Westminster Retable

"[4] In 1998 the Hamilton Kerr Institute in Cambridge, with support from the Getty Foundation and the National Heritage Lottery Fund, began a six-year project to clean and conserve what remained of the work.

[1] The retable is divided into five sections by gilded wooden arcading,[6] with pastiglia relief work, elaborate glass inlays, inset semi-precious stones and paste gemstones, to imitate the lavish goldsmith's metalwork found on some surviving retables and shrines on the Continent, and the now destroyed Shrine of Edward the Confessor installed in the Abbey in 1269.

To the sides are two sections each with four small medallions containing depictions of the Miracles of Christ, those to the right missing completely and those to the left showing the raising of Jairus' daughter, the healing of the blind man, the feeding of the 5,000 and another subject, too defaced to identify.

[9] After the Benedictine abbey was dissolved in 1540, the retable panel was made into the lid of a chest, with the main painted side facing down, that was used to store wax funeral effigies of English monarchs.

The Retable was discovered by George Vertue in 1725, but in 1778 serious damage was caused when the chest was modified into a cupboard or display case to show the funeral effigy of Pitt the Elder.

[14] In 1858, watercolours of the Retable were made for the Society of Antiquaries of London; a conjectural restoration was included in Viollet-le-Duc's Dictionnaire raisonné du mobilier français,[15] and plates accompanied William Burges's essays, published in 1863, on painted objects at Westminster Abbey.