A Masterly Hand / Scientia Artis 9

15 14 Introduction and Acknowledgements whole­heartedly, and to all the kik-irpa staff who contributed to the research project, the conference and this publication. Bernard Petit was responsible for the painstaking processing of the considerable amount of photographic mate- rial for the printer: the credit for the quality and visual appeal of the images in the publication is therefore largely his. Together with Anne-Françoise Gerards he also provided the diagrams. The meticulous revision of various parts of the texts was carried out by Catherine Bourguignon, Ilona Collas, Simon Laevers, Dominique Vanwijnsberghe and intern Adrien Marx. Finally, we owe many thanks to translator Lee Preedy for the translation into English of several of the Dutch texts and the careful revision of the English texts. The ‘Master of