Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland: carvings, legends and modern theories
Founded in 1446 by William Sinclair, Rosslyn Chapel is rich in carvings: the Apprentice Pillar, the green men and theories about Templars and the Grail.
A few kilometres from Edinburgh, in the village of Roslin, stands a small Gothic church whose walls seem not to have a single centimetre left bare. Leaves, dragons, musician angels, biblical figures and human faces crowned with vegetation climb across columns, arches and vaults. Rosslyn Chapel has become famous throughout the world for the esoteric theories surrounding it, but its documented history is already enough to make it extraordinary.
An unfinished collegiate church
The chapel was founded in 1446 by William Sinclair, Earl of Orkney and later of Caithness, as a collegiate church dedicated to Saint Matthew, where a group of priests would celebrate masses for the family. The original plan probably envisaged a larger, cruciform church, but only the choir was built. After the Protestant Reformation of 1560 Catholic worship ceased and the building went through periods of neglect and damage.
In the nineteenth century the chapel was restored and returned to worship in the Scottish Episcopal Church, to which it still belongs. Romanticism had already discovered it: poets, painters and travellers, among them Walter Scott, had celebrated its melancholy beauty, and Queen Victoria visited it in 1842. In recent decades a long restoration has consolidated the stones, threatened by damp and by earlier, less fortunate interventions.
The Apprentice Pillar
The most famous column is the so-called Apprentice Pillar, wrapped in spirals of foliage carved with great virtuosity. A local legend, attested at least from the eighteenth century, tells that the master mason, having gone away to study a model, found on his return that the column had already been carved by his apprentice and, blinded by envy, killed him with a blow of his mallet. A head with a wound on the forehead, in a corner of the chapel, is pointed out as that of the apprentice.
The story has parallels in other European churches, where similar tales are told of jealous masters and gifted pupils, and it is regarded as a traditional tale rather than a historical fact. It has, however, enjoyed great success in Masonic culture, which has seen in it an echo of the legend of Hiram, the architect of Solomon's Temple killed by his companions.
Green men, Templars and the Grail
More than a hundred green men have been counted in the chapel, faces from which leaves and branches sprout, a motif widespread in European Gothic art and linked to the idea of regeneration. Some carvings have been interpreted as ears of maize, an American plant that could not have been known in Europe before Columbus; most scholars, however, consider them stylised plant motifs.
In the twentieth century the chapel was associated with the Templars, Freemasonry and even the Holy Grail, supposedly hidden there. These hypotheses arose from popular books and find no support in the sources: the Templar order had been suppressed in 1312, more than a century before the foundation. The novel The Da Vinci Code, published in 2003, then multiplied the number of visitors.
Stripped of the most fanciful theories, Rosslyn Chapel remains a masterpiece of late Gothic Scottish sculpture, a place where the devotion of a noble family was translated into a forest of stone peopled with angels, prophets and plant creatures. The legends are part of its history and have secured its fame, provided they are recognised for what they are: tales born around an exceptional building.