The Variety of Carving found in Bible-boxes.—We give a series of illustrations indicating some of the interesting details of carving to be found on such boxes, where, as in work intended for a treasure-chest to preserve a sacred book, considerable zeal has gone to the elaboration of ornament. These seventeenth-century relics of a wave of religious enthusiasm are the crude Puritan likenesses, belonging to a less innately artistic race, of the tabernacles and ivory carved Madonnas and saints of the Italian renaissance. They both, though poles asunder in realisation, represent the instinctive love of man for ornament in connection with his religious emotions. Savage races with another ritual produce religious and ceremonial woodcarving representative of their best. Here, then, is the Puritan craftsmanship, mainly of provincial origin and found scattered over various parts of the country, following motifs executed by the same hands as Jacobean chairs and dressers, but bearing rich touches of ornament, betraying much originality, within the limited scope of Jacobean design.
The carving has nothing of the humour or strong bold relief of the miserere seats of the palmy days of the woodcarver in the fifteenth and early sixteenth century in details that might well have been applied to the Bible-box. The ambition of the Puritan woodcarver never reached figure-work, or he might have represented Biblical scenes if his abhorrence of graven images had not demoralised his fancy. Some of the early boxes have bold carving. We illustrate a fine example (p. [143]) of the time of James I., about 1600. The design is floral, which embodies the well-known conventional rose. Illustrated on the same page is another carved box of unusual pattern with floriated design. It was a frequent practice to treat the front of the box as though it were continuous and the pattern leaves off at the ends much in the same manner as modern wallpaper. In the box above it will be seen that the front is panelled and the design is confined to the circumscribed area.
CARVED OAK BIBLE-BOX. FINE EXAMPLE. TIME OF JAMES I. ABOUT 1600.
Length, 2 ft. 4 ins.; width, 1 ft. 4 ins.; height, 11-1/2 ins.
CARVED BIBLE-BOX OF UNUSUAL PATTERN.
(By the courtesy of Messrs. Phillips, Hitchin.)