A most interesting series of square plaques belong to the second half of the century, and are much the same type as the Trivulzio tablet; the figures are positively grotesque, with their peculiar cap-like hair, staring eyes, heavy features, and large unmodelled forms, yet there is such a sincere reverence and solemn earnestness about them, that the attention is forcibly arrested. The Darmstadt plaque represents _Christ healing the Demoniac_, who is held, whilst the evil spirit struggles forth from his lips. The British Museum possesses an equally well-carved plaque with the _Raising of the Widow’s Son at Nain_, the vertical folds are finely fluted, and the features, though peculiar, are in no way coarse. The background of this plaque like one in the Berlin Museum, and another at Liverpool, is covered with a diaper of cruciform perforations, like those on St. Patrick’s Bell and other early Irish antiquities. Christ is youthful and beardless on the Berlin plaque, which represents _Mary and Joseph finding Him in the Temple_. The technique in this and the remaining plaques at Liverpool is slightly coarser, but the style in all is identical. Christ alone is nimbed, and in each the figures have heavy masses of hair drawn back half over the ears, and strange solid robes, with the folded edge of the transverse drapery passing just below the knee. Another very exceptional series, which must be the work of some Rhenish master at the end of the century, is intensely forcible in style; but the artist is already preoccupied with the technical effects of which he shows himself such a master. The cover of the Echternach codex, which is said to have belonged to the Empress Theophano, bears in the centre an ivory plaque representing Christ on the Cross, with Longinus and Stephaton. These bizarre figures seem to presage the whole future of German art, the love of descriptive figures, that evil should appear evil, and earthly things should have no heavenly aspect. Perhaps they carried their love of naturalism to extremes, and as heavenly things were few and far between, they also gained a strong earthly taint. The Crucifixion on a binding in the John Rylands Library at Manchester (Fig. 25) is evidently by the same artist. The grouping is purely Byzantine, but the severance of feeling is as far as the East is from the West. The gesture of the beloved disciple as he clasps his hands to control his passionate emotion, is worth all the stereotyped poses of Byzantine art, and one forgets the crudity of the whole thing in wonder at the emotion pent up in those rugged forms.