No carver with a healthy ambition can long continue to make designs and produce them in wood without feeling intensely the want of some architectural occasion for his efforts. Had he only a barge-board to carve, or the canopy of a porch, it would be such a relief to turn to its large and general treatment after a course of the panels and ornaments peculiar to domestic furniture. Look, for instance, at the carved beams of the aisle roof in Mildenhall Church given in Plate III, and think what a fund of powerful suggestion lay in the bare timbers before they were embellished by the carver with lion, dragon, and knight. Even the carpenter became inspired with a desire to make something ornamental of his own department, and has shaped and carved (literally carved) his timbers into graceful moldings. Then, again, in the roof of Sall Church, Norfolk, shown in Plate IV, you have a noble piece of carpentry which is as much the work of an artist as the carved figures and tracery which adorn it—indeed it is all just as truly carved work as those figures, being chopped out of the solid oak with larger tools, ax and adze, so that one knows not which to admire most, carved angels or carved carpentry.
Plates XI and XII are details of the carvings which fill the spandrels of arch and gable in the choir stalls and screen at Winchester Cathedral. There are a great many of these panels similar in character but differing in design, some having figures, birds, or dragons worked among the foliage. They are comparatively shallow in relief, and this appears less than it really is owing to the fact that many parts of the carving dip down almost to the background, giving definite but not deep shadows. The main intention seems to have been to allow only enough shadow to secure the pattern, and then to emphasize this by means of a multitude of little illuminated masses. The leading lines run through the pattern as continuously as possible, but the surface of the leafage is divided up into numbers of little hills and hollows. The sides of these prominences catch and reflect light more readily than they produce shadow, so that it is possible to trace the pattern at a considerable distance by means of the lights alone. Unfortunately for all believers in the historical evidence of ancient handicrafts, this work was overhauled some half century ago, and in parts "restored." The old work has been imitated in the new with surprising cleverness, but for that, no one who has a clear sense of the true function of the carver's art, or of the historical value of its witness to past modes of life, will thank those who carried out the "restoration," so confusing is it to be unable to distinguish at a glance the old from the new, so depressing to find such laborious efforts wasted in pleasing a childish desire for uniformity of treatment when it could only be achieved at the cost of deception, and, I may add, so irritating to find oneself for a moment deceived into accepting one of the "restored" parts as genuine old work. To add to the deception, the whole of the old woodwork, as well as the new, was smeared over with a black stain in order the better to hide the difference of color in old and new wood, thus forever destroying its soft and natural color, as well as the texture of its surface, so dear to the wood-carver.
The fifteenth century in England was a period of great activity among wood-carvers, and many beautiful choir-screens were added about this time to the existing churches, all in the traditional Gothic manner, as the Renaissance influence was a full century at work in other countries before its power began seriously to affect the national style. The West of England (Somerset and Devon in particular) is rich in the remains of this late Gothic carving, some details of which are shown in the accompanying illustrations, Figs. 75, 76, 77.
Fig. 75.
Fig. 76.