Winchester Cathedral, Winchester, Hampshire, England

The Stacked Mythical Beasts and Foliate Canopy Wood Carving at Winchester Cathedral

2150

High Medieval / English Decorated Gothic Period (c. 1308, early 14th century)

A multi-tiered architectural wood carving from Winchester Cathedral's choir stalls featuring a lithe mammalian beast resting atop a heavily scaled sea-dragon, the whole surmounted by a dense billowing canopy of deeply ribbed serrated oak and vine leaves. Carved around 1308 by William Lingwode, the vertical composition — from scale to hide to leaf — stages a hierarchy not of authority but of material covering, each surface type implying a different relationship to the natural world.