ENGLAND SCULPTURE

The widespread destruction wreaked during the English Reformation, especially of monumental statuary and decoration, together with the conservatism prevailing in funerary sculpture and the production of alabaster reliefs, augment the difficulties in the study of the stylistic development of English sculpture at the close of the Middle Ages.
Largely exported to the Continent by the workshops of Nottingham or other towns, the overabundant production of small carved and painted alabaster panels, whether independent devotional images or elements of altarpieces, indeed became repetitive after the middle of the fifteenth century. Since the documents corresponding to extant works are often missing and since the sculptors consistently re—employed the same iconographic and stylistic formulas, the English alabasters are difficult to date accurately. But it is easy to recognize them thanks to their simplified, highly typical treatment—lean forms, stereotyped faces, crisp draperies—and their refined polychromy, which delicately brings nut the natural colour of the alabaster.
The large output of alabaster or stone tombs followed the general evolution of funerary art, adopting in particular the twin representation of tomb effigy and  withered corpse, the deceased reposing on the tombslab in all the paraphernalia of his earthly glory above the macabre image of his cadaver (tomb of John Fitzalan at Arundel or, at Ewelme, Oxfordshire, tomb of the Duchess Alice of Suffolk, who died in 1477). Inside the churches, the sculptured decoration consisted chiefly of rows of figures in stone sheltered by canopies on the chancel screens and in funeral chapels (chantries), built in large numbers in the late Middle Ages. The statues of English kings adorning the choir screen of Canterbury Cathedrat (1411—1427) have a quiet density scarcely enlivened by a few sinuous falls of drapery, also appearing, at mid—century, in the figures of angels and saints ornamenting the funeral chapel of Richard Beauehamp in the church of Sr Mary at Warwick. This style has been related to the activity of John Massingham, mentioned at Canterbury in 1436, at Oxford, where he was responsible for the decoration of All Souls College from 1438 to 1442, and in London in 1449. Several sculptures from the chapel of Henry V at Westminster Abbey (about 1441—1450) issue from a similar spirit but others, like the Angel and the Virgin of the Annunciation, clearly reveal the influence of painted or sculptured models from Brabant and Flanders by their physical types and conception of draperies with broken and hollowed folds.
But it was at the end of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the next, at the moment of the full flowering of artistic activity, that several sculptors are mentioned as coming from the Netherlands or Germany to work at the English court. Unfortunately, the teams collaborating on the rich decoration of the chapel of Henry VII at Westminster (I503-1512) remain anonymous. On all the walls unfolds a frieze of angels carrying armorial bearings placed above a row of statues. The energetic treatment and expressive force of these sculptures, which verge on dryness and stiffness in the least successful works, evoke in some aspects the art of the Lower Rhine at the end of the fifteenth century and recall the figures of the Divsnity School at Oxford (1481). This harshness, which also appears in stone tombs and in woodcarving—choir stalls, benches, beams, rood screens—is one of the characteristics of English production of the late Middle Ages, unreceptive to Italian novelties. The style of the Florentine master Pietro Torrigsani, summoned to build the tomb of King Henry VII (1512-1518), indeed  presents a complete contrast with the pieces from the Gothic workshops of London or regional centres, whose activity was suddenly broken off by the English Reformation in the 1540S.