The Penn Stater Magazine

A Pleasant Surprise at the National Cathedral

June 4, 2009 at 6:45 pm Tina Hay 4 comments

The south portal of the National Cathedral, which turns out to have a Penn State connection. Click to enlarge.

It’s tough to get away from Penn State, I’ve found.

I drove down to Washington, D.C., yesterday for a magazine-publishing conference. The conference activities didn’t start until last evening, but I decided to go down early and do a little sightseeing before the conference.

My first stop was the National Cathedral, where my picture-taking of the stained glass inside was interrupted because a church service was about to start. So I went outside to get some exterior shots, and found myself at the south portal, which is what you see in the first photo, above.

Do you notice how, between the two doors, there’s a long slender sculpture? (If you click on the photo, you’ll get a bigger version where you can see it much more easily.) In architecture, a sculpture in that location is called a trumeau—a fact I learned from reading the cathedral’s Web site before the trip.

I got in a little closer to take some shots of that sculpture, among others. And then I saw something familiar. Check out the signature that I stumbled onto at the base of the trumeau.

It turns out that Heinz Warneke, sculptor of the Nittany Lion Shrine, did a little work for the National Cathedral as well.

Here’s a detail from the top of Warneke’s trumeau:

And here’s another detail from the same trumeau:

That discovery was fun enough, but then later, after I got to the hotel, turned on my laptop, and started poking around on the Web, I discovered that Warneke did more than just this trumeau. He also designed the entire scene above the two doors. In architectural terms, it’s called the tympanum, and this particular tympanum is titled Last Supper & Road to Emmaus.

Heinz Warneke's "Last Supper & Road to Emmaus."

So I looked through my photos to see if I had a shot of that, and it turns out I do—it’s the photo at right.

You can see a dozen more photos (not mine) of Warneke’s work on the south portal here.

From looking around on the Web, I learned that Warneke was born in Germany in 1895. He sculpted the Lion shrine for Penn State in 1942, of course, and did his work for the National Cathedral about 20 years after that—in the late 1950s/early 1960s. He died in 1983.

The sculpture "Prodigal Son" in the garden on the cathedral grounds.

Oh yeah, one more thing. Something else I photographed while waiting for the service inside to finish was the Bishop’s Garden on the cathedral grounds. I noticed a sculpture there, called Prodigal Son, but the light wasn’t quite right, so I didn’t take a close-up of it. I just got this one so-so shot you see here, a photo of the garden with Prodigal Son in the background.

You probably know where this is headed. Yup, when I was looking around on the Web later, I discovered that the sculptor who did Prodigal Son was none other than our man Warneke.

Tina Hay, editor

Entry filed under: University Park campus. Tags: "Last Supper & Road to Emmaus", "Prodigal Son", Bishop's Garden, famous sculptors, Heinz Warneke, National Cathedral, National Cathedral South Portal, Nittany Lion Shrine, sculpture, trumeau, tympanum.