拍品專文
As Francis Cheetham points out in his definitive book on the subject, the Trinity is one of the most popular of all subjects represented on English medieval alabasters. There are eighty or so surviving examples known, which may be divided into four distinctive iconographic types (Cheetham, op. cit., p. 296). The present example conforms to his type B, in which the basic Throne of Mercy - with Christ Crucified in the lap of God - is further adorned by a napkin containing the diminutive figures of the souls of the blessed held up by God the Father. A particularly closely comparable Trinity in the Victoria and Albert Museum (Cheetham, op. cit., no. 227, p. 310) lacks precisely the same elements as the present piece, namely the head of God the Father and the dove of the Holy Spirit, which was dowelled on in the space between the figure of Christ and the napkin holding the souls of the blessed. The unusually large scale of such pieces must have rendered them particularly liable to damage.