This had the effect of enormously adding to the apparent scale of the room, a great contrast to the method of decoration which was employed in later times of decadence, when large halls were dwarfed and rendered insignificant by covering the walls with figures of colossal size. The sixteenth century tapestry in the great hall at Hampton Court is a striking example of the way in which gigantic figures may destroy the scale of an interior. _Existing fragments._ The great beauty and extreme minuteness of the work can be seen in some few damaged fragments, now in the British Museum, which were not completely destroyed when the Royal Palace of Westminster, the seat of the two Houses of Parliament, was burnt in 1834. In the second half of the thirteenth century, during the reigns of Henry III. and Edward I., the painting of England was unrivalled by that of any other country[102]. Even in Italy, Cimabue and his assistants were still labouring in the fetters of Byzantine conventionalism, and produced no works which for jewel-like beauty of colour and grace of form were quite equal to the paintings of England under Edward I. _English sculpture._ _William Torell._ In sculpture too England was no less pre-eminent; no continental works of the time are equal in combined dignity and beauty, both of the heads and of the drapery, to the bronze effigies of Henry III. and Queen Eleanor of Castile on the north side of Edward the Confessor's Chapel at Westminster. These noble examples of bronze sculpture were the work of the goldsmith citizen of London William Torell, who executed them by the beautiful _cire perdue_ process with the utmost technical skill[103]; see page 232 on their gilding, which was executed by the old "mercury process." _The Fitz-Othos._ One of the chief English families of the thirteenth century, among whom the practice of various arts was hereditary, was named Otho or Fitz-Otho. Various members of this family were goldsmiths, manuscript illuminators, cutters of dies for coins and makers of official seals, as well as painters of mural decorations. The elaborate gold shrine of the Confessor, one of the most costly works of the Middle Ages, was made by the Otho family. The great royal seals of more than one king were their handiwork, and it should be observed that the seals of England, not only of the thirteenth century but almost throughout the mediaeval period, were far the most beautiful in the world, both for splendour and elaboration of design, and for exquisite minuteness of detail. _English needlework._