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508
MEDIEVAL ENGLAND
portioned. The artist had certainly seen some contemporary
Flemish work, but he still uses a conventionalized rocky ground
space, and the blue background, now much flaked, can never
have conveyed much spatial illusion. It is, however, distin^
guished work and if it represents an active school of painters
their output would have taken a worthy place in north-west
European art.
In the most notable surviving painted cycle ofthe second half
ofthe fifteenth
century,
the Eton chapel wall/paintings (1479-
83), Flemish influence is dominant. The artist was William
Baker, a good English name, but iconographically and stylis/
tically the frescoes are dependent on Burgundian manuscripts
of the Miracles of the Virgin, such as that which is now MS.
Douce 374 ^n ^ e Bodleian Library. Their grisaille treatment,
their full draperies and experiments in perspective are found
some years earlier in the illustrations to Thomas Chaundler's
Litter
Apologeticus, now in Trinity College, Cambridge.
One branch of Gothic art was peculiarly
associated with
England, that of embroidery. The Cuthbert stole shows an
early proficiency in the medium. It had been recorded as far
back as the Norman Conquest that Englishwomen were very
accomplished with the needle and the Bayeux Tapestry,
whether made in England or Normandy, may be taken as an
example of this type of skill. By the second half of the thir'
teenth century, English embroidery, opus angticanum, enjoyed
a wide continental repute. In the Vatican inventory of 1295 it
is mentioned 113 times. Many pieces, some ofthem papal gifts,
still survive on the Continent. One of the finest was the gift of
Clement V to St. Bertrand de Comminges, where the figure
scenes are set on a closely patterned ground. Some of them,
such as the education of the Virgin, have a delicacy of line,
which even in this material recalls contemporary works such
as the Douce Apocalypse. The Pienza cope, presented to the
cathedral by Pius IV in 1462, is probably work of the late
fourteenth or early fifteenth centuries, and is one of the most
magnificent of the surviving pieces. The better^known Syon
cope (in the Victoria and Albert Museum) cannot compare