The Gilded Monuments
English Church Monuments, 1510-1840. By Katharine A. Esdaile. (Batsford. 21s.) MRS. ARUNDELL ESDAILE has compiled a much-needed book. De- scribing her work as a sequel to Mr. Crossley's English Church Monuments she provides an authoritative survey of English tomb sculpture from the Tudor period to the marriage of Queen Victoria. Few people are so well qualified for this task. Besides her scholarly life of Roubiliac and her work on the Temple monuments, Mrs. Esdaile has shown her wide knowledge of post-Reformation English sculpture by many published articles. Her varied information is now gathered into this well-illustrated book : I say "gathered " because there is one notable defect in Mrs. Esdaile's method—an unhappy lack of order in the marshalling of her material. Art history is a subject in which the strictest adherence to chronology is vital, but Mrs. Esdaile (in an attempt at popularisation?) has chosen to divide her material vertically rather than horizontally—by "types," "influ- ences" and " subjects " (e.g., Children, Antiquaries, Men of Letters). Perhaps aware of this defect, the publishers have engaged Mr. Sacheverell Sitwell to contribute a long and urbane introductory essay. In this he discusses English monumental sculpture chrono- logically and relates it, where this is feasible, to the funeral monu- ments of Italy and France.
This comment registered, there can be nothing but praise for Mrs. Esdaile's work. Mediaeval English tomb-figures today re- ceive due public recognition as works of art ; and in the past year Londoners have had their first opportunity for many hundred years of a close-up view of the gilt-bronze kings and queens from West- minster Abbey, back from safe keeping in the country and now shimmeringly clean. These Westminster figures, and with them such famous effigies as that of the Black Prince at Canterbury, are established in the public mind. But our multitudes of marble, stone and alabaster figures of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—lying, kneeling, sitting, standing according to the sculptural idiom of their day—are less well known. It is with these monu- ments that the present book deals. Mrs. Esdaile approaches her subject with the zeal of Agnes Strickland. She has traced the Stone quarries and studied the costs of moving newly finished tombs to their destinations (up the coast to Boston by sea, or bumping in a cavalcade of carts along the country roads). She has visited in- numerable churches and examined many thousand monuments. She has investigated sculptors' and masons' account books and studied their patrons' orders and wills. She has made more than one important discovery, put names to forgotten sculptors and re- identified wrongly attributed work.
One of her chief objects in writing this book has been to restore to native English workmen monuments traditionally attributed to some famous foreign hand. I suspect that she would like to convince us that England has produced monuments that rank easily with the finest Renaissance or Baroque work upon the Continent. This begs the question, for, as Mr. Sitwell notes, English sculpture belonged in the Middle Ages to the main stream of mediaeval European art, but became with the Reformation markedly insular. For a hundred and fifty years after the death of Henry VIII English sculptors
and masons reared tombs that were stately and romantic, showy and surprising ; but seldom beautiful and almost always naive and provincial in atmosphere and execution. The few Continental sculp- tors working here just before the Reformation left little mark. Mrs. Esdaile likes to see the hand of some of Torregiano's English under- lings in the Howard tombs at Framlingham and the terra-cotta monu- ments at Layer Marney. But the rigid bearded effigy of the second Duke of Norfolk at Framlingham is entirely mediaeval in concep- tion, far nearer to the Westminster Edward III than to the Torregiano Henry VII. How disconcerting, too, to think that such stylised tombs were contemporaneous with Michael Angelo. The illustrations in this book offer many such anomalies. Text and photographs-leave one feeling that the monumental masonry in English churches is primarily of historical rather than aesthetic interest, but within its own limitations this branch of English sculpture has a peculiar and power- ful charm. Mrs. Esdaile's readers will find this charm enhanced and even explained by her comprehensive and conscientious book.
JAMES POPE-HENNESSY.
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