The Resurrection Of The Stones.(enlivened photographs on ancient stone buildings)(Brief Article)(Illustration)

Across the face of England and Wales, ecclesiastical ruins lie scattered like dominoes, toppled in a power struggle between church and state. To obtain a divorce from Catherine of Aragon, Henry VIII broke with Rome and in 1534 declared himself "Supreme Head of the Church of England." Literally dismantling the opposition, while replenishing bankrupt royal coffers, between 1536 and 1540 Henry's agents seized several hundred monasteries and convents, systematically desecrating and plundering the properties in the name of the king. Most have been abandoned ever since; parts of others survive as parish churches. At the hands of photographer Berthold Steinhilber, the once-magnificent buildings are reborn in ghostly grandeur through a technique called "light painting." After studying a structure in the daytime, Steinhilber sets up his field camera. Just before dark, the "blue hour," he calls it, he opens the shutter. Then, carrying a single light powered by a car battery, he walks from choir to nave to steps and so on, illuminating each separately. The exposure time can be more than two hours, depending on the building's size. Some 40 positions were needed to make the photograph at left. As with a painting, says Steinhilber, you see only what its creator wants you to see.

At Byland Abbey, consecrated in North Yorkshire in 1177, rise the remains of one of the largest Cistercian churches in England. Founded in 1098 by Benedictine monks who disapproved of the relaxed practices at their abbey in France, the Cistercians vowed to live in isolation, supporting themselves by manual labor. Their architecture began with similar austerity, yet by the 13th century features such as the colorful floor tiles and vast rose window at Byland betrayed the wealth and worldliness that had overtaken the order.

In 1535, royal commissions assigned to inspect the religious houses, and assess their wealth, reported on the prodigious sexual activities of the monks and nuns in the lesser houses, and alleged that relics were fabricated to coax alms from pilgrims. Faced with such accounts, which now seem clearly contrived to sway public opinion, Parliament passed the ...