quietly toward redemption. That force, unnamed and unrealized, flickers at the poem’s edge—a conceptual architecture drawn from the constellation of antiquarian image-flows that Vetusta Monumenta helped propel into the world. It is not of the clerics, but of the structure itself, standing watch through centuries, awaiting the renewal of its meaning.
In this diffractive collapse of distinctions, Vicki Kirby’s philosophical anthropology proves especially resonant. In Quantum Anthropologies, she argues that the dissolution of rigid oppositions—between Nature and Culture, materiality and meaning—has reshaped both academic and political terrains. As disciplinary and social movements alike abandon the search for stable analytical foundations, a more fluid and entangled mode of thought comes into view. She writes:
on the political front we have seen similar shifts in the practices, modes of alliances and strategies that once identified particular social movements and struggles for equity. And all this because the material self-evidence of initial conditions or first causes, those stable analytical reference points that allow us to identify a problem and then debate what needs to be done to correct it […] [and because of] the very real sense political contestation has always debated first principles, once the substantive difference between Nature and Culture, or temporal priority and causal directionality, is disestablished, we enter into a very different zone of political possibility (Kirby 2011, 68).Kirby’s “zone of political possibility” invites a rethinking of visual culture not as a passive record but as a generative force. In this light, antiquarian drawings and engravings become forms of inscription that do not merely preserve but actively shape historical meaning. Just as Cooper reimagines Lincoln Cathedral as a radical counterforce to clerical excess, Vetusta Monumenta plates do not merely depict—they mediate. They negotiate presence and absence, authority and omission, materiality and imagination. Lincoln Cathedral, in this sense, is not simply documented; it is continually redefined, its material agency unfolding through networks of antiquarian attention, reproduction, and reception.
And it is for this very reason that the plates demand a non-positivistic approach—one that accounts for their material force and the ways they both absorb and exceed the antiquarian concerns that shaped their commission. A strictly empirical reading risks flattening their complexities, overlooking how these engravings function as sites of active negotiation rather than mere representation. This becomes especially clear in the transformation from Lumby’s drawings to Basire’s engraved renderings, where architectural details were altered, omitted, or emphasized to reflect evolving antiquarian priorities.
If antiquarianism sought to curate the past, then the animate presence of Lincoln Cathedral in Vetusta Monumenta is no neutral archive. It is a site of convergence, where a post-medieval built environment becomes an engine of material and epistemic world-building—inscribing the cathedral into a system of historical legitimacy that continues to shape its reception.
Basire, Blake, Lumby, and Antiquarian Art
The specific engravings of Lincoln Cathedral’s West Front in Vetusta Monumenta were shaped by—and impelled into fit visual form—through the efforts of two sets of hands: William Lumby’s and James Basire’s, two figures who occupied distinct but interrelated positions within the antiquarian ecosystem.
Lumby was a Clerk of the Works at Lincoln, responsible for overseeing construction and maintenance, and deeply embedded in the architectural culture of the cathedral itself. He produced the preparatory drawings that served as the foundation for the final engravings. The process of translating Lumby’s designs into print was handled by James Basire (1730–1802), one of the leading engravers of the Society of Antiquaries of London (SAL). Basire was a key figure in the visual transmission of antiquarian knowledge, known for his engravings of monuments, and his workshop famously trained William Blake—an intriguing parallel given Blake’s own engagement with the visual imagination of the Gothic.
That the SAL chose to publish these images in Vetusta Monumenta rather than in its flagship journal Archaeologia is revealing. A cruder, earlier rendering of the cathedral had appeared in Archaeologia Volume 4 (1778), accompanying James Essex’s influential “Some Observations on Lincoln Cathedral,” originally read before the Society in 1775. The contrast makes clear how Lumby and Basire’s collaboration was understood to signal a leap in both technical and aesthetic sophistication. The move to Vetusta Monumenta—a more prestige-driven publication series—suggests an effort to assert not just antiquarian documentation, but antiquarian authority. In this way, Lumby’s and Basire’s contributions offered more than a record; they embodied the Society’s ambitions to shape a refined visual-historical canon.
