Tap … tap … tap … tap.
Using a mallet and chisel — and techniques that would be instantly familiar to masons working centuries ago — Freya de Lisle put the finishing touches on a wedding cakelike piece of stonework for York Minster, the enormous Gothic cathedral that has dominated this medieval city in northern England for centuries.
A former art history student who wanted to work with her hands, Ms. de Lisle, 28, is one of the minster’s seven full-time stonemasons who, together with four apprentices, maintain, restore and sometimes replace the worn-out stonework on the historic Anglican church. “We try to the best of our ability to replace like for like,” she said. “Enormous amounts of research and a lot of painstaking work goes into everything we do here.
“This is one of the world’s great cathedrals so we have a huge responsibility to get things right.”
The piece she was creating — a multicrocketed bud finial, to use its formal architectural designation — would eventually replace a worn one on an elaborate pinnacle high on the cathedral’s exterior, impossible to see from street level but still faithful to the original. It can take weeks to carve one of these finials and months to carve what is called a grotesque — one of the hundreds of demons, dragons, kings, saints, leering faces and fabulous creatures that decorate the structure.
“The first question everyone asks when they hear about our work,” Ms. de Lisle said with a laugh, “is what happens if just when you get to the end, you chip off the wrong piece?”
The short answer was that it did not happen, she added, or at least that it happened very rarely, and even then, the problem is more likely to be a hidden fault line in the stone than a slip of a chisel.
The post As the Elements Erode a Cathedral, Masons Replace Its Stones appeared first on New York Times.
