The ancient Cambridge High Street was originally known by four names: St. John's Street, Trinity Street, King's Road and Trampington Street. It stretches from the Tudor Gatehouse in the north to the Fitzwilliam Museum in the south, with the majestic Chapel of King's College in the center. The centerpiece of the street is King's Road, a true King's Shady Lane, at least in the off-peak tourist season. Crowding is inevitable in normal times. This is the picturesque center of the small town. The Council Chambers, the Great St. Mary's Church, the King's College Chapel - a mix of classical and medieval styles in this architectural complex. But without the tree in the King's College Chapel, the buildings would be a bit cold.
Those houses, built of brick and trusses, were built in the 18th and 19th centuries. Stores, cafes, housing - there is not a single house of note on King's Road, but all together they provide a vivid backdrop to the college across the road. Newspapers, teddy bears and robes can be bought on King's Road, ties in every color can be bought at Redd and Amis, and the best of today's handicrafts can be bought in the Primavera Gallery. Once upon a time people met at least once in the day on King's Avenue, the inter-collegiate news exchange where university policy was made. "Remember this," wrote Francis Cornford in his Microcosmology of University Education in 1908, "the man of business is the man who walks up and down King's Avenue from 2 to 4 o'clock, every day of his life." Knock out a couple of small towers at either end of the King's College Chapel and it would be more appropriately proportioned!
-John Raskin, 1849
A stone wall runs along King's Road, with beautiful spires dividing it into segments, as if behind the wall were the palace of Kubla Khan. Through the latticed window panes, the inner courtyard is green with grass. Even the Victorian mailbox outside the gatehouse has a small dome. On the wall where bicycles are parked, "No Bicycles" is written. Swallows nest in the arches of the gateway, despite the daily tidal wave of visitors. This is the classical portico of King's College. Visitors, of course, enter through the north door of the chapel. Even the back door here is grand. John Betchmann said that King's College was the most Oxford-like of all the Cambridge colleges, and he didn't say that without reason - it was the most flattering comment an Oxford man could make.
The college, known as King's College of Blessed Mary and St. Nicholas, was founded by Henry VI in 1441, a few months after Eton. The King, who was just 19 years old, created the two colleges in imitation of William Wickham. Seventy years before that, Wickham had linked New College in Oxford with a senior preparatory school in Winchester.
Until 1861, King's College admitted only Eton students. The elite also enjoyed the privilege of being neither required to take the usual university examinations nor subject to the authority of official agents. The King conferred a special status on those at King's College that lasted until the mid-19th century. This did not make them more likeable, but enhanced their pseudo-gentlemanly appeal.
Today King's College always emphasizes its liberal tradition of not professing the Anglican religion. It began accepting girls in 1973, one of the first colleges in Cambridge to do so. Today, it is this former Etonian enclave that favors the highest percentage of students (around 80%) from state schools.
King's College also accepted minority students earlier and more often than any other college. It is the custom at King's that teachers and students are equally important. This spirit of freedom and friendliness also characterized the Apostles' Club and the Bloomsbury Club, and no one portrayed it more thoroughly than the novelist Forster, a fellow of King's College, who said he would rather sell out his country than his friends. To have said that when the college was first founded would have killed him.
The statutes state that King's College shall have 70 Fellows and students, 10 priests, 6 laymen, 16 choirboys and a Master. The Dean was not to be called Master but Provost. it was then the largest college in Cambridge and land was needed to create a college of that size. The whole town was demolished, including its parish chapel - all at once - and the planned new building was not completed until centuries later. At first only the old compound to the north of the chapel, and later the academy, was built. With the King's fall in the Wars of the Roses, there were no funds left to finish building his academy.
The chapel was miraculously completed in 1515, and it would be another 200 years or so before King's College made plans again in a big way-again, only partially realized: the Gibbs Building, which stood directly opposite the main entrance. James Gibbs, the architect of the Chapel, designed the long, empty wing in light-colored Portland stone, in keeping with the rational spirit of classical architecture (1724-1732). Above the stone-walled ground floor is the lyre room, with a flat, subdued gable end and a balustraded top floor - a striking contrast to the unusually flexible, soaring Gothic of the adjoining chapel. Only the triumphalist aisle, triangular frieze and semicircular windows bring some tension to the symmetrical front, and its simplicity is due to budgetary constraints.
On Oct. 25, 1946, in this building, two great men had their first and only argument. "Any philosophical trouble?" Karl Popper asked, an invited speaker from the Ethics Club, while Ludwig Wittgenstein grabbed a firehook. Did he really do it? From this legendary incident led to one of the longest and most bizarre footnotes in the history of philosophy. Today, this room is the studio of two King's College Fellows - Emma Rothschild, the female economic historian, and Baron Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal.
