 In this case study, we are concerned with English alabasters made in the Middle Ages, particularly beginning in the 14th century and continuing well into the 15th century. By the 15th century, the production of sculpted alabaster in England had almost become an industry and altarpieces like the one that you see here in Haddon Hall in Darbyshire were almost mass produced in the hundreds and they ended up in churches all over Europe. In Nottingham in England, a particularly fine grained type of gypsum alabaster could be found and it was quarried out pretty much in the 14th and 15th centuries and used in fairly small blocks like the ones that you see making up this altarpiece and you can see a detail on the right and these were carved and painted and shipped all over Europe to France and to Spain in particular also to the Netherlands and were really one of the primary medieval artistic exports at this time period. They oftentimes, these altarpieces, had sort of stock iconography so certain stories that would be told and this particular one for example shows kind of the the passion of Christ so it begins with his entry triumphally on a donkey into Jerusalem ends with his crucifixion death and resurrection and I'll show you those in the next slide. Here again in the Haddon Hall altarpiece I'm showing you two more of the alabaster plaques from that altarpiece and you can see on the left Christ being removed from the cross this is a subject matter commonly called the deposition from the cross and you can see that members of his group of friends and followers are using pliers to remove the nails so that he can be lifted down very carefully from the cross and then on the right we have one of the we have the very next scene in the sequence and this shows Christ being placed in the tomb and you can see in both of these the Virgin Mary is one of the the primary mourning figures as is Joseph of Arimathea whose grave was donated to house the the body of Christ in this scene of mourning too we can recognize Mary Magdalene she's the one who is kneeling at the base of the sarcophagus and she's holding her long hair and using it to wash Christ's wounds with her hair this is a reference to an earlier episode in the Gospels what I'd like you to notice is the fairly simple treatment of the figures they're fairly formulaically treated with pretty standardized faces and bodies and in fact we know that in the by the time we get into the 15th century you would actually have certain artists who specialized in certain scenes and so for an altarpiece like this you might actually have a group of different artists each one specializing in one or two particular scenes all working together to kind of knock this out as quickly as possible I also want you to notice the use of color in a way we come full circle with alabaster and also with with marble in that we started this course talking about pigments with ochre and lapis lazuli and here we're going to end by talking about at least to some degree sculptures that were painted and had color added to them and we have a tendency to think of sculpture is not having been colored but more and more the evidence is to the contrary and we know definitely from the survival of a great deal of color on these alabaster pieces that they were definitely painted in addition to the life and death of Christ alabaster pieces might also feature the life of the Virgin and the sorrows of the Virgin and so what we see here in a general view and a detail of one of these alabaster carvings is the Virgin Mary kneeling at a reading desk engaged in religious study and she is surprised by the entry of the angel Gabriel this is a scene of the annunciation and so Gabriel is the the sort of shortest figure to her left and there's a scroll that kind of scrolls around a lily flower so the lily is commonly associated with the Virgin Mary it's called a Madonna lily and the scroll is meant to represent the words that Gabriel will say to the Virgin Mary which are blessed are you among women for you will be the mother of God and then we have an additional reference to Mary's coming pregnancy in the upper left here and you can see this both in the general view and in the detail we have God the Father up in heaven making a gesture of blessing but also I want you to notice that there we have visible breath coming from his mouth and that breath then takes on the form of the dove of the Holy Spirit which is there to show that Mary is going to be filled with the Holy Spirit and actually become pregnant while still a virgin with the Christ child oftentimes we see in northern Renaissance art and sometimes also in Italian Renaissance art the dove of the Holy Spirit sort of entering the Virgin Mary's ear on a shaft of light or sometimes you see a little flying baby but there's always some way of kind of giving us some clue of what is happening in the annunciation you should notice that we have a again a very brightly colored work although here it's clear that a lot more color has been lost but you can see that Mary originally wore a very bright crimson gown it might have had an under painting in red ochre but seems like it probably also had a brighter more expensive possibly lead or mercury based red used on top and then she has a dark blue over cloak at least meant to be lapis lazuli whether it was actually painted in lapis or not I don't know that would be something for pigment analysis and then you can see there's the use of yellows which are very likely yellow ochre there's also some evidence that gilding was also used in this piece you can see sort of the cloth behind Mary's halo appears to have some dots of gold on it for example here are two particularly nicely made alabaster's both in the victoria and albert museum and they appear stylistically and also from their color and the