A comparison with the earlier and far cruder rendering of Lincoln Cathedral’s West Front in the Essex volume underscores the significance of Lumby’s contribution. That earlier print—contemporaneous with Blake’s apprenticeship in Basire’s workshop—is comparatively primitive in its technique and flattened in its representational depth. Its schematic, almost diagrammatic form emphasizes outline over texture and largely evacuates the architectural richness that characterizes Lumby’s vision. By contrast, the Vetusta Monumenta plates, derived from Lumby’s carefully executed drawings, demonstrate a more refined command of line, shadow, and proportional articulation. They offer not only a more aesthetically persuasive rendering but a more conceptually robust one: where the Archaeologia print conveys structural facts, Lumby’s image mediates a complex architectural history. This shift in representational ambition reflects the Society’s increasing investment in visual sophistication as a vehicle for interpretive preservation and public authority. In this context, the Lincoln plates become not just images, but arguments—asserting the place of antiquarian representation as a mode of historical knowledge production.
This translational process—from Lumby’s draughtsmanship to Basire’s engraving—also reveals the editorial and institutional negotiations that determined how Lincoln Cathedral would be represented. Rather than simply reproducing the structure, the Vetusta Monumenta plates emerge from a process of selection, revision, and adaptation, shaped by the priorities of multiple contributors. Lumby himself, though not formally a member of the Society of Antiquaries, was able to submit his drawings through the patronage of Sir Joseph Banks, the eminent naturalist, imperial advisor, and President of the Royal Society. Banks’s wide-ranging networks—extending across scientific exploration, antiquarian inquiry, and colonial administration—enabled projects that bridged natural history and architectural study. His support helped secure institutional approval and funding for the Lincoln plates, even as his legacy remains entangled with the violence of British imperial expansion, especially in Australia, where he played a central role in advising the Crown on settler colonial policy and extractive practices (O’Brian 1997, 243–269).
Although encouraged by the Society to contribute an explanatory account to accompany the plates, Lumby declined—perhaps out of modesty, or due to his position as an architectural officer rather than a scholarly author. This absence of a first-person narrative left room for a different kind of authorship to emerge, shaped instead through the interplay of image, institutional mediation, and the later textual framing by Sir Henry Charles Englefield. In this light, Lumby’s role stands in revealing contrast to that of William Blake, whose visionary stance positioned him as a prophetic outsider, resistant to the constraints of institutional authority. Where Blake strove toward radical originality, Lumby cultivated a quieter form of innovation: one rooted in collaboration, precision, and the slow accretion of archival influence. His contribution shaped not only the visual record of Lincoln Cathedral but also the broader circuits of antiquarian knowledge in an era increasingly defined by the image’s role in both historical narration and imperial imagination.
Such influence, however, was not merely the product of institutional alignment. Banks’s patronage of Lumby likely stemmed from a recognition of the architect’s infrastructural intelligence—a capacity to render in drawing not only the cathedral’s formal complexity, but its layered entanglement with time, sediment, and site. The cathedral itself is hewn from Lincolnshire limestone, quarried near the city—a material whose granular composition, honeyed tone, and workability have long shaped the region’s architectural identity. As Heringman notes, Romantic-era encounters with stone and ruin played a crucial role in shaping geology as a distinct and authoritative field, emerging at the intersection of literary, visual, and scientific engagements with the deep time of the earth (Heringman 2004, 11). In this light, Lumby’s rendering of Lincoln Cathedral does more than document an inherited structure—it conjures the building as the manifestation of a geological imaginary and actuality all at once, an aesthetic form that stands at the intersection of nature and culture, inscription and erosion. In this way, the plates also inherit the visual logic of earlier antiquarian renderings—most notably George Vertue’s engraving of the Lincoln Hypocaust in Plate 1.57—where architectural sectioning and excavation become vehicles for temporal and material revelation.
But if Lumby’s mode of vision was institutional, sedimentary, and embedded, one can still imagine a radically different engagement with the cathedral—one grounded less in archival mediation than in visionary intervention. No doubt Blake, had he occupied Lumby’s role, would have insisted on drawing, engraving, and composing the explanatory text himself. Though Vetusta Monumenta’s Lincoln plates appeared in 1796—years before Blake began producing his illuminated epics MIL/TON and Jerusalem—we can nevertheless speculate on what a Blakean encounter with Lincoln Cathedral might have revealed through these artworks: a mythopoeic refraction of its form, charged with prophetic urgency and marked by messianic time.
