IN PARTS I AND II of this study, the Great Cross at the Chartreuse de Champmol, Dijon, known today as the ‘Well of Moses’, was reconstructed. A wealth of evidence demonstrated that on the terrace the Magdalene knelt alone, embracing the base of the cross; moreover, the face of the cross was not set over David, as previously supposed, but at the point of the hexagon between David and Jeremiah, providing a visually more complex and satisfying view (Figs.1 and 2). This reconstruction allows a complete reconsideration of the meaning, audience and purpose of this monument. The Magdalene becomes a key figure, and the orientation of the cross indicates a new grouping and interpretation of the angels and prophets. Most dramatically, the crucial role of Jeremiah on this monument is now apparent, and it has wide-ranging implications for the artistic programme at Champmol and the art of this period in general.

SURVEYS OF MODERNIST British sculpture regularly begin with a description of the architectural carvings made by Jacob Epstein for the new British Medical Association building on the Strand in London during 1907 and 1908 (Fig.26). Despite this apparent consensus among art histor­ians, it is still far from clear exactly why the carvings should herald such a radical change in sculptural aesthetics and techniques, and what Epstein’s intentions were in creating them. Fortunately, a century after the sculptor began work on the project, new evidence has emerged that goes a long way towards clarifying both questions. The present article not only confirms the position of the BMA carvings at the roots of British Modernism, but also exposes their debt to a specific artistic tradition from outside Europe. Intercultural aesthetic exchange is persistently ignored in discussions of early Modernism, in particular, but Epstein’s trans-national leanings confirm it as an important factor even during the first decade of the twentieth century.

THIS TECHNICAL STUDY helps to explain how Pablo Picasso made one of his earliest Cubist constructions, Still life (1914; Spies 47; Fig.37); what his original intentions were and how he achieved them; and how the work has changed with time. Conservators have published technical studies on Picasso’s paintings, but less attention has been paid to his early sculptures. This article suggests ways in which Picasso controlled his materials to emphasise the basic, almost crude, effect he intended. The artist’s failure or refusal to efface evidence of the way the work came into being gives the impression of hasty or rough workmanship, and at the time Still life was made this was unusual, even shocking, in a serious work of art. Picasso left clues that give insight into his working method. Close inspection and analysis of Still life reveals a level of control in the construction that is not immediately obvious. There are indications of effort and deliberation that support the argument that Picasso intended this work to have an unfinished look. Connections between some components in Still life and those in other constructions from this period are here examined; but other comparisons may illuminate more about the artist’s working methods and the chronology of these early works.

CLARENCE KENNEDY is best known for his multi-volume photographic portfolios, Studies in the History and Criticism of Sculpture, which document his meticulous study of ancient Greek and Italian quattrocento monuments through his camera lens. Four of the seven volumes extensively feature the sculptures of Desiderio da Settignano. While Kennedy did not publish a great deal, his archive, owned by Harvard University, reveals that his interest in Desiderio did not end with the Studies or with his publication ‘Documenti inediti su Desiderio da Settignano e la sua famiglia’ of 1930. Several unpublished texts and reams of careful notes on Desiderio testify to his ambition to devote a monograph to this artist.

THE COLLECTION OF the Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe of the Uffizi contains a considerable number of designs for funerary monuments dating from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. About 190 drawings related to such monuments are noted by Pasquale Nerino Ferri in his Indice geografico analitico dei disegni degli Uffizi. There is no catalogue raisonné of these drawings and, while some have been discussed in monographic studies on individual artists, a considerable number of the sheets are still categorised as anonymous works. One of these sheets (Fig.48) is the subject of this article. Listed by Ferri in his Indice as ‘Anonymous sixteenth century’, the drawing, a fragment in a very bad state of conservation, has never been published before. Yet it matches the upper part of a drawing, a Design for a funerary monument for Leo X in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (Fig.49), attributed to Andrea Sansovino and dated to 1521 by Ulrich Middeldorf.

RANGED ALONG THE west side of the north transept of Chichester Cathedral is an important yet little-known sequence of three stately marble wall monuments to bishops of the Restoration period (Fig.52). They originally stood apart from one another in the retrochoir, and were aligned in 1829 in the same sequence in which they are found today on the east side of the wooden reredos behind the high altar and opposite the Lady Chapel, as shown in an engraving by J. Wilmshurst published in 1838. They were reunited in the north transept c.1890 after various vicissitudes following the disastrous collapse of the spire and crossing tower in 1861. In the centre stands the monument to the famous Royalist poet Bishop Henry King (1592–1669), the son of Bishop John King of London, and one of John Donne’s executors, jointly responsible for commissioning his celebrated monument by Nicholas Stone in St Paul’s Cathedral. Created Bishop of Chichester in 1642, he was forced out of office the following year after the siege of the city by parliamentary forces but was reinstated at the Restoration. His monument, consisting of a noble Baroque urn on a tall pedestal, is flanked by monuments to Bishop Robert Grove (died 1696) on the left and to Bishop Guy Carleton (died 1685) on the right (Fig.54). During the Civil War, Carleton had been expelled from two livings as a result of his Royalist sympathies, and was for a time imprisoned in Lambeth Palace. He returned to favour at the Restoration, becoming successively Chaplain-in-Ordinary to Charles II, Dean of Carlisle, and Bishop of Bristol, before his translation in 1679 at the age of eighty-two to Chichester, where he remained until his death. In the absence of documentary evidence there are nonetheless compelling stylistic grounds for attributing his monument to John Bushnell (c.1630–1701), since it incorporates several aspects of his distinctive sculptural identity.

FOR UNSUSPECTING VISITORS ringing the doorbell of Matt’s Gallery in the East End of London during the first few months of 2000, there was probably little to suggest that they were about to be drawn into a parallel world entirely of the artist Mike Nelson’s making. Upon entering the gallery hall there was also scant indication that anything was awry or out of the ordinary. The usual features of such a foyer were present – a visitors’ book, a somewhat battered leather sofa and a ‘No smoking’ sign above the door. Only after opening the next door and crossing the threshold to the following room were the boundaries between fantasy and reality elided to the point of perplexity. Gone was any trace of the white cube space normally encountered at Matt’s Gallery. Instead, it was replaced by yet another waiting-room with a metal grille that was both seemingly and seamlessly ‘real’. But, whoever encountered it must have felt suddenly displaced, as the door banged shut behind them, to reveal a room lit only by a bare light bulb swinging from the ceiling as a fan attempted to churn the stagnant air, and charts in Arabic adorned the walls. Somewhere between this room and the one that proceeded it, a boundary had been blurred that left reality askew. So began Nelson’s landmark work, The coral reef.

THAT LOS ANGELES is a city without a discernible centre is by now a familiar lament. One need only skim Mike Davis’s City of Quartz: Excavating the Future of Los Angeles (1990), Robert Fogelson’s The Fragmented Metropolis (1968), or Reyner Banham’s Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971) to understand the origins and persistence of this complaint. Commenting on this condition with great precision and prescience as early as 1945, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote: ‘Los Angeles [. . .] is rather like a big earthworm that might be chopped into twenty pieces without being killed. If you go through this enormous urban cluster, probably the largest in the world, you come upon twenty juxtaposed cities, strictly identical, each with its poor section, its business streets, night-clubs and smart suburb, and you get the impression that a medium-sized urban center has schizogenetically reproduced itself twenty times’.