Wednesday, March 3

Toledo Cathedral (No, the Other One)

Another brilliant example of underappreciated early twentieth-century liturgical work, Our Lady, Queen of the Most Holy Rosary in Toledo, Ohio, is the work of one William Perry, of Pittsburgh, and was begun during the tenure of Samuel Cardinal Stritch. It is frequently described as Plateresque in style, the Spanish architectural mode thought to resemble the delicacy of early Renaissance silverwork, though to me it looks more straightforwardly Cram-and-Goodhue Gothic with a few Romanesque and Hispanic flourishes. It is, however, quite stunning, and features an interior robed in murals even more brilliant than that of St. Joseph Cathedral which we chronicled below. Here are some great photos from flickr.com:



(NB: Someone seems to inexplicably placed the font where the high altar used to be, but, of course, this was not the original layout.)



And here is an exterior, from flickr.com user erozier2:



What is particularly fascinating is the image above was created by running an ordinary photo through a computer program to reduce the distorting perspectival effects of shooting from the ground up. More on this technique can be seen here, in an item written by the photographer himself.

10 comments:

  1. Those first two photos were from a trip I took to the Cathedral last year. I'm was so surprised/honored when I saw them on your blog! It is such a splendid place and I'm glad to see you giving it some much-needed attention.

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  2. And, as I recall, the hanging rood used to be under the ciborium. Silly liturgical planners.

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  3. Nice photos, beautiful cathedral.

    A century ago, in-camera perspective control was the norm. The old view cameras had the ability to tilt and shift the lens independently from the film, allowing for perspective distortion correction. This type of correction was the norm until the advent of compact roll-film cameras.

    Apparently the human eye has built-in vertical perspective control: if we don't tilt our heads too much, we perceive vertical lines as being vertical and so expect the same in images. Even when painters started using perspective in their works, they generally did not apply perspective to vertical lines.

    My early church photography looked terrible and I didn't know why - until I learned the digital technique described here. Of course it helps by taking a good picture to begin with, by having the camera far from the subject and high up, to get as much good perspective as possible on the initial shot. Too much perspective correction looks bad, and this technique also degrades the image.

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  4. Dear Globe-Spinner--thanks so much for taking these wonderful photos! Toledo Cathedral is spectacular, and I hope someday to see it in person!

    Dear Mark--thanks so much for the commentary. It's fascinating to see how our minds filter the information we've been given, and it explains why my own photos drive me bananas on occasion.

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  5. That is going to be such a useful piece of software. Thankyou for the link (and also for the gorgeous photos of a gorgeous building).

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  6. You can still buy view cameras, of course, and all the necessary equipment.

    If you don't want the inevitable loss of resolution that comes with correcting perspective on a computer, you can buy a tilt-shift lens (sometimes called a perspective-control lens) for most SLR cameras to replicate part of the functionality of a movable front standard on a view camera. The downside is that such lenses are expensive, generally $2,000 or more. I'd love one but my finance department won't approve the RFE. :)

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  8. Matthew,

    The eye apparently does lots of tricks out in the real world, and this trickery is greatly attenuated when the eye looks at a tiny static photograph.

    Eyes have much larger dynamic range than cameras, so a typical photograph will have pure white and black areas where the eye in real life will see plenty of detail; closely related is the color saturation you see compared to the camera. The eye also adds sharpness to edges, and will partially correct for the color of lighting. Lots of Photoshop processing is needed to reproduce these effects, but the end result is well worth it.

    I'm beginning to discover that many old rules of painting have direct applicability to photographic processing, and making a photo look more painterly will often make it look more pleasing, as well as more realistic.

    Nicholas,

    It would be very nice to have a view camera with a digital scanning back, but the price of the digital back is outrageous - same for digital backs for smaller medium format cameras. An alternative is digitally scanning film. I've also stitched together multiple photographs into a larger composition, but this is rather error-prone as well as time-consuming.

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  9. They pulled a switch in the 70s. The tabernacle is now in the baptistery and the font is now where the high altar should be. They also turned the cathedra into an ambry, which is located behind the ciborium/baldachin. They also extended the sanctuary out beyond the previous sanctuary. They now have red chairs on either side of the sanctuary (obvious in the pictures; quite out of place, but practical), which the current bishop is trying to maintain as being only for priests. They say the old-timer priests in the 70's showed up for the "rededication" with black arm bands over their albs in protest of the renovation. The liturgists of the time sought to highlight the sacraments of initiation, with the altar, baptismal font, and ambry present in the central line of the sanctuary. The baptistery is beautiful as a baptistery, but is way too small as a chapel of reservation, not to mention the art and stained glass clearly portraying baptismal imagery.

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  10. Nothing Platteresque about it from what I can see, but it is handsome and I must say the mural decoration appears exceptional. Obviously Perry spent a lot of time looking at Goodhue - perhaps he worked in his office at some point.

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