Blake’s preface to MIL/TON captures this visionary framework with a series of insistent questions that collapse sacred history into dispersed spacetimes, inviting a redemptive reading of England’s landscape—even as it bristles with industrial violence:
Blake’s mythic geography collapses temporal registers and merges sacred space with contemporary critique—distributing the divine force of imagination in a way that anticipates Jacques Derrida’s articulation of “the messianic, or messianicity without messianism… the opening to the future or to the coming of the other as the advent of justice without horizon of expectation” (Derrida 1996, 56). For Derrida, the messianic is not anchored to any specific religious figure or teleological end but names a radical openness to what is yet to come—a transformative arrival that must be awaited without certainty. The sacred matrix Blake inscribes in these lines enacts just such a possibility: the continual re-entry of the messianic into time, made present through every creative act that resists destruction and insists upon the world’s remaking. This vision finds further articulation in the Laocoön, where Blake writes: “JESUS [Yeshua] We are his Members / The Divine Body | It manifests itself in his Works of Art (In Eternity All is Vision)” (Laocoön, E 273). Here, artistic creation becomes messianic labor: to make art is to participate in the Divine Body—not by restoring a lost origin, but by opening a space for vision, transformation, and the repair of the world.
And did those feet in ancient time,
Walk upon Englands mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On Englands pleasant pastures seen!
And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills? (M 1[i]:1–8, E 95)
It is within this messianic horizon that Blake’s “dark Satanic Mills” begin to cast their long shadow, as divine creativity comes to stand—within the artist-poet’s vision—as a force aligned with the Gothic and opposed to the entanglements of industrialization and classicism. As I have argued elsewhere, these mills function not merely as allegorical figures but as architectonic embodiments of early fossil-fueled modernity, with Albion Mill—destroyed by fire in 1791—as their inaugural form (Leveton 2022, 137). Designed in a rough Neo-Palladian style, Albion Mill epitomized the rationalist and imperial aesthetics of late eighteenth-century industry, standing in stark contrast to the textured asymmetry and vertical spiritual ambition of Lincoln Cathedral. One was built to house engines of extraction and combustion; the other to elevate the eye—and perhaps the soul—toward the heavens.
Against this backdrop, Lincoln Cathedral emerges not simply as a relic of medieval devotion, but as a determinate negation of Albion Mill’s industrial dominion—a counter-monument whose enduring form resists the architectures of combustion by reasserting a sacred, collective imaginary rooted in stone, ascent, and the hope of what might yet be redeemed.
In this spirit, one might imagine how Blake—had he engaged Lincoln Cathedral more directly later in his career—could have re-mobilized iconographic forms of Gothic architecture as literal thresholds to prophetic vision. Such a possibility finds precedent in Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion (c. 1804–20). There, the frontispiece—or portal-image—functions not merely as illustration but as initiatory device: a visual-spiritual architecture that mediates access to prophetic vision by aligning material form with imaginative entry. At its center stands Los—Blake’s prophetic figure of creative labor and embodied imagination—bearing an orb of divine light in his right hand. With his gaze fixed forward and limbs striding into space, Los does not merely present the illuminated epic but leads the viewer-reader into it, passing through a pointed Gothic archway carved in shadow and flame.
This Gothic portal is not incidental. It summons the reader into a layered architecture of vision, inviting passage from material ruin into imaginative possibility. In this figural movement—Los as psychopomp, the archway as threshold, illumination as both image and act—we glimpse the full force of Blakean architecture: not built form alone, but sacred mediation, embodied memory, and visionary awakening.
In this light, Lincoln Cathedral—both in its engraved rendering within Vetusta Monumenta and in its continued material, even speculative, presence—shimmers as a latent counterpart: silent, yet structurally resonant. A monumental inheritance, it too holds the potential to guide viewers from temporal debris toward prophetic renewal.
Yet if Blake’s vision flares at the edges of time, casting imagination as divine intervention, Lumby’s contribution draws power from the slow work of continuity. His was not the path of rupture, but of historical synthesis. It is precisely Lumby’s embeddedness—his ability to work across disciplines, within institutions, and in collaboration—that made his intervention so enduring. Where Blake sought revelation, Lumby translated legacy. His draughtsmanship not only recorded architectural detail but rendered the cathedral’s deep sediment of time legible to his contemporaries. In this way, Lincoln Cathedral becomes not only visible, but readable: a palimpsest of memory, civic devotion, and antiquarian epistemology.
