Journal of Art Historiography (Jun 2020)
The problem with Leuven sculpture around 1500: the creation of anonymous sculpture workshops
Abstract
In the late middle ages, the Brabantine city of Leuven was a regional production centre of sculpture that followed artistical trends being set in Brussels. The Leuven sculptors had a varied clientele and received commissions from far beyond the city walls. However, they were not organised in their own corporation and therefore did not apply a system of trademarks to allow quality control. The result was 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. This paper will discuss the case of two anonymous Leuven masters who were provisionally named in the 1970s and who have been assigned a body of works as their oeuvre: the Master of the Crucified Christ Figures and the Master of Christ on the Cold Stone. These notnames are filled with speculation, as the researchers that created these unknown masters made some methodological errors. Since the 1970s, research has barely progressed, and the notnames have often started to live a life of their own. This paper offers a different approach to analysing these sculptures and possibly re-grouping them, by showing that stylistic analysis and connoisseurship are only some of many tools and methodologies that can be used to research anonymous late gothic sculpture, such as technical research and cultural space contextualisation, the ultimate goal being to achieve a more nuanced and far richer image of the sculpture workshops active in Leuven around 1500, where the names or notnames of the sculptors are of lesser importance.
