Avant-garde sculptors… in the 16th century. Mannerism in Entre-Sambre-et-Meuse is the partial reflection of the painstaking work carried out by a group of researchers and restorers, gathered around Michel Lefftz, professor at the University of Namur and specialist in medieval and modern sculpture. .
The interest shown by Michel Lefftz, curator of the exhibition, in the stalls of the Chœur des Dames, preserved in the Sainte-Gertrude collegiate church in Nivelles, constitutes the starting point of the research. The set of wooden sculptures adorning the stalls has made it possible to highlight the production of a large-scale workshop gathered around a Master, active in the third quarter of the 16th century in the Meuse region, and located in the wake of an artist such as Lambert Lombard. The stalls are inscribed, by the form and style of the figures that adorn them, in the Mannerist vein: characters with exaggerated, stretched proportions, angular hips, long sinuous necks and slender fingers, whose faces are marked by eye asymmetry. Various hands contributed to their realization, a master, for the most accomplished parts, and several collaborators, hence the variety of sculpted groups and the differences in quality. From the stalls of Nivelles and their “main” Master, therefore, two other sculptors and workshops have been “identified” – the Master of Gedinne and the Master of the Saints Roch – and a first body of work, most of which is still in place in places of worship, could be attributed to them.
TreM.a - Musée des Arts anciens, Rue de Fer, Namur, Belgique
