When soldiers have golden helmets and the wounded have wings

‘If I go to war, I go on condition I can have Giotto, the Basilica of Assisi book, Fra Angelico in one pocket, and Masaccio, Masolino and Giorgione in the other,’ Stanley Spencer wrote to the artist Henry Lamb in 1914. The sixpenny Gowans & Gray edition of the Masterpieces of Giotto now in a glass case in Somerset House’s exhibition Stanley Spencer: Heaven in a Hell of War is the one that travelled with him two years later to the Macedonian front, where its imagery fused with his memories of war. Although the idea of a fresco cycle of war paintings began incubating in Spencer’s mind in Salonika — ‘If I don’t do this on earth,’ he wrote to his sister Florence during a bout of malaria, ‘I’ll do it in Heaven’ — it wasn’t until 1927 that he was able to begin his visionary series of paintings for Sandham Memorial Chapel, 16 of which are temporarily billeted on Somerset House while the National Trust restores the building.

Incapable of looking on the dark side, Spencer infused his war paintings with images of resurrection

Washing Lockers by Stanley Spencer  on the south wall at Sandham Memorial Chapel, Burghclere, Hampshire

The dream of a chapel of one’s own to decorate was easier to realise in Giotto’s day than Spencer’s, but Spencer got lucky.