A study day to be held next Saturday on the treasures of Cork University's Honan Chapel will forge a link with a time of extraordinary artistic activity in Ireland.
And it is fitting that the event - "The Craftsman's Honoured Hand" - will be opened by Dr Madoline O'Connell, daughter of the late coroner J.J. Hogan and his first wife, Mary. Dr O'Connell is also the grand-daughter of Sir Bertram Windle, president of Queen's College, Cork from 1904 to 1919. It was he who decided, with the solicitor Sir John O'Connell, to build and furnish a church for student use with the 1913 bequest of Isabella Honan.
The Honans were wealthy butter merchants in Cork for several generations, with Robert, Matthew and Isabella the family's last representatives. Isabella established the Honan Scholarships in 1909, and on her death left £40,000 to be used at the discretion of her executor, Sir John O'Connell.
Glorious windows
The Honan family is not commemorated prominently within the chapel which is its greatest legacy. The glories are the windows - 11 dramatic lights by Harry Clarke and eight from Sarah Purser's Dublin studio - and the mosaic flooring of the aisle and transept depicting biblical birds, beasts, flowers, rivers and fish. But Isabella's name, and those of her two brothers, appear on the sanctuary lamp.
This wondrous object is both massive and delicate, with each of its four pieces suspended on silver chains from handles fashioned as the heads of mythical birds and decorated in Celtic interlacing with enamel bosses. It carries a poignant inscription: "May this lamp ever burning on the altar of God in the Collegiate Chapel of St Finn Barr obtain eternal rest and peace for the souls of Matthew, Robert and Isabella Honan of this City of Cork, by whose charity and piety this chapel was built and this lamp was made. Requiescant in pace. Sir John Robert O'Connell, Doctor of Laws, ordered me to be made. William Alphonsus Scott, First Professor of Architecture of the National University of Ireland, designed me. Edmund Johnson of Dublin fashioned me AD 1916."
This legend is all the more poignant because, instead of "ever burning on the altar of God", the lamp has been stored in a large cardboard box in a vault under the corridors of UCC - having been found by the UCC archivist Virginia Teehan, while she was searching for Honan items dismissed from the re-ordered chapel before her time.
She was aware that the Honan chapel, designed by the Cork architects McMullen and Associates and completed in 1916, was first the showpiece and then the repository of the Celtic Revival in arts and crafts. Its design, fittings, ornamentation, sacred vessels and vestments were all conceived according to a single determining ideal: to unite ecclesiastical solemnity with a display of the very best of Irish craftsmanship, offering a counter-blast to Italianate trends.
Ceremonial chairs
The builders were Sisks, who also provided the oak pews and ceremonial chairs carved in Irish Romanesque. The Dun Emer Guild in Dublin created the larger altar-hangings and the sanctuary carpets. Egans of Cork made much of the silver altar plate; the enamelist Oswald Reeves made the tabernacle doors; and the tooled and jewelled bindings of the missal covers were by Eleanor Kelly. Joseph Tierney made the silver-framed altar-cards, which are mounted on oak inset with rock crystals.
The altar plate, the monstrance shaped like a flight of doves and the iron grilles were designed by William A. Scott, professor of architecture at UCD, who was also the restorer of Thoor Ballylee for W.B. Yeats. The silversmith Edmund Johnson designed the incense boat and stoup, ciborium, paten, custos and lunette, thurible and missal stand. All these, with altar bells and candlesticks of silver-gilt, are decorated with Celtic interlace openwork, with enamel bosses, peridot and amethyst, garnet and mother-of pearl.
The altar cloths are embroidered in silk with gold and silver metal threads on backgrounds of wool poplin; stoles and copes and chasubles match the entire liturgical year in suites of coloured vestments. Inside the linings are the names of the women in Egans of Cork and Dun Emer in Dublin who stitched them; the threaded litanies offer a reminder of what T.W.Rolleston called, in verses on the inauguration of the Arts and Crafts Society of Ireland in 1895, the holy hand of craftsmen and women working for a golden vision.
Cellars and attics
Yet for years most of these riches have been hidden from UCC, Cork and Ireland. The reforms of Vatican II permitted a radical removal of beautiful things once held sacred. Liturgically outdated, the redundant pieces of this marvellous collection were dispersed throughout cellars, attics and outbuildings and more or less forgotten - until Virginia Teehan and her colleague, textile restorer Elizabeth Wincott Heckett, unearthed and examined them, brought them to secure lodgings, sought further expert advice and produced an illustrated inventory, breathtaking in its scope.
Saturday's event will present aspects of the Honan legacy to the public, with speakers such as Dr Nicola Gordon Bowe of the National College of Art and Design and Dr Paul Larmour of Queen's University, Belfast. The hope is that this may help find the money to produce a fully researched and illustrated publication on the Honan treasury, and even to achieve a means of permanent display for it, now that its liturgical context has been abandoned.