I am super thankful to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for inviting me to tour the newly renovated Manti Temple, one of Mormonism’s most historic and beautiful buildings. I’ve been to the building before, but only outside, since LDS temples are generally not open to the public. Between the renovation and rededication, the church held a public open house, and it was amazing to get to finally go inside.
There are other temples that are older, temples that were the sites of more important historical events, and temples that are more architecturally significant, but what makes the Manti Temple so special is that its original layout—including three rooms with spectacular murals—have been preserved. All the other buildings of its era have been heavily renovated, and the murals were stripped from the two other nineteenth-century Utah temples that originally featured them. They were very nearly destroyed in Manti, as well, saved only after a massive public outcry encouraged the LDS Church to reconsider its plan to gut the temple and instead build a newer, more accessible temple nearby in Ephraim.
Seeing the murals in person was breathtaking. I respected the church’s request to not take photos, but this article in their newsroom has some great images if you’re interested. The “Creation Room” was painted by C.C.A. Christensen, a Danish immigrant who lived in Sanpete Valley (and is buried just up the highway in Ephraim). He wasn’t as well-known in nineteenth-century Utah outside his home region, but in the last fifty years, he has become the most beloved “pioneer” era painter among modern Latter-day Saints. His style lacks the polish of more academically trained artists of his day, but it would be hard to imagine a more earnest painter. His imaginative vision of the earth’s creation is striking—my favorite detail is the grey globe emerging out of a field of clouds on the left half of the front of the room. It reminds me a bit of the front panels of Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights.
It’s probably no surprise that the Garden of Eden in the next room in the Manti Temple, however, is nothing like Bosch’s. The style is nothing like Christensen’s either. Although he and Salt Lake City artist Danquart Weggeland painted murals in the next two rooms in the temple, the Garden Room and the World Room, they had deteriorated by the 1940s when the temple underwent an earlier restoration, so they were removed and replaced with new work. The mural in the Garden Room gets overlooked between the more famous examples on either side, but it is lovely work by a pair of underappreciated Mormon artists, Joseph Everett and Robert Shepherd. I like the pastel hues and blocky geometric forms in the Garden Room—seems like a mashup of Art Deco + hints of the golden age of American Illustration.
The most famous mural by far is in the third room, the World Room. It was painted by Minerva Teichert, a woman from Cokeville, Wyoming, with an incredible life story. She managed to get to New York to train at the Art Students League with Robert Henri, then headed back to small town Wyoming where she maintained a professional art practice at the same time as she raised a family and ran a farm.
Her vision for the World Room starts on the back wall with the separation of humanity at the Tower of Babel, then progresses along each of the side walls with a roughly-chronological procession of a wide variety of historical cultures all moving toward the front of the room, where a Native American figure with outstretched arms welcomes them to the culmination of history in the American New Jerusalem. The city at the top looks a lot like Salt Lake but also sort of like Manti—but it was actually not based on a specific location. Nonetheless, Teichert imagined the City of Zion very much in the model of the cities that her pioneer ancestors had helped to found in the West. Doris Dant’s article is a great reference on the mural if you’re interested in learning more. The mural reflects the perspectives of the era in which it was created, in its ethnically stereotyped figures that contemporary viewers will find outdated, and in its uncritical interpretation of Western colonization as the fulfilment of divinely-appointed destiny. As much as her art is beloved among LDS audiences today, the Manti Temple project was her only commission for an LDS temple. Many of her contemporaries found her freely-handled painterly style off-putting, and church leaders preferred a more commercial-feeling, slicker modern style to her expressive modernism.
It’s a shame that it came too late for her to enjoy during her lifetime, but in the last few decades, she has become one of the best recognized and most-collected Mormon artists ever. Even though it doesn’t have anywhere near the length of history as Christensen’s, it was the thought of losing Teichert’s mural that drove the grassroots effort to save the Manti Temple from a destructive renovation.
The other amazing thing about the Manti Temple is its location, which you don’t have to go inside to appreciate. Visiting the Salt Lake Temple and then going to like Manti is sort of like visiting St. Paul’s Cathedral in London and then going to Salisbury. Since it was finished in 1893, the Salt Lake Temple has gradually diminished as a part of the city’s skyline. It is an imposing building from directly below, but among twenty- to thirty-story office towers, it fails to make the same impression it did when first completed. Wikipedia says it’s currently the twenty-sixth tallest building in Salt Lake City, fyi. Manti, however, is still a small town in a remote high-desert valley without any other structure that even comes close to competing with the temple. Not only are its 180-foot towers vastly taller than any building in the area—its site along the top of a hill on the north end of the town makes it even more prominent. On the highway down from Ephraim, you can see it from miles away. It gives you a very clear feeling, I think, just how much it meant to the people who built it.