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Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Book in excellent unread/unused condition. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> Introduction ELIGIOUS PAINTINGS STILL FOUND TODAY in English churches cathedrals Ra and colleges have rarely been studied in depth. The most accessible ref- erence to them is in Pevsner’s The Buildings of England where they are listed under ‘Furnishings and not always attributed to a particular artist or to the correct School. Thus hidden away in many a country church or college they have received little attention and yet they add greatly to our knowledge of Continental art of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Furthermore on the altars of churches and chapels or in the hallways and libraries of colleges they can be seen to function in a modern context and at the same time reflect their earlier contemporary use. In contrast to paintings in museums they still have a religious role to play. There is no obvious pattern in the way the paintings are distributed throug- hout England because they came as individual donations to the various chur- ches or colleges the latter mostly Catholic. For the study of the history of collecting therefore these paintings deserve special attention. What is signi- ficant is that the greatest number of altarpieces comes from the Netherlands and more specifically from Antwerp. The few German examples originate from different regions and there are also isolated examples from France and Spain. This book deals essentially with painted panels: triptychs single devotional paintings and panels that once formed part of large retables. The single panels and triptychs often have donors portrayed in the wings and would have been placed in private chapels or side chapels as for instance in St Edmund Hall Chapel in Oxford (No. 48). The carved retables however could have been used as the high altar in the centre of the choir because of their size and highly polychromed carvings which would make for a dazzling effect from a distance. A great number of these retables have now been dismembered and many of the single panels found in churches and colleges today are the only remains of a larger ensemble such as those in Queens College Chapel Cambridge (No. 15) which originally formed the wings of a carved centre or in Bathwick (No. 5) where the carved centre was added in the nineteenth century to give the impression of an authentic retable. With the rise of a flourishing export trade and production on a grand scale. especially in Antwerp at the beginning of the sixteenth century altarpieces could be produced according to patterns. Their creators were mostly anony mous yet prolific little masters adept at picking up novelties and new in- fluences and ready to incorporate them into their repertoire. To the modern