The Cardinal's Ear-Rings
.. or, to be more precise, the pendants of the Cardinal's Metropolitan Cross. For years, the Metropolitan Cross that is used for Pontifical Ceremonies at the Cathedral has looked like this:
The two pendants, with the greek letters Alpha and Omega, were novel features, although not without precedent in Byzantine work.
However, there was no trace of the pendants, and it was presumed that they had been damaged, lost - or worse - sold at some stage. The photograph below shows the back of the cross, with the enamelled arms of S. Edmund of Canterbury, S. Francis de Sales, H. E. Cardinal Bourne, and the See of Westminster - plus the pendants.
Earlier this year, the pendants were located in an unmarked box in the vaults; they were tarnished, and some of the stones were missing. We have had them restored by the silversmiths Pruden and Smith of Ditchling; appropriately founded by Dunstan Pruden, an associate of Eric Gill.
The pendants look splendid, and will be restored to the Metropolitan Cross for Midnight Mass.
2 comments:
The corpus looks different as well. It looks down in the old photos. Has it been changed or merely worn down?
I love the pendants - very byzantine - but I always thought that a metropolitan cross had to have a second horizontal crossbar. Or is that only the case in heraldry?
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