Page:Charles Moore--Development and Character of Gothic Architecture.djvu/310

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designer, while a disciplined artistic power is less apparent. But though more exclusively naturalistic in conception than French sculpture, the rendering of forms is not more true to nature. It is not so true. The modelling of draperies, for instance, in the so-called statue of Christiana (Fig. 186) is much less true to the folds of real drapery than is the modelling of the draperies in the contemporaneous statue of the Virgin in the doorway of the north transept of the Cathedral of Paris; and yet the whole air of the figure is naturalistic rather than ideal. In truth and skill of modelling even the sculptures of Chartres and St. Denis, which are a century earlier in date, surpass these of Wells. Observe, in Fig. 186, the flat surfaces, sharp edges, and unnatural lines of the draperies on the breast and arms, and the stiff and awkward forms of the arm and hand. Stiffness and awkwardness, arising from want of skill, are not, indeed, in early art incompatible with a great deal of beauty and with fine sentiment. In the early art of France such defects are sometimes apparent; but this sculpture of Wells is not early. It dates from the mid-thirteenth century—the time of the highest development of Gothic sculpture—and for that time it is strangely primitive and unskilful as compared with the art of France. Yet for simplicity of motive, veracity of conception, and monumental grandeur, this sculpture certainly deserves to hold an eminent place in the art of the Middle Ages. It bears somewhat the same relation to the sculpture of France, that the painting of Velasquez has to