The Gibbs-designed compound would have had two separate annexes, not just one. Another century passed before the entrance compound to King's College was built as it is today. William Wilkins, the greatest college architect of his day, built the south wing and refectory in 1824-1828, with two spires on the roof, and on the east side, opposite the street, the gatehouse and chanting platform. Above the parapet of this wall are built Gothic spires, as if they had climbed down from the roof of the chapel, and on the wall are large vertical windows, light, transparent, and so low as not to spoil the view over the college chapel. In the center is the gatehouse, a neo-Gothic gem, built with a dome and spire. Although more than 300 years separate the construction of this Perpendicular Line Chapel and the gateway, they appear consistent and harmonious in their entirety, a great success for the architect. Who will miss the cloister that Wilkins wanted to build on the inside?
Until his death in 1970, Foster lived in the entrance compound of King's College for the last 20 years of his life. He was a saint of the college, visited by teachers and students, and he was no longer at all the "shy little mouse" that Virginia Woolf described him as. His novel Maurice depicts a same-sex love story in Cambridge. In James Ivory's film adaptation of it, academics still walk in long lines to the high tables in the cafeteria. As I sat there, the cafeteria under the high neo-Gothic shelving flat roof was busy, no one wore robes anymore, and the high tables were removed. Hal Dixon, the retired academician who accompanied me, said, "We boast of being egalitarians." Old acquaintances looked down on us from the wainscoted walls of the refectory: Baron Robert Walpole, Britain's first prime minister, and his son Horace.
Among the colleagues Dr. Hal Dixon used to meet regularly here were the Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Friederike Sanger, the historian Noel Annan, the Marxist Eric Hobsbawm or Tony Blair's teacher, the sociologist Anthony Giddens. It is also possible to meet a young academician-French teacher Andy Martin in shorts and Hawaiian shirt, who describes surfing as Roland Barthes describes everyday life. The corridors and meeting rooms are filled with portraits of King's College luminaries, many from Bloomsbury Circle (there are also small Indian sculptures in the ladies' toilets). The library at King's College, also designed by Wilkins, boasts a collection of nearly 130,000 volumes, specializing in medieval and Orientalist manuscripts, and another collection of rare books by an economist. Keynes had no heirs, and when he died in 1946, he left first editions of works by Copernicus, Newton, Leibniz, Descartes, Voltaire, and Milton to his college-a valuable library of European intellectual history; Keynes had some 50 editions of Kant's works published in the 18th century alone, and for him, reading was as natural as breathing.
Keynes has collected books since he enrolled at King's College. The walls of his lodgings in Wibber Yard, behind the library, are covered in paintings of nude male dancers and grape pickers, painted by his friends Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell. The floral and still-life sketches of ground tiles on the floor of Hostel Gardens, a residential area bordering the Academician's Garden (1949), are also by them.
Thousands of letters and photographs by Bloomsbury artists are housed in the modern archive center of the college library-from the manuscripts of King's College graduates from Roger Frye to Alan Turing to nearly all of the surviving manuscripts of Forster and Rupert Brooke. Don't rule out the possibility that one-time history student Salman Rushdie will one day gift printouts of his novels to this archive, which today even has the painted door of Keynes's place off London's Gordon Square hanging in its reading room. The college meadow is King's College's River Sword Meadow, where cows graze. Forster's novel The Longest Journey begins with a philosophical discourse by several King's College students, "The cow lives ...... Whether I am in Cambridge, Iceland or dead, the cow will live." We walked into the back garden from Wilkins' Bridge over the River Sword (1819). A slightly curved lime-wooded vagina led us along its graceful lines through the meadows. Everywhere silver lilies, hyacinths, blue stars, daffodils, and checkerboard flowers were in bloom. The first hints of new green flickered in the river meadows. But uniquely, even without the colorfulness of spring, the view of King's College from the back garden has remained unchanged since the 18th century: the Gibbs Building, the Chapel, the old Clare College compound, which sits there at a green and regal distance. It was the same path that the choirboys of King's College took every day, going from the school across the road to the College Chapel for evening prayers.
On July 25, 1446, on Jacob's Day, King Henry VI laid the foundation stone of the College Chapel, which the people of the time must have found even more magnificent than we do today. Only the Cathedral and the Court Chapel have a similar honor. The chapel was a Mass chapel for the founders of the College, but it was first and foremost a monument to the Church, against the Wycliffites and other heretics of the time. Finally completed after 70 years, King's College Chapel is an icon of post-Gothic England, with an influence that extends far beyond Cambridge, and is the last great ecclesiastical building of the pre-Reformation royal patronage.
