Northumbrian crosses of the pre-Norman age / by W.G. Collingwood.

  • W. G. Collingwood
Date:
1927
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Northumbrian crosses of the pre-Norman age / by W.G. Collingwood. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    MELSONBY FIGURE 20 KIRKDALE f FIGURE 21 slab-cutting was a separate art with its own methods and traditions.* Of such depart¬ mental limitations we have plenty of evi¬ dence in the later middle ages, when a miniaturist, for example, was not allowed to paint large pictures and every craftsman had to£ stick to his last’. But it is impossible to crowd all the English slabs we have 31 reviewed into one early Columban peri¬ od; they cannot have been made before 664, when similar Irish forms go on to 994. Crossed slabs must have been in use concurrently with staff-roods and tall stone crosses throughout the whole pre- Norman age. In this connex¬ ion it remains only to mention a few graveslabs and re¬ cumbent monu¬ ments of Anglian ! and Anglo-Viking character. Many of them are short of the length of a normal man or woman, but the same can be said of the ordi¬ nary medieval grave-slab, and perhaps they werenot intend- | ed to seal the grave but only KJJ?KE>AXf7 j to lie on the top of the stones that actually covered it in. Much would depend on the means for getting a piece of stone large enough, and it FIGURE 22 *Any practical draughtsman who is familiar with the crosses knows that they were drawn free-hand on the stone before carving: e.g. a horizontal line very frequently curves a little, and in a pattern that allows it the member opposite the designer’s right hand is usually a little higher than it ought to be in strict symmetry. Cross-carvers did not lay out their detail geometrically. But slab-carvers did; they used rule and compass in all but the rudest kind of work.
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