way that they're painted to have come from the same altarpiece and what we're seeing on the left is kind of a representation of the holy trinity originally there would have been a dove of the holy spirit behind between the hands of God the father and then you see that he's sort of balancing Christ on the cross between his knees and also holding a little bundle in his hands that shows some of the blessed kind of being brought up into heaven so the message here has to do with the salvation of humanity through the intervention of Christ and his willingness to be sacrificed on our behalf on the cross and you can see those elongated angels carrying different instruments and holding up the cross and this would have been very rich richly painted you can see traces of some gold in the cloth behind the halo of God the father you can also see some gold on his crown which is quite elaborate but at the same time I'd like you to notice how extremely stylized this is and how sort of formulaic the figures of the angels are their poses everything is strictly symmetrical and so this would have adhered to sort of a regular pattern that this particular sculptor would have done on the right we have what is called a representation of the tree of Jesse and this is kind of a simplified way of showing the family tree of Christ so we have Jesse asleep having a dream and from him springs of vine which is a representation of Christ's ancestry and right above Jesse in the center you can see a crowned figure playing a harp that's King David and Christ is part of the house of David so right up above David's head in this representation we see the Virgin Mary with Christ on her lap and that's meant to give us sort of an abbreviated version of his lineage and what makes it clear that these two pieces probably came from the same altarpiece is if you look at the sort of flower decoration on the bases of both of them we have sort of that dark blue and then flowers made out of red and white dots that resemble each other very similar tone of red a similar degree of gilding that is powdered gold that would have been painted on so again these are the kind of things that were produced really in incredible numbers and I'm just going to show you a couple of other examples to sort of flesh out your picture of what these would look like here are a couple of alabaster pieces from what would have been a much larger representation of the last judgment so here what we're seeing are actually the sides of the blessed and the damned so on our left but this would be Christ's right up above this there would be a representation of God the Father in heaven or Christ in judgment and so on our left Christ right we see Saint Peter with his keys welcoming three smiling naked people into the gates of the heavenly Jerusalem they're going to heaven and you can see how their bodies are almost identically shown they're all in roughly the same prayerful pose two men and a whim on a woman there's probably a missing part that would show corpses rising from tombs perhaps just below this and then on the other side in the separate piece we see a couple of the dead here with a chain around their waist and that chain is being pulled by a green demon and they're all being pulled towards a hell mouth if you look the entire right side is made up of an enormous gaping mouth it's as if a large snake has unhinged its jaw and we actually have two sets of eyes and two noses if you take a look at the top and the bottom on this incredible gaping hell mouth and there's already one chain figure sort of inside praying for mercy I want to give you a closer look at the hell side of the last judgment because you can see again some really nice evidence of the original painted decoration the polychromy multicolored decoration here and that really vivid red that you can see in the incisions in the jacket of the demon here that's probably a a mercury based red a very hazardous pigment one that really is not produced today but it makes a very stable very bright red color and then you can see the green in the the ground here probably a mixture of an ochre maybe with a malachite and then the green also on the figure itself and also get a wonderful feel for that gaping hell mouth with its huge incisors and that figure kind of praying for mercy on the inside here's our very last example and this is one that I had a chance to examine in the Nashor Museum at Duke University and it shows Christ tied to a column and being flogged this is part of the tortures that occur prior to the crucifixion and he's surrounded by four grinning figures who are in the act of flailing him with with whips and there's lots and lots of gold left over visible on this piece you can see some of the red ground that was used beneath the gold oftentimes they would attach the gilding to kind of a red tinted wax in order to make it adhere the point I want to make is that since this alabaster was so abundant in the area around Nottingham and so easy to work it it was possible for medieval artists in this area to create sort of a cottage industry of relatively inexpensive altar pieces that could be made and shipped all over the place and we have many many examples of these from all over Europe there are fewer today in England and if you know anything about English history and Henry the 8th throwing out the Catholic Church you'll know that that occurred with the accompaniment of many images being destroyed and so there would have been widespread destruction of this material in Britain so we have to assume that at least twice as many of these would have existed and originally and that's sort of a conservative number but again it's in it's important to to recognize that the ease of production here is what sort of was the underpinning of an entire industry for over a century in Northern England