281 British Sculpture. to the Earl of Warwick (1464), in St. Mary's Church, Warwick. William Austen is the name of the sculptor of the last-named work, which Flaxman considers in no respect inferior to the productions of his Italian con- temporaries. The greatest works of English sculpture produced during the reign of Henry VII. were the statues in the Lady Chapel of Westminster, the original number of which is said to have been 3000 : very few now remain, but those few suffice to give an idea of the great talent and fertility of invention of the artists employed. In the reign of Henry VIII., when the iconoclastic spirit of the Reformation prevailed, many of the finest works of English sculpture were destroyed ; but before his death, the arrival of the Italian Pietro Torriggiano (1470 — 1522) the contemporary of Michelangelo, gave a new and a different impulse to the art; and to him we owe the sculptures of the tomb of Henry VII., which, though superior in execution and accuracy of proportion to those of the chapel itself, are certainly inferior to them in vigour and truth to life. No English sculptor of eminence arose, after the storm of the Reformation, before the Restoration, although a few isolated works were produced which prove that the artist spirit of England was not dead but sleeping, and with a little encouragement would have revived. The tomb of Sir Francis de Vere, in Westminster Abbey, and the figures on the monument of Sir George Hollis, also in the Abbey, by Nicholas Stone (1586 — 1647), a sculptor who would have become famous under more favourable circum- stances, are proofs of the latent power which might have been trained to excellence. The bronze equestrian statue of Charles I., now at Charing Cross, is by a foreigner
