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ART 511
It is in the Beauchamp chapel, referred to above, that Eng'
land's greatest fifteentlvcentury statue is to be found, the
recumbent bronze effigy of Richard Beauchamp, earl ofWar'
wick. In full plate armour, the earl lies with his head on his
helm; his eyes are open, gazing on the Virgin, carved in a
corbel above the east window; his hands are not folded in
prayer, but, apart, they seem to be welcoming the celestial
vision. The bronze is treated in smooth, broad planes, but
wrinkles and veins are clearly marked. In its finality and con/'
viction it rises above the English idiom as we know it elsewhere
into the company of European masterpieces (PL 107^). It was
cast by William Austen of London, and the wooden pattern
for it was commissioned from John Massingham. It is tempting
to see in Massingham a knowable artistic personality; he had
already been working for three years in the Beauchamp chapel,
and the carved figures of the window and the models for the
moving and expressive bronze weepers round the tomb are
probably his. Ten years earlier he had been working at All
Souls. Here only the general framework, reset with later
figures,
remains in position, but the statues of Henry VI and Arch'
bishop Chichele, which formerly stood above the main gate'
way, are preserved and, despite much weathering, can be seen
to be works of unusual ability; the cloaked, restricted figures,
adapted for narrow niches, are given movement and variety by
the slight but fall emphatic ofthe drapery.
The Warwick effigy stands by itself, the climax ofour bronze
figures, till, some sixty years later, the Italian Pietro Torrigiano
(1472-1528) designed the tomb of Henry VII and Elizabeth
of York and that of Lady Margaret Beaufort, using the old
Gothic convention ofrecumbent pose with joined hands raised
in prayer, but modelling the faces with a new truth to nature
and spreading the drapery in full, pliant folds, that belong to
the high renaissance in their luxuriant sense ofform. Between
Massingham and Torrigiano, however, many fine tombs were
produced, of which one must stand as an example, that of
Alice, duchess ofSuffolk, at Ewelme, cut in alabaster. She lies
under a canopy with a frieze of angels, crowned by standing
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