personality among Poland's early kings, so is his tomb the grandest and most precious among the royal sepulchres on the Wawel. It is made of red marble and sandstone. On the tomb reposes the noble figure of the monarch, his crowned head adorned by a long, curled beard, the gravity, wisdom, and calm which characterize his reign depicted in his face. The right hand holds a sceptre, the left an orb; there is a dagger at the side. The body is clad with a tunic, girt on the haunches with a belt wrought in the form of a wall with little turrets. The upper garment, a cope, is held together by a broad clasp across the breast. The square tomb is divided into panels containing figures, over each of which there is a tail-piece canopy with tracery. The tomb is surmounted by superb canopy on eight pillars, the whole monument profusely adorned with crockets and finials of exquisite workmanship.
Space forbidding us to give a detailed description of the consoles found in the convent cloisters, the ivory casket at St. Mary's Church, and sundry small objects wrought of precious material and preserved in the museums, we now pass on to fifteenth century sculpture.
This is characterized by more accurate study of and deeper insight into nature. The Northern artist, having no opportunity for close contact with the relics of antiquity, had to turn a diligent eye to nature. In the period we now speak of, plastic art is no more at the service of architecture, but independent. The sculptor makes no attempts at the monumental, but directs his endeavours to a servile imitation of nature; he wants a knowledge of anatomy and is entirely under the spell of medieval superstition and the tenets of his age. The clothing of the figures is intended to cover completely the naked body, and it is in the lines of the drapery that the artist's imagination is fully and forcibly displayed; here the tendency to movement finds its immediate expression. Preference is given to strong, rough lines; they are characteristic of Northern work generally, and thus found in Poland too. The picturesque element enters with full force into all conceptions. Down to the middle of the fifteenth century Bohemian
