Splendours and miseries of the man on the alabaster elephant

If there is one material I particularly relish, it is alabaster. It is slightly soluble in water and therefore defenceless against a rainy climate. So it can’t be used for outdoor work on cathedrals and churches. For internal decoration, however, it is superb, being soft and easy to cut; it takes a high polish and can be painted with almost any kind of pigment including watercolour. In the Middle Ages, workable deposits were discovered in Staffordshire and near Nottingham, and by the mid-14th century English alabaster was famous, and religious figures and altarpieces carved from it were exported all over Europe. If you want an example of English skills at their best you have only to go to the Victoria and Albert museum, where a splendid altarpiece, late 15th-century, called ‘The Joys of the Virgin’, originally from Swansea, is on display. Alabaster was a favourite material for tomb effigies in churches, especially of knights, for its softness enabled the sculptor to put on exquisite details of armour and equipment, as well as beards and moustaches, and the figure could then be realistically coloured in bright paint. The paint has gone in most cases, and often the nose or face too — the work of Puritans, distant ancestors of those now trying to ban hunting — but these recumbent figures, worn smooth and shiny by touching, are one of the greatest pleasures of our old parish churches. By putting one’s hands on them one joins physically, as well as in metaphor, the men and women who lived more than half a millennium ago, as well as the countless visitors who have felt them since.

I have a beautiful alabaster bust of Loie Fuller, the sensational dancer from Chicago, who performed at the Paris Folies-Bergère in the 1890s, using the resources of electric stage-lighting and spotlights for the first time, and so creating images which were then unprecedented.