In every museum there are examples of the Byzantino-German school, one branch of which was situated in the Rhine Provinces. The relief of the Rhenish carvings is usually bold, and the figures large and long, but they often lack both the spontaneity of the Germans and the elegance of the Byzantines. A charming representation of the _Nativity_ encircled by an embattled wall, and another plaque with the _Visitation of the Magi_, in the Victoria and Albert Museum, show these features, the figures having almost the appearance of children’s toys set out at random without the slightest relation to the background. A peculiar feature in some of these carvings, is the row of dots drilled down the centre of each fold. There was also a school of direct copiers of Byzantine carvings, which varies from the most miserable caricatures to such splendidly finished work, that critics experience great difficulty in deciding for or against the Byzantine origin. A case in point is the magnificent book cover in the Vatican, which came from the Abbey of Lorsch in Germany, and the similar panel in the Victoria and Albert Museum. The central figure of Christ on the Vatican panel has a wide smooth face (without a beard), as in the sixth century sculptures. The Virgin’s face is much narrower and more of the Byzantine type, and the robes are treated with a wonderful complexity of folds. Both these panels are divided like the five-piece diptych (Fig. 10, with a single figure on each side), and have a similar pair of flying angels above, and long narrow scene beneath. Westwood has attributed them to Italy in the sixth to eighth centuries, but that is impossible, as the actual technique is far more delicate than anything that could have been accomplished even in the sixth century. Molinier thinks it probable that the Vatican panel is an original from the finest period of Byzantine Art, and the English panel is an imitation by an almost contemporary German craftsman. The extraordinary similarity of technique, even down to such small details as the folds of drapery on the thighs of the standing figures, seems to point that the two panels came from the same atelier, even if they were not made for the same book cover, the latter seeming to be disproved owing to the slight variation in size and shape of some of the panels. The book cover in the Bodleian Library at Oxford is a variant of the panel in the Vatican. [Illustration: [BRITISH MUSEUM 26. CEREMONIAL COMB English, eleventh century]