
St Michael towers triumphantly over a pole-axed and very anatomically correct figure of The Devil at Coventry Cathedral.
‘St Michael’s Victory over the Devil’ is a 1958 bronze sculpture by Jacob Epstein, displayed beside St Michael’s steps which lead to the main West Entrance of Coventry Cathedral. The statue is a hefty 7.6 metres high, with the angel’s wings spreading for 7 metres. The sculpture symbolises the victory of good over evil, and depicts a winged angel with spear, standing with arms and legs spread above the bound figure of the horned devil lying supine. For the face of the angel, Epstein made busts of his daughter Kitty's two husbands, Lucian Freud and Wynne Godley, and selected Godley as his model. The angel's body may be inspired by Epstein's 1944–45 statue of Lucifer, now at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. The features of the devil may be based on a distorted version of Epstein himself.
Epstein was first asked to make a maquette, a small model about 18 in (46 cm) high. He made several preliminary studies in plasticine and bronze, and had started to work on the main work by the time his commission was approved in 1957. Reportedly, some members of the cathedral reconstruction committee objected to Epstein being commissioned, with one complaining "But he is a Jew", to which the architect Basil Spence responded "So was Jesus Christ".[citation needed] A similar controversy had arisen before, when Epstein created his floating lead statue of the Virgin Mother and Holy Child for the Convent of the Holy Child in Cavendish Square, London (now the offices of the King's Fund).
The sculpture was one of the last major works of art completed by Epstein before his death on 21 August 1959. It was cast in bronze and unveiled at the cathedral in 1961 by Epstein's widow, Kathleen.
Just occasionally people tell me they don’t like Coventry Cathedral. I couldn’t disagree more; a powerful symbol of Resurrection, restored to a very different life barely twenty years after being destroyed in the Blitz on 14 November 1940. The Modernist Cathedral of St Michael of the 20th Century both surrounded by and incomprehensible without the ruins of 14th Century building that surrounds it.
Coventry Cathedral incarnates the twin and interconnected British revivals of the two decades after the end of the Second World War – a revival of high culture and a revival of Christian faith. Basil Spence’s cathedral housing Jacob Epstein’s sculptures, John Piper’s massive arrangements of stained glass into windows, and Graham Sutherland’s tapestry, still in 2021 the largest in the world, represent collectively a totemic achievement in modernist visual arts and architecture.
The brief for the competition to select the architect of the new Cathedral demanded that the design emphasise the celebration of the Eucharist; Spence himself had a further vision of the building as the repository of great modern works of art. He described his building as “a plain jewel casket”. Piper’s windows cast shafts of colour into the heart of the nave, while the plain glass West Screen, which faces to the geographical south, allows much natural light into the building, essential given that the east end is entirely filled with Graham Sutherland’s great tapestry, still the largest in the world at 22 metres tall by 12 metres wide.
Coventry Cathedral was built to a tight budget – “not more than £985,000” – and making much use of reinforced concrete, the new cathedral was constructed in just six years, between Queen Elizabeth II laying the foundation stone on 23 March 1956 and the dedication ceremony on 25 May 1962.
Could there have been a finer or more appropriate setting for the world première of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem on 30 May 1962? On that night, the Cathedral’s great post-War religious theme was also incarnated in the three soloists: Peter Pears (Britten’s partner) from the host nation, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau from Germany, Galina Vishnevskaya from the USSR, representing three belligerent nations. That tri-national partnership continues to be symbolised by the presence of a replica of the Stalingrad Madonna given by the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin, where the original hangs, with a second copy being in Kazan Cathedral in Volgograd.
A building that breathes with the presence of the Holy Spirit, giving new life the Church in every generation.
This description incorporates text from the English Wikipedia.