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Description: | A complete gilt copper alloy figure of St John the Evangelist. The figure stands upright upon a short triangular base. The spherical head is slightly bowed and moulded with a finely rendered bowl hairstyle composed of radiating incised lines from the crown to the fringe, but with no hole in the top of the head to accept a separately cast nimbus. The face has an impassive appearance - lentoid eyes set in deep eye sockets, the nose a flattened (possibly damaged) triangular projection, the mouth an incised slit and the ears, absent.
The figure is robed from neck to foot. The collar is a well-defined roll of cloth around the back of the neck that divides at the front and falls to the midriff. Between the collars an undergarment with a circular neck can be seen. The arms are both drastically foreshortened, possibly to do away with unnecessary undercuts, facilitating the casting of the figure in a simple two-piece mould? The left arm terminates in a bible; it has no indication of a hand. The face of the book is rendered with fine vertical lines representing pages and two incised transverse incised lines representing a clasp. This clasp, or the strap it would be attached to, is shown on the side of the arms with two short incised lines. The right arm terminates in a raised palm with a pronounced thumb and fingers indicated with short incised lines. From under the right arm the folded cloth of the robe falls away diagonally to the left arm and down to the feet. At the right knee the cloth tucks inwards to indicate the lower leg and falls across the foot, the pointed toe barely protruding. The left foot is not indicated directly but the folds of cloth are seen to fall across a hidden toe. The back of the figure is simpler. The shoulders are a broad curvaceous mass, the back a plain surface and from the hips to the heels the robes are indicated by gently curving incised lines falling straight down.
From the back, the graceful S- curve of the figure is fully appreciable. The S-curve was a stylistic convention of the ?Elegant Style? of High Gothic sculpture that had the desirable effect of energising sculptural mass in a peculiarly graceful and elegant manner. It is seen on virtually all free-standing sculptural figures, in all media, at this time. This figure is probably quite early in the very small surviving corpus of English gilt-bronze figures and is perhaps, a late 13th -early 14th century production?
An almost identical figure of St John was found at Marks Tey, Essex in xxxx and later acquired by Colchester Castle Museum. This figure and the Marks Tey example were reunited at a meeting there, and the similarity was striking. There is virtually no difference between them both. The head of the Marks Tey St John is more upright, but that is all. | Format: | text/html | License: | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ | Publisher: | The Portable Antiquities Scheme | Rights holder: | The Portable Antiquities Scheme | Subjects: | archaeology | Temporal: | 1250
1350 | Source: | Portable Antiquities | Identifier: | http://www.finds.org.uk/database/artefac... | Language: | en-GB | Format: | text/html | Go to resource |
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