After the medieval building had been reduced to a ruined shell by enemy bombing during the Second World War, architect Basil Spence wrote an account of the rebuilding of Coventry Cathedral. When talking about the design of the pulpit, he concluded that ‘the lectern had to have the traditional Eagle’. He then went on to say, ‘Elisabeth Frink, that gifted sculptress, was to my mind an obvious choice. She designed and carried out a magnificent bird which looks as if it had just settled here after a long flight’ (Spence 1962: 104). 

But why was the Eagle ‘traditional’?

The answer comes, in part, from Revelation 4:6–7, and the ‘four living creatures’ which echo those seen by Ezekiel in Ezekiel 1 and 10. In Against Heresies, written around 180 CE, Irenaeus interpreted them as representing the four Evangelists, and the Eagle was identified as John (Against Heresies 3.11.8).

John’s Gospel famously opens with the statement, ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’ (John 1:1). Although John mentions his namesake, John the Baptist, as one who ‘came…to bear witness to the light’ (John 1:7), the Evangelist too bears witness to the Word through his Gospel—and so it makes sense that his symbol, the Eagle, should bear the weight of the word.

Frink’s sculpture is thus a practical object, a vital piece of church furniture, as well as being a work of art. Spence’s realization that she was an ‘obvious choice’ to make the work acknowledged her early success—she was twenty-eight—but arose more specifically from her sculptures of tortured, angular birds, a series in which she captured something of her own experience of the war. On one occasion, she had narrowly avoided death when a German fighter machine-gunned the precise location where she and her friends had just been playing. As Frink herself said, ‘It’s to do with birds flying, planes crashing—big monstrous things flying, sometimes with a man in them’ (Spalding 2013: 12).

Frink’s lectern, however, is not one of these tortured, injured creatures, but, with its enormous wingspan—more than a metre—and the firm grasp of the talons, it is a creature that demands attention, and speaks with authority.

References

Porter, William. 2018. ‘Lot Essay: Dame Elisabeth Frink, R.A. (1930–1993) Eagle Lectern’, www.christies.com, available at https://www.christies.com/lot/lot-dame-elisabeth-frink-ra-1930-1993-eagle-lectern-6175152/ [accessed 10 September 2022]

Spalding, Julian. 2013. ‘Frink: Catching the Nature of Life’, in Elisabeth Frink: catalogue raisonné of sculpture 1947–93, ed. by Annette Ratuszniak (London: Lund Humphries), pp. 9–23

Spence, Basil. 1962. Phoenix at Coventry: The Building of a Cathedral (London: Geoffrey Bles)