This incredible bronze sculpture of St Michael’s Victory over the Devil, by Jacob Epstein is on the east wall of the new Coventry Cathedral. St Michael’s Cathedral is ‘new’ in the sense that it was built after the second world war to replace the older cathedral which had been bombed. The new cathedral was designed by Basil Spence, knighted for this work; the foundation stone was laid in 1956 and the building consecrated six years later.
St Michael is described in the Bible as the archangel who fights against Satan in the Book of Revelations, and flings him out of heaven. The symbolism is obvious… beside the new cathedral stands the ruins of the older building, left in situ as a reminder of the suffering caused by war.
Sir Jacob Epstein who made the sculpture, was born in America in 1880, but he moved to Britain and became a British citizen before the 1st World War; he actually served in the Royal Fusiliers, in what was known as the Jewish Legion. When he created this sculpture, for the new cathedral, replacing the one which had been destroyed by German bombs, it must have been very much on his mind that the war which had been won was a victory over the evil of Nazism, the vile regime which had sent millions upon millions of Jewish people and others to their deaths. 
Sadly, Epstein died in 1959, at the age of seventy-nine, before he saw his sculpture mounted so magnificently on the wall of St Michael’s Cathedral.
Lois Elsden 