A Masterly Hand / Scientia Artis 9

looked like. It has the typical ingredients, such as a number of free-standing statues of popular plague saints like Anthony, Christopher, Roch and­ Sebastian, the church’s patron St Lambert, a figure of Christ on the Cold Stone, a Marianum, and a Calvary, Christ the Saviour and the twelve apostles on the rood beam. In the Meuse-Rhine region a few other late-Gothic examples of the so-called apostle beam survive, for instance in St Willibrord’s Church in Eisden, where the apostles are shown as relief busts in nic hes. 43 Th e apostles and Christ from the Elsloo group in Ellikom are currently in niches in the balustrade of the gallery at the back of the mid-twentieth-century chu rch. 44 A t about 32 centimetres high, they are only half the size of the Neeroeteren figures; the backs are only roughly finished and were probably not meant to be seen ( fig. 4 .5e). 45 If these little sculptures were displayed on an apostle beam in Ellikom’s former small Romanesque church, it must have been a fairly low one, with niches or canopies for the figures. Alternatively, they might have been part of an altarpiece, although no evidence has yet been found for the earlier presence of such an altarpiece in the Ellikom church. 4.7 Fig. 4.7 St Christopher, Neeroeteren, St Lambert’s Church, detail