3D Model of North Grimston Baptismal Font

This is a 3D model created with Agisoft PhotoScan of the early medieval baptismal font at St. Nicholas' Church in northern England. Described by Nikolaus Pevsner in 1972 as “a mighty and barbaric piece,” the baptismal font at North Grimston (East Yorkshire) dominates the nave of its contemporary early 12th-century church. The drum of North Grimston has a cable molded rim and a series of Christian scenes within an arcade: Christ’s Descent from the Cross, the Last Supper with Christ enthroned, a geometric panel, and an ecclesiastical figure commonly attributed as St Nicholas after the medieval dedication of the church. The sheer size of the North Grimston font—nearly a metre in diameter—advertised the expense of quarrying and transporting the calcareous grit (fine-grained sandstone) from appropriately sized beds in North Yorkshire. The 3D model of the baptismal font allows us to visualize the way early medieval men and women would have interacted with the font in the small size of the church nave, and to analyze its devotional iconography.