The Old Curiosity Shop

Abstract

Like Hans Memlinc’s late fifteenth-century painted shrine of St Ursula at Bruges, The Old Curiosity Shop proclaims and celebrates the incidents which lead towards a pious death. The shrine incorporates scenes which represent events on St Ursula’s pilgrimage and the sequence culminates with a picture of her martyrdom by the pagan Huns; lunettes on the lid of the Gothic casket show her received into heaven by the Holy Trinity and rejoicing angels. While these scenes glorify the death of a virgin-martyr they also proclaim the vitality and witness of her life. Memlinc’s imagination, to some extent like Dickens’s, was fired by the variety, the detail and the colour of life, even a life shot through with suffering and death. The mediaeval artist, steeped in a long Christian tradition, saw nothing incongruous in celebrating holy dying as the consummation of holy living. To a modern observer, however, the representation of the decorous massacre of Ursula and her eleven thousand virgin companions is likely to appear improbable, even a little absurd, but the shrine, like The Old Curiosity Shop, has first to be appreciated with something of the spirit of the age which produced it before its imaginative power can sink in.