King's College's janitors called their chapel "The Shack". Coleridge praised its "beauty beyond the intuition of the senses", William Turner painted it, and William Wordsworth dedicated three poems to it. Only John Raskin, the architectural great from Oxford, complained that Cambridge's baby looked like an inverted table with four legs pointing skyward. For wall climbers in the 1930s, there was no greater challenge than the steep vertical walls of the northeast tower of King's Chapel. Anyone who could secure an umbrella or a bicycle to the top of the high tower had a similar sense of triumph to the stonemasons of old who stood on wobbly scaffolding. The workers who built the King's Chapel sometimes numbered upwards of 200, which was quite a lot for a city that had only about 5,000 inhabitants at the time. And what a building it was: begun in 1446 in the time of a Lancaster king, aborted in 1461 for the Wars of the Roses, renewed in 1477 by the victorious House of York, re-suspended in 1485, and finally completed brilliantly by the Tudors. As is usually the case, the east wall was built first, using the grayish-white magnesian limestone of Yorkshire. The rear portion of the building to the west of the chapel was constructed using the darker, cream-colored Wilton stone of North Hampton. It is evident that there was a break in the building, not only from the replacement of the stone, but also from the style. The western portion of the buttresses is decorated with many Tudor roses, hanging doors, shagannaghia tails, and crested animals, unlike the earlier eastern portion. But despite this difference, despite the long delay in construction, and despite the fact that at least four architects led the project before and after, the overall effect could not be more uniform.
In a magical belief in stasis, the chapel eliminates the separation of load-bearing walls and windows, and John Betchmann called it a crystal palace of "stone and glass. The truss structure is like a spider's web, spreading softly over the windows, walls and roof to form a long, high room. The walls are weightless; they seem to carry nothing but their own lightness. The room was flooded with light and was bright. The ribbed timbers of the half-columns on either side stuck out and forked high above our heads into a vault that unfolded almost effortlessly in a fan shape. This fan vault spanned 12 meters, was 88 meters long and 24 meters high, all in one piece without interruption. This great engineering achievement combines a clear structure with high quality decoration. The erection of such a magnificent vault, which was a daring design for its time, was also to be accompanied by the embedding of crown stones in the fan folds, in the lozenges of the perpendicular ribs, which themselves already weighed a ton, and by a monolithic stone carved out of a rose and a hanging door as an alternating Tudor emblem. The whole vault weighs 1,875 tons, the whole weight being directed outwards and shared by four corner towers and 22 buttresses. A row of through side chambers hides the depth of the stout buttresses, whose spires stand spear-pointed on the ridge and poke skyward.
Banking on the help of a fellow of King's College, I was able to enter the fan vaults of the chapel. A rotating staircase in the northwest tower connects to a narrow passage along the side wall on which massive oak roof beams rest. Immediately below the beam is a darkened room whose wavy, undulating floor is the back of the fan vault. Between the oak ribs and the stone roof, I felt like Jonah in the belly of the whale. This vaulted wonder has a name: John Vastell. There is evidence that he lived in the King's Chapel building shed from 1485 onwards. Considered to be his work are the fan vault in the central tower of Canterbury Cathedral and the vintage altar in Peterborough Cathedral. His representative work is in Cambridge. Originally planned by Henry VI's architect, Reginald Ely, as a branch-wake vault, John Vastell completed the chapel in 1512-1515 with this massive fan vault, which is the largest fan vault in England. Wastell and his stonemason Thomas Stockton also built most of the side chapels' vaults, the gates and corner towers with their many statues, and the superbly carved coats of arms - nearly 400 stone coats of arms in all***: roses, crowns, hangings and flowers, Mrs. Beaufort's greyhound, the Tudor Welsh dragon. Henry VI would never have approved of this decoration. His whole chapel deserved to be as simple as the east front. But Henry VIII made the front room a treasure trove of his own coat of arms: a magnificent state church foyer and a hall of honor for the Tudor family, which, as a new dynasty whose reign had not yet been stabilized, had to flaunt its insignia even more. The forced use of the coat of arms for architecture was a typically Spanish trait, so art historian David Watkin suggests that "perhaps it was the result of the 1509 union between Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon."
The ornate black oak altar cabinet, a gift from the king, separates the vestibule from the altar. It is just the right place to partition the extra-long room and enhance its appeal. The entrance to the reading desk resembles a Roman triumphal arch, surmounted by the organ (late 17th century), with two angels standing on its cross-wire legs, playing glittering trombones-what an ingenious arrangement! The stylistic contrasts are also extraordinary: in the middle of the Gothic building are Renaissance-style wood art, altar cupboards and altar chairs. Intricately carved columns, pilasters, floor tiles, round arches, and classical shapes separate the many almost contrived statues and motifs. The quality is unparalleled in England in the early Renaissance style. Did those wood carvers come from Italy, France or Holland? We don't know their names. But they left behind the royal initials HR and RA, and Henry VIII married his second wife, Anne Boleyn, in 1533 and had her beheaded in 1536-a useful basis for identifying the date of the altarpiece's production.
