Reassessing English Alabaster Carving: Medieval Sculpture and its Contexts PhD, University of East Anglia, Art History and World Art Studies December, 2018 Lloyd de Beer 1 Abstract Alabaster sculptures in the form of panels for altarpieces or free standing images were one of the most significant artistic outputs of late medieval England, but they remain poorly understood. They have, moreover, featured only rarely in wider art-historical studies of the later European Middle Ages. On one hand this is a historiographical predicament. For ideological and aesthetic reasons, English alabaster was quarantined; it was seen as an isolated and provincial phenomenon by a series of scholars writing from the late nineteenth century onwards. The narrow picture they formed has remained firmly in place. On the other hand the destructive consequences of the English Reformation continue to obscure our view. Many hundreds of panels are broken or dispersed as a result of sixteenth-century iconoclasm, and there is little surviving documentary evidence to identify who made them or where they were made for. The central aim of this thesis is to reassess English alabasters by exploring them in their proper European contexts. Chapter One sets the scene by outlining the status and significance of English alabaster carving after the Reformation. From here the discussion moves on in Chapters Two and Three to explore the production of altarpieces and free-standing sculptures. Chapter Four builds on this approach by reuniting a single altarpiece, before zooming out to address the trade, reception and functions of Continental prints and sculptures circulating between England and the Low Countries. This chapter demonstrates the complex interplay between printed and sculptural forms. Chapter Five looks at the post-medieval reception and reuse of English alabasters on the Continent, specifically in Denmark and Holland. By considering English alabaster sculpture in a broader European context, a new history of 2 the corpus and a new framework for understanding its status and significance is proposed. 3 Reassessing English Alabaster Carving: Medieval Sculpture and its Contexts Table of Contents Acknowledgments 5 Introduction: 7 Chapter 1: The Status and Significance of English Alabaster after the Reformation: Iconoclasm, Concealment and Rediscovery 38 Chapter 2: The Kettlebaston Altarpiece at the British Museum: Reconstruction, Iconography and Context 94 Chapter 3: English Alabaster Abroad I: Imitation or Invention? The British Museum Virgin and Child, and St George from Quejana 141 Chapter 4: The St Catherine Altarpiece from Lydiate Reunited: Patronage, Attribution and Environment 178 Chapter 5: English Alabaster Abroad II: Reframing English Alabasters in Denmark and Holland 222 Conclusion 273 Bibliography 280 List of Illustrations 326 4 Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisor Sandy Heslop who has been tireless in his support throughout the course of my PhD. I am immensely grateful to him. At the British Museum my research receieved the support of Roger Bland, Jill Cook, Joanne Dyer, J.D. Hill, Michael Lewis, Dora Thornton, Carl Heron, Lucia Pereira-Pardo, Tracey Sweek and Michele Hercules. My thanks to them and to all of my colleagues at the museum, especially Gaetano Ardito who helped arrange access to the alabasters at Santa Croce in Gerusalemme and Craig Williams who produced the drawings of the Kettlebaston alabasters. My research has been facilitated by an Arts and Humanities Research Council Collaborative Doctoral Award. Without this funding I would have been unable to undertake this project. I have additionally recieved support from the Henry Moore Institute which aided travel to France. Many other people have shared their time, expertise, and collections with me. In particular I should like to acknowledge the generosity of Naomi Speakman, Kim Woods, Nicholas and Jane Ferguson, Sir Paul Ruddock, Paul Williamson, Glyn Davies, Michaela Zöschg, James Robinson, Louise Dunning, Julian Luxford, Amy Jeffs, Alixe Bovey, Pierre-Yves le Pogam, Nicolas Hatot, Sylvie le Prince, Timothy Husband, Timothy Leese, Mark Blundell, Maeve Kennedy, Sam Fogg, Matthew Reeve, Alison Luchs, Emily Pegues, Eduardo Carrero, Meg Bernstein, Tom Nickson, Susie Nash, Mark Blundell, Fr Thomas Wood, Margit Thøfner, Jurica Matijevic, Jadranka Beresford-Peirse, Jeremy Warren, Michael Carter, James Cameron, Jessica Barker. Finally I thank Esther Chadwick, my family and all my friends. 