These paintings, considered the best of their kind preserved from the late 13th century in France and which have close stylistic links with the court of Henry III, have been exposed in all their multicoloured splendour for the first time in more than 500 years.

However, the walls remain hidden behind panels in the cathedral of Angers, in western France.

The team of British art historians and conservators has worked for a decade to create the first full-colour image of the paintings of the life and miracles of St Maurille, a 5th-century bishop of Angers whose relics were kept on a silver altar in the cathedral, the source said.

The image was created by digitally stitching together more than eight thousand photographs of the curved walls, taken in the basement behind panels that could not be removed because they form part of the choir stalls. These thousands of team photographs, distorted by access problems and the curvature of the wall, were then digitally stitched together to form a coherent whole by Chris Titmus of the Hamilton Kerr Institute in Cambridge, a job that took years.

The project, funded by a grant from the John Fell Fund, was published in the most current issue of the Bulletin of the Hamilton Kerr Institute (November 2024). The legend of Bishop Maurille tells how he blessed a barren woman who gave birth, but did not intervene when the child died.

Penitent, he threw away the keys to his church which were providentially swallowed by a fish, and sailed to England where he worked for the king as a gardener until the fish and keys were miraculously served at a banquet.

With his identity revealed, he returned to Angers to bless the child who rose from the dead and became St. René, whose supposed relics were also in the cathedral (his story is now believed to be entirely fabricated).

The paintings emphasize the cross-Channel journeys to England. The Angers region was the original power base of the Plantagenets, who ruled England for centuries until Richard III was killed at the Battle of Bosworth.

The scientific team dates the paintings to around 1270 and believes they may have been commissioned by Isabella the White, half-sister of the Englishman Henry III, or by her son Maurice, who may have been raised in part at Henry’s court.

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