Art Centres in the Lower Rhine and the Maasland Revisited: Research Potential of a Methodological Reorientation of Medieval Art History (original) (raw)
2020, The Journal of Art Historiography
The medieval wooden sculptures in the Lower Rhine and the Maasland region have been the focus of much art historical interest. Various inventory and exhibition projects in the twentieth century comprehensively recorded and arranged the numerous works available in the region and assigned them to different known or unknown artists or art landscape groups of works, according to the status of the respective research claim. Important here are such renowned names as Master Arnt Beeldesnider, Dries Holthuys, the Master of Elsloo, Jan van Steffeswert and Hendrick Douwermann, who afforded a hierarchical systematisation, including possible students and successors. However, numerous fragments and sculptures cannot be integrated into previously ordered systems and so receive less attention. The basis for a revision of the Lower Rhine and Maasland medieval wooden sculptures lies in the application of large-scale research efforts toward medieval wooden sculpture and panel painting in the Mecklenb...
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Journal of Cultural Heritage, 2021
Studying the wood of art objects such as sculptures, panel paintings and furniture can be crucial to elucidate their chronology and production centre. Here we present an approach that considers the provenance of the wood and its potential availability in different areas as a means to identify the provenance of wooden art objects. We illustrate this approach with an interdisciplinary study aimed to determine the date and provenance of the Woman with lantern , a carved altar fragment from the Rijksmuseum's collections (Amsterdam, The Netherlands). The origin of this object is undocumented, but based on stylistic and iconographic features its provenance was proposed to be the altarpiece of Rennes cathedral (France), carved in Antwerp (Belgium) around 1520 C.E.. However, doubts arose when curators tested the potential fit of the sculpture in that altarpiece and could not find a neat match. Dating and provenancing the wood of the sculpture by standard dendrochronological means failed to produce a date, and comparison of the tree-ring pattern from the sculpture with those of the sculptures from Rennes altarpiece delivered no results either, supporting the suspicion that the Woman with lantern belonged elsewhere. In 2019, X-ray computed tomography (CT) provided digital cross-sections throughout the sculpture and a longer treering series was obtained. This time, the outermost ring was dated to the year 1487 C.E.. The tree was estimated to have been cut after 1495 C.E., indicating a likely production in the first quarter of the 16th century. The origin of the timber in the eastern Netherlands/northwest Germany, combined with empirical evidence about timber availability in various regions of the Low Countries at that time, suggests that the sculpture was made in a workshop located north of the Rhine in the (current) Netherlands, rather than Antwerp. This research has led to the hypothesis that workshops north and south of the Rhine river branches in the Low Countries were supplied by forests located in different areas. If proven correct, establishing the wood provenance will assist in determining the origin of Netherlandish works of art from the late-Gothic and Northern Renaissance periods.
E M Kavaler -- Sixteenth-Century Netherlandish Sculpture. A Recovery NKJ 67.pdf
Netherlanders produced enormously rich and varied sculpture in the sixteenth century. Indeed, Low Countries sculpture likely enjoyed a higher reputation than painting for most of the century, especially in other lands. 1 There were remarkable individuals involved in its production. Jacques Dubroeucq , court artist to Mary of Hungary, carved the statues and reliefs for the jubé of St. Waudru at Mons -notable examples of narrative design, the vogue for Roman antiquity, and the awareness of artistic developments in other regions of Europe (fig. 1). 2 The tomb sculpture of Cornelis Floris (1514-1575) became paradigmatic for funerary monuments across much of northern Europe (fig. ). 3 As Kristoffer Neville and Cynthia Osiecki discuss in this volume, his manner was so widely emulated that the term 'Floris style' has become something of a cliché in discussions of art around the Baltic.
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