5 Volume One: Text 6 Introduction: They know not alabasters who only alabasters know.1 Nigel Ramsay provided this tautological warning in his review of Francis Cheetham’s 1984 catalogue of medieval English alabaster sculpture at the Victoria and Albert Museum (hereafter the V&A).2 It was as much a personal indictment of Cheetham’s view of the material as it was a cover-all for the historiography of medieval English alabasters. What irked Ramsay about Cheetham’s catalogue was his seeming lack of awareness that the sculptures were part of a wider European context, mostly ignored by scholars working on English alabasters. They were presented in the catalogue as if they were originally produced in provincial isolation, which is strange given that they were traded across Europe during the Middle Ages. Stranger still, the V&A’s collection of English alabasters was primarily formed from collecting activity taking place across Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth century. Cheetham failed to discuss, at much length, Walter Leo Hildburgh, the major collector and donor of the vast majority of the V&A’s alabasters; a fascinating individual with a deep interest in English folklore.3 Why the alabasters were desired and how they might have functioned was beyond the scope of Cheetham’s catalogue. His project was one of collation and classification, organising the alabasters by type and arranging those types in a relatively vague chronological order. Cheetham went so far, Ramsay stated, as to break up whole, or partially complete altarpieces into iconographic groups which reduced the images to a simple typology. Readers of the catalogue are thus required to navigate complicated cross- 1 Nigel Ramsay, “Review: English Medieval Alabasters. With a Catalogue of the Collection in the Victoria and Albert Museum, by Francis Cheetham (Oxford: Phaidon-Christie's, 1984)”, The Antiquaries Journal, 66(2), 1986, 472-473. 2 Francis Cheetham, English Medieval Alabasters. With a Catalogue of the Collection in the Victoria and Albert Museum (Oxford: Phaidon-Christie's, 1984). 3 Catherine Oakes, “Dr Hildburgh and the English medieval alabaster”, Journal of the History of Collections, Volume 18, Issue 1, (1 June 2006), 71–83. 7 referencing to reunite the panels and make the altarpiece whole again. In effect, this makes any attempt to see beyond the iconography of the sculptures a difficult task. For Cheetham, each sculpture was practically the same as others in the corpus and the method by which they were presented in the publication worked to reinforce this premise. If the study of English alabasters in the 1980s was hampered by a decontextualized – or typological - approach, then it has yet to be rectified in any serious way. All of the most important sculptures remain poorly understood and there has been, as yet, little attempt to situate any of the many thousands of English alabasters within a wider European framework, which has been done for several groups of Continental sculpture made during the same period, roughly 1300 to 1550.4 This fact is reflected in the display of English alabaster sculpture in museums across Western Europe and the United States. Those with the largest collections: the V&A, the British Museum, the Burrell Collection, Nottingham Castle Museum, the Musée des Antiquités Rouen, the Musée de Cluny-Musée national du Moyen Âge, and the Musée du Louvre, all display their English alabasters in isolation, sometimes with very little 4 This list is not intended to be exhaustive but is produced to emphasise the range and depth of research into Continental altarpieces. For the Low Countries see: Lynn Jacobs, Early Netherlandish Carved Altarpieces, 1380-1550: Medieval Tastes and Mass Marketing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Brigitte d’Hainaut-Zveny, Miroirs du sacré: Les Retables sculptés à Bruxelles, XVe-XVIe siècles: Production, Formes et Usages (Bruxelles: CFC-Éditions, 2005); Kim Woods, Imported Images: Netherlandish Late Gothic Sculpture in England, c.1400-c.1550 (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2007). For France see: Pierre-Yves Le Pogam, Les Premiers Retables (XIIe-début du XVe siècle): une mise en scène du sacré (Paris: Musée du Louvre, 2009). For Italy see: Eve Borsook and Fiorella Superbi Gioffredi, Italian Altarpieces 1250-1550: Function and Design (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). For Spain see: Maeve O'Donnell, “The Castilian Altar in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries: a Material and Social History” (PhD thesis, the Courtauld Institute of Art, 2018). For Norway, see: Magne Malmanger, Laszlo Berczelly, and Signe Horn Fuglesang, Medieval Altar Frontals and Related Material: Papers from the Conference in Oslo 16th to 19th December 1989 (Rome: Giorgio Bretschneider, 1995). For a volume addressing the Pan-European popularity of altarpieces, see: Justin Kroesen and Victor Michael Schmidt, The altar and its environment, 1150-1400 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009). 8 information.5 Didactic labels at the Cluny simply state: “Panneaux de retables d'albâtre, Angleterre, XVe siècle”, and the situation is