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ART 503
(an early instance of it), and the crosses show in their figures
also an increasing sense of curving rhythms. They have a sway/
ing motion, the head slightly bent in a contrary movement to
the hips; the drapery is flatly treated but is edged with small,
crumpled folds. The Virgin and Child in the York chapter/
house, though sadly mutilated, shows this mannered charm of
the first q uarter ofthe century. Tomb effigies have again survived
more plentifully, and have in the female figures the same smooth
falling garments, though the recumbent attitude presents a
more rigid discipline. This in the male effigies was sometimes
avoided by the popular fashion of crossing the legs, so as to give
a coiling twist to the whole composition. On the knight's
tomb at Dorchester (Oxon.) the movement of legs, arms, and
head are conceived in a series of spirals, which give to it a
curiously modern, abstract appearance (PL I04&). A new
material was now coming into use, alabaster, which was to play
a conspicuous part in English carving ofthe later middle ages.
An early example is the effigy of Edward II at Gloucester,
placed on his tomb some time after his death, one of the un/
doubted masterpieces of the century, though curiously old/
fashioned in its stylized hair and beard and its sidelong glance
which recall the conventions ofthe St. Albans School. Above
the effigy rises a splendid canopy, and it is in these elaborate and
detailed works, and in the small/scale carving of bosses, that
fourteentlvcentury invention seems at its happiest. The Percy
tomb at Beverley (after 1339, possibly as late as the 6o's), still
wonderfully complete and sharply cut, is a marvellously in/
genious piece of pattern/making, and has a delicacy and ele/
gance almost at variance with the stone from which it is
wrought (PL 105). The small figures on it have a sureness of
touch in their execution, whereas much of the
large/scale
sculpture of the time, such as that on the west front of Exeter
(c. 1 340-80), has a gauche clumsiness. There is in fact much
that is
disappointing about English figure/carving as it has
come down to us from the last
quarter ofthe fourteenth and first
quarter of the fifteenth centuries. At a time when France was
realism and Glaus Sluter was
producing a new and vigorous