Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Debaene, Marjan

Titel

The problem with Leuven sculpture around 1500: the creation of anonymous sculpture workshops

Ist Teil von

• Journal of art historiography, 2020-06 (22), p.1-14

Ort / Verlag

Glasgow: Journal of Art Historiography

Erscheinungsjahr

2020

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

EZB Electronic Journals Library

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• In the late Middle Ages, the Brabantine city of Leuven - located at about 30 km from Brussels, the capital of current Belgium - was one of the more important cities in the Duchy of Brabant and a regional production centre of sculpture that appears to have followed artistic trends being set in Brussels. The Leuven sculptors worked for a varied, but mostly religious clientele and received commissions from beyond the city walls, mostly to the east of the city (the so-called 'Hageland' region). The Leuven crafts were organized in a corporate system of guilds. However, the sculptors were not organized in a corporation of their own - they were to join the stonemason's guild - and did not apply a system of trademarks to allow quality control, as was the case in Brussels, Antwerp and Mechelen. The result of this being that in the archives many sculptors are known by name, but they can hardly ever be linked to a body of work. Conversely, many remaining sculptures cannot be attributed to a specific sculptor. Another result being that there are not really reference works with a clear Leuven attribution (just one, by Hendrik Roesen), like in Antwerp or Brussels, where the presence of the Brussels mallet or the Antwerp hands on many remaining pieces, give us an artistic and stylistic frame of reference. The absence of reference works has in the past made the Leuven sculpture research somewhat a Wild West for stylistic attributions. The next part of this paper will discuss two concrete cases illustrating the problematic attribution practice regarding Leuven late gothic sculpture. Both anonymous masters have been assigned a body of works to their name, yet it is not sure they are even separate masters or workshops. In both groups there are clear differences and clear similarities of 'masterly hand' features. So, one can even begin to wonder if it is just an artificial divide between two groups?