Some English medieval alabaster carvings in Italy

Abstract

There are, or at least are known formerly to have been, in Italy a somewhat surprising number of alabaster carvings produced in medieval England, some of them in their original gaily-painted frameworks, in churches or in museums; others, detached from their initial wooden supports and now more or less isolated, preserved in public museums or in private collections. How and when these carvings came to be in Italy would seem to have remained as yet almost uninvestigated, although examination of contemporary archives concerned with Italian churches in which English alabasters exist, or from which it is known that they have been removed, might well bring to light information of signal importance to historians of the once vigorous English alabaster industry. Despite the abundance of surviving English alabaster carvings—they may well number some thousands—it is to only a minute percentage of them that we are able to assign with reasonable certainty a date more than broadly approximate; or, at least for those carved after about 1400, with more than moderate assurance the locality responsible for their production. Although records there are, some foreign but for the most part English, of matters connected with the English alabaster industry, co-ordination between individual carvings and the documentary evidence is almost completely lacking. While there is strong probability that some of the English alabasters in Italy reached there as refugees expelled from England, or smuggled out, because of the religious disturbances resulting from the English Reformation, it would appear correspondingly probable that many of them passed to Italy in the ordinary course of trade, as seems indeed to have been the case with the St. Peter and St. Paul, and their two accompanying alabaster carvings, cited infra. Most of the English alabasters still in Italy or recorded as having come from there are presumably attributable to the fifteenth century. I think it by no means unlikely that examination of Italian ecclesiastical records could in at least some cases inform us where those alabasters had been purchased, when and whence they were shipped, by or through whom they were presented, and perhaps of other matters of interest in connexion with the English alabaster industry.