Unlike woodcarving jobs, contracts for the making of chapel windows have been preserved, with the names of the artists written on them. Bernard Flowers, the master glass fitter in the King's household, who painted the glass in the King's Chapel from 1515 to 1547. This is the most complete set of church windows from Henry VIII's time. They were removed piece by piece and hidden during the Second World War, and then it took five years of work to re-install them. Stylistically, the vitrines reflect the transition from the Gothic to the Renaissance; iconographically, they still follow the medieval tradition to the letter.The upper part of the 24 porthole windows tells a story from the Old Testament, and the lower part depicts an episode from the New Testament. The west window with its picture of the Last Judgment echoes the large east window with the Crucifixion and Crucifixion of Christ. Everything is very touching and of art historical value. A painting in one of the side chapels really touched me: Crucifixion by Craigie Acheson, 1994, a cipher of primal eternal solitude, drowned in the passion of color. A window cleaner etched his personal message on the glass in the vestibule of the chapel, "John Blackmore cleaned these windows in 1747." A later engraving reads, "They need cleaning again."
It is precisely the huge Rubens piece favored by audiences in King's College Chapel that has drawn strong protests from experts. Painted in 1634 for a nunnery in Flanders and later acquired by the Earl of Westminster, the painting broke records at the time when it fetched a record high price of 3 million marks at auction in 1959, and its new owner donated it to the college. These methods of "worship" are all very well. However, the painting was too large to fit in the east window, so the academicians had the historic main altar removed, as well as the wainscoting. Since then, right above the Holy Family, this masterpiece of Baroque color painting and the Tudor glass painting have been engaged in a daring struggle. But we must be fair: what happened at the other end of the chapel was a larger aesthetic disaster-the souvenir store in the chapel vestibule.
There is no doubt that the King's College Chapel needs money, with daily costs alone amounting to more than €1,500 a day. Acid rain and car exhaust fumes are increasingly damaging the walls. Maintenance problems and repair costs grow with constant weathering. A few years ago, when it was still free to visit, people dropped their donations into a tin-covered oak box next to the main entrance (now displayed in the Chapel's exhibition room in the side chapel). It is said that Henry VII used this box to donate money to Cambridge in order to complete the College Chapel. The people there had already been utilizing a unique source of income - the golden voices of the choir boys. The choir of King's College is older than this chapel. In 1441, the year the college was founded, Henry VI decreed that six laymen and sixteen boys of "refined and modest manners" should sing Mass in King's College Chapel every day. They have been doing this for over 550 years, and the 16 boys, dressed in Eton uniforms, bowler hats and tuxedos, come for evening prayer at 5.30pm. King's College School, 50 Grange Road, is a co-educational preparatory school for children aged 4 to 13. There, in addition to singing they learn the traditional morals of self-discipline, loyalty and perseverance.
Women have long been priests in the Anglican Church. But what if there were girls in the choir at King's College? It's hard to imagine. No soprano singer has ever achieved that quivering boyish voice, that inimitable timbre between angel and eunuch. That which rises into the fan vaults of King's College is a crystal-clear supreme tone, a magician of sound, which is played to the utmost before the impending acoustic change. Looking at the angelic boy sitting in the choir chair, illuminated by the glow of the smokeless Swedish candles, it all mesmerizes us. In his memoirs, Darwin said that when he was in college he used to go to King's Chapel for evening prayers, and that he was so moved by the celestial chambers that he "sometimes invited the choir boys to sing in my room."
Singing boys were trained in English cathedrals and colleges since the Middle Ages, and their voices were programmed into polyphonic works by church composers, especially in the Tudor era, which was a uniquely English and still vibrant vocal culture. The King's College Voices brought the perfection of this music, as it was then formed, to a transcendent level. There was always a place in the chapel for term-time evening prayers, but once a year it would be so crowded that long queues of people with sleeping bags could be seen outside the college gates on the first night. King's College's Christmas Eve concerts have an audience of 190 million, not including the lucky 1,500 in the chapel. Thanks to the BBC, the world has been able to tune in live since 1928 when a crisp solo voice sings those famous verses. For Britons, the "King's College Carol" is as essential to Christmas celebrations as turkey is in America.
Henry VI's choirboys are a national export, marketed by brokers like other boy bands in the rock industry. They go away for concerts on weekends, tour abroad in the summer, and put out three new CDs a year.In a secularized society, this kind of church music is growing in popularity. Important musicians have emerged from the academy and its choir: Orlando Gibbons, who sang here at the age of 13; the conductor John Eliot Gardner; the canonist Thomas Ertz, now manager of the Aldeburgh Festival, and tenors such as David Cordier and Laurence Zazzo.