If the first plate emphasizes the West Front’s monumental verticality—its visual force, symbolic reach, and layered asymmetry—then the second plate operates in a different register altogether. It offers a sectional anatomy of Lincoln Cathedral’s architectural body, fragmenting the whole into discrete forms: elevation, decorative capital, layered archway, and speculative reconstructions of spires and vaulting systems. This distributive logic is not merely technical; it reflects the antiquarian impulse to parse, categorize, and medi(t)ate. Rather than stage a singular, dramatic ascent, the plate enacts a mode of knowledge that depends on disaggregation, disambiguation, and recomposition. Lumby’s drawing presents not just what is seen but how vision itself is trained to read architecture: by sequence, index, and comparative form.
At the center of this architectural vision is Lumby himself, whose intimacy with Lincoln Cathedral as Clerk of the Works infused the image with a rare kind of fidelity. His drawings do not merely document—they translate a structure he knew with daily, physical familiarity into a graphic register capable of instructing and inspiring. This is the labor of someone who has walked the stones, absorbed the weight of the vaults, and studied the play of shadow on column and capital. In the act of drawing, Lumby does not simply record detail; he reveals it, guiding the viewer into a visual encounter shaped by precision, care, and grace. There is a generosity in this act—a kind of epistemic gentleness, rich with insight—through which he gives the public access to a space they might never visit, yet can now come to know. His voice, quiet but insistent, can be felt in the grain of every line: a call to look again, to trace the textures of stone and style, and to recognize in these forms a history still unfolding.
It is this fidelity—born of patient, tactile knowledge—that James Basire translates through the medium of the copperplate, where Lumby’s architectural insight is re-inscribed through engraved depth and controlled darkness. In the first Lincoln Cathedral plate, Basire does not merely reproduce Lumby’s drawing; he reanimates it by incising into the copper with a material sensitivity that holds and shapes ink. The negative spaces of the plate become reservoirs: the deeper the cut, the more ink they carry, and the richer the passage that prints. In the heavy shadows beneath the central archway, for instance, the pooling ink casts weight, mystery, and motion—drawing the eye inward before guiding it upward through successive registers of arcading, ornament, and crenellated forms. The engraving’s verticality becomes not just compositional but affective, inviting the viewer to ascend alongside the image itself.
Basire’s technique, in this sense, materializes interpretive depth. Through precise modulation of line and shadow, he renders architectural asymmetry legible—refusing to flatten irregularity in favor of a false harmony. Instead, the engraving foregrounds difference: a structure shaped by centuries, layered interventions, and the hands of many. Where Lumby offered intimate knowledge, Basire gave that knowledge monumental voice, pressing ink into metal, then into paper, to produce a vision that carries both fidelity and transformation.
This is more than reproduction—it is transmission. Between the delicacy of Lumby’s line and the assertiveness of Basire’s burin, we witness not merely a record of a building, but the shaping of a visual epistemology. A structure becomes a medium. A drawing becomes an argument. The plate, in turn, becomes a threshold: where stone meets imagination, and vision is inscribed for publics yet to come.
At the heart of these plates is a question not only of representation but of reconstitution: how architecture—and its image—comes to bear meaning across time. With/in this configuration, a luminous convergence emerges: Lumby’s draughtsmanship, Basire’s engraving, and the textual framing coalesce into an intricate network of material inscription and historical imagination. Their labor—rooted in situated knowledge, translation, and formal care—renders Lincoln Cathedral not as a static monument, but as a dynamic site of historical becoming. From Cooper’s haunted ambivalence to Blake’s visionary Gothic, from the asymmetries of the West Front to the sectioned fragments of Plate 3.11, we witness a sustained meditation on memory, media, and transformation. The plates render Lincoln Cathedral as a site where stone and ink, word and copperplate, co-(i)nspire to reframe its architectural significance. Each layer of production sustains presence as a dynamic form—a palimpsest of visual thought, continually re-inscribed through acts of viewing, reading, and imaginative return.
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