Volume 8: Western Yorkshire

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Current Display: Unknown Provenance 1, West Riding of Yorkshire Forward button Back button
Overview
Present Location
Leeds Museum Discovery Centre: from 2008 will be on display in the Leeds Gallery of the new City Museum. Accession no. LEEDM.D.T.2395
Evidence for Discovery
Brears (1989, 65, caption to figs. facing) implies that this was among the stones from Adel (p. 271 above), but no evidence for this has been found in any of the publications concerning the Adel stones.
Church Dedication
Present Condition
Damaged and incomplete
Description

The surface is dressed back around shallowly modelled figures. A tall, possibly originally central figure is portrayed frontally. He is not nimbed. His features partly survive, crudely delineated. His right arm is extended outwards, bent upwards at the elbow.
The hand is incomplete. His left arm is missing but the shoulder line suggests it may have been similarly outspread. His body has several V- shaped modelling lines, either crude folds from a tunic, or crude indications of a naked ribbed chest. His body is missing below the waist. Below, on the figure's right, a smaller figure faces towards the centre, and holds his arms out towards the waist-level of the central figure.

Discussion

Appendix A item (Stones dating from Saxo-Norman overlap period or of uncertain date)

It is not clear whether this fragment is a panel or part of a shaft or even a headstone. The figure group bears some similarities to the group on a panel from Bramham, near Leeds (p. 106, Ill. 74), which I consider possibly represents a Traditio Legis. The scale here is smaller however, and the V-shaped marks on the torso possibly do represent a naked breast: if so this possibly represents a Crucifixion scene. The subsidiary figure is then likely to be either the spear-bearer piercing Christ's side, or possibly a figure catching the flow of blood from the side in a chalice, therefore representing the Church. The carving is quite crude, and for that reason is difficult to date, but its particular type of crudity is not paralleled in pre-Conquest figure sculpture from the region.

Date
Probably eleventh to twelfth century or undatable
References
Brears 1989, 65, fig. 4
Endnotes
None

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