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Some English medieval alabaster carvings in Italy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 November 2011

W. L. Hildburgh
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Extract

There are, or at least are known formerly to have been, in Italy a somewhat surprising number of alabaster carvings produced in medieval England, some of them in their original gaily-painted frameworks, in churches or in museums; others, detached from their initial wooden supports and now more or less isolated, preserved in public museums or in private collections. How and when these carvings came to be in Italy would seem to have remained as yet almost uninvestigated, although examination of contemporary archives concerned with Italian churches in which English alabasters exist, or from which it is known that they have been removed, might well bring to light information of signal importance to historians of the once vigorous English alabaster industry. Despite the abundance of surviving English alabaster carvings—they may well number some thousands—it is to only a minute percentage of them that we are able to assign with reasonable certainty a date more than broadly approximate; or, at least for those carved after about 1400, with more than moderate assurance the locality responsible for their production. Although records there are, some foreign but for the most part English, of matters connected with the English alabaster industry, co-ordination between individual carvings and the documentary evidence is almost completely lacking. While there is strong probability that some of the English alabasters in Italy reached there as refugees expelled from England, or smuggled out, because of the religious disturbances resulting from the English Reformation, it would appear correspondingly probable that many of them passed to Italy in the ordinary course of trade, as seems indeed to have been the case with the St. Peter and St. Paul, and their two accompanying alabaster carvings, cited infra. Most of the English alabasters still in Italy or recorded as having come from there are presumably attributable to the fifteenth century. I think it by no means unlikely that examination of Italian ecclesiastical records could in at least some cases inform us where those alabasters had been purchased, when and whence they were shipped, by or through whom they were presented, and perhaps of other matters of interest in connexion with the English alabaster industry.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Antiquaries Journal , Volume 35 , Issue 3-4 , October 1955 , pp. 182 - 186
Copyright
Copyright © The Society of Antiquaries of London 1955

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References

page 182 note 1 Cf. Illustrated Catalogue English Medieval Alabaster Work, 1910, Society of Antiquaries of London, 1910.Google Scholar

page 182 note 2 Papini, R., ‘Politicci d'Alabastro’, in L'Arte, xiii, 202–13.Google Scholar

page 182 note 3 Also in Illustrated Cat., cit., pl. I.

page 183 note 1 Reproduced also by Nelson, in Archaeol. Journ. LXXIV (1917), pl. XII.Google Scholar

page 183 note 2 Cf. Nelson, , in Archaeol. Journ. LXXXIII (1929), 33 f.Google Scholar

page 183 note 3 Cf. ‘Tre sculture inglese … a Milano’, in Rassegna d'Arte, XII (1912), 160 f.Google Scholar

page 183 note 4 Reproduced by Biver, P., in Archaeol. Journ. LXVII (1910), pl. 2Google Scholar; and by Nelson, , in Trans. Hist. Soc. Lanes, and Ches. LXXII (1920), pl. facing p. 52.Google Scholar

page 183 note 5 Cf. short note, accompanied by two plates, by Stefano Bottari, ‘Un alabastro inglese nel Museo Civico di Catania’, in Siculorum Gymnasium, (University di Catania), January-June, 1949.

page 183 note 6 From neg. 5564, Soprintendenza alle Gallerie di Napoli; reproduced by courtesy of that bureau and of the Superintendent of Monuments and Galleries for Campania. I owe my notice of this, and the therewith accompanying information, to our Fellow J. B. Ward Perkins, Director of the British School at Rome.

page 183 note 7 Cf. Sculture lignee nella Campania: Catalogo della Mostra, by P. Bologna and R. Causa, with preface by B. Molajoli, Naples, 1950. Fig. 20, accompanying the relative text, reproduces the tables of the ‘Assumption’, the ‘Coronation’, and ‘St. James’.

page 184 note 1 Cf. ‘Iconographical Peculiarities in English Medieval Alabaster Carvings’, in Folk-Lore, xliv (1933), pp. 130 ff.Google Scholar

page 184 note 2 An altarpiece formerly—but, I have been told, no longer—at Avilés, in Spain (cf Antiq. Journ. xxiv (1944), pl. xi and pp. 31 ff.) is as a whole closely similar to the Majori one, having the same scenes, with (except in the, both at Majori and at Avilés, unusual presentation of the ‘Adoration of the Kings’) the participants arranged in the same ways, with the same form of headings (cf. infra), and with the same inscriptions, in virtually identical lettering, painted below the tables. The Avilés altarpiece has, however, ‘St. Catherine’ at the beginning, instead of the Majori ‘St. Margaret’, and ‘St. Margaret’ at the end instead of the Majori ‘St. James’.Google Scholar

page 184 note 3 The Ass is similarly portrayed in a ‘Nativity’ table at Daroca, in Spain; cf. Hildburgh, in J.B.A.A., 3rd Ser., xvii (1954), pl. V a and p. 12.Google Scholar Also in an embattled ‘Nativity’ in the Los Angeles County Museum (cf Valentiner, W. R., Gothic and Renaissance Sculpture … Los Angeles County Museum, Los Angeles, 1951Google Scholar, no. 16; and The Connoisseur, CXXX (1955), p. 10, and pp. 108 f.).Google Scholar

page 184 note 4 Papini, ‘Pohticci d'Alabastro’, fig. 2.

page 184 note 5 Prior, E. S. and Gardner, Arthur, Medieval Figure-Sculpture in England, Cambridge, 1912, fig. 579.Google Scholar

page 184 note 6 Cf n. 2 supra.

page 184 note 7 Maceron, L., Le retable d'Ecaquelon, Paris, 1947, giving many photographs of details; Biver, op. cit., pi. III, 3; Nelson, in Trans. Hist. Soc. Lanes, and Ches. lxxii, pl. facing p. 50.Google Scholar

page 184 note 8 Biver, loc. cit., pls. V, VI; Nelson, loc. cit., pl. facing p. 55.

page 184 note 9 Antiq. Journ. VI (1926), pls. XLII, XLIII.Google Scholar

page 184 note 10 Nelson, in Archaeol. Journ. lxxvii (1920), pls. IV, 2 and VI, 1.Google Scholar

page 184 note 11 Cf p. 183 supra.

page 184 note 12 The two-tiered reredos at La Celle (Prior and Gardner, op. cit., fig. 537; Illustrated Cat., cit., fig. 16) has headings only slightly different.

page 185 note 1 Cf. Weinberger, M., The George Grey Barnard Collection, New York, 1941, pl. XXXI, nos. 108, 107.Google Scholar

page 185 note 2 From photographs obtained for me by Mr. John Pope-Hennessey. Reproductions also in S. Ortolani's S. Croce in Gerusalemme (in the Series ‘Le chiese di Roma’), Rome, fig. 16; and in Ulrich Middeldorf's ‘Two English Alabaster Statuettes in Rome’, in Art in America, XVI (1927–1928), 201.Google Scholar

page 185 note 3 Of the contemporary alabaster images of analogous dimensions, a goodly proportion, however, had the details of their eyes carved naturahstically.

page 185 note 4 Cf Burlington Magazine, XLIV (1925), 307 ff.Google Scholar; Art Bulletin, XXXII (1950), pp. 18 f andfigs.23–26.Google Scholar

page 185 note 1 Cf. Rymer, , Foedera, A.D. 1382. An. 5, Richard II.Google Scholar

page 185 note 2 Cf. Ortolani, op. cit., p. 16.