So, as announced yesterday, here is the first instalment of my Medieval Wall Painting News, covering reports from January to March 2014. Ok, technically speaking, the first item on the list is actually last year’s news, but it has continued to make the rounds all over the internet well into 2014, and in any case I believe it is important enough to be included here:

• In St Cadoc’s church, Llancarfan, Wales, a restoration campaign started in 2007 has revealed an important set of late 15^th-century wall paintings showing St. George Slaying the Dragon, the Seven Deadly Sins and Death and the Gallant. The paintings are remarkable both for their interesting moralizing iconography and for their state of preservation: While many medieval wall paintings in Britain have suffered from ill-considered restoration attempts of the 19^th and, especially, the mid-20^th century, the murals that have now come to light in Llancarfan have been spared such interventions.
  For a more detailed account see this entry on Ellie Pridgeon’s medievalwallpaintings blog (including a link to a short video on the discovery by the BBC) or go directly to the project website. As updates about the restoration have continued to arrive throughout the first half of 2014, there have been many more reports on a number of websites, online papers and social media, but I’ll just link to this recent piece by James A. Cameron which has the big advantage of being written by someone who has actually seen the paintings himself.

Detail of St. George, St Cadoc’s, Llancarfan (image by James A. Cameron)

• In Italy, local newspaper La Tribuna di Treviso reports (in Italian) on newly uncovered frescoes in the church of the Madonna dei Broli in Farra di Soligo (Veneto). Dating to the late 13^th or early 14^th century, they are now considered to be the earliest wall paintings to survive in the diocese of Vittorio Veneto. They show the Resurrection of Christ and several saints, one of whom may be St. Francis in conversation with the wolf of Gubbio. For more photos of the church see this page (which also suggests that a first phase of restoration already took place in 2012).

• Moving on to Germany, in Leipzig late 15^th/early 16^th-century murals from the cloister of the city’s former Dominican monastery have been made accessible to the public in the foyer of a university building, the so-called Neue Augusteum. The paintings had been saved when the cloister was demolished in the 19^th century, but they had been in storage ever since. Having been restored in 2005-2009, they have now been returned to their original location – the Neue Augusteum was built on the site of the Dominican monastery – where they can be viewed during the university’s regular opening hours. They depict scenes from the Bible, a Life of St. Catherine and a Genealogical Tree of the Dominican order. For more information (in German) and some glimpses of the paintings see here or here.

• Similarly good news arrive from Hungary where after 13 years of restoration works the palace chapel of Esztergom is finally open to visitors once more (for visitor information see here). While the chapel is already remarkable for its 12th-century architecture, to top things off it also has some of the finest 14th-century Italianate wall paintings in all of Central Europe. For more details see this post on Zsombor Jékely’s Medieval Hungary blog.

• Finally, a rather spectacular discovery has been made in Cyprus where researchers from the University of California were surprised to find a layer of asbestos in the 12^th-century wall paintings in the monastery of Enkleistra of St. Neophytos. While the use of asbestos since ancient times is well-documented, this is the first known instance of its use in wall painting or, in a wider sense, construction work, making this a highly important find not only for the history of art but also for the history of science and technology. It is not yet entirely clear why asbestos was applied in the murals at St. Neophytos at all, but the research team suggested it may have been added to give more shine to certain areas of the paintings.
  Needless to say, this piece of news was also widely reported on, but as so often perhaps the best summary is provided by The History Blog. Or you could of course just go and read the research team’s original paper which is available on academia.edu.