History, Frescoes and Reading the Middle Ages: A Final Note

It was 21 December 2003 when The Daily Telegraph announced that the Doom Fresco in Holy Trinity Church, Coventry, depicting the Last Judgement, was ready to be revealed after seventeen years of restoration work. That work involved removing varnish put over the Fresco by a local restorer in 1831 which had been intended to preserve the painting but instead had turned it black. Prior to this, the Doom Fresco had been covered over by Protestant reformers sometime in the 1560s. Along with many others, the Fresco had proved unacceptable to the reformers given its strong visual representation of Christ at the Last Judgement and its overt connection to Catholicism. Remarkably, the Fresco had survived the attempt to hide it as well as the unintended blackening of the 1831 restoration work and today is a fine example of its kind. The Fresco is usually dated somewhere around 1430.