In the Tower of London there is an effigy of
Queen Elizabeth going to the city to give thanks for the defeat of
the Spanish Armada.
This looks as if it might have been the work
of some one of the Valsesian sculptors. There are also the figures
that strike the quarters of Sir John Bennett's city clock in
Cheapside. The automatic movements of these last-named figures
would have struck the originators of the Varallo chapels with envy.
They aimed at realism so closely that they would assuredly have had
recourse to clockwork in some one or two of their chapels; I cannot
doubt, for example, that they would have eagerly welcomed the idea
of making the cock crow to Peter by a cuckoo-clock arrangement, if
it had been presented to them. This opens up the whole question of
realism versus conventionalism in art - a subject much too large to
be treated here.
As I have said, the founders of these Italian chapels aimed at
realism. Each chapel was intended as an illustration, and the
desire was to bring the whole scene more vividly before the
faithful by combining the picture, the statue, and the effect of a
scene upon the stage in a single work of art. The attempt would be
an ambitious one, though made once only in a neighbourhood, but in
most of the places in North Italy where anything of the kind has
been done, the people have not been content with a single
illustration; it has been their scheme to take a mountain as though
it had been a book or wall and cover it with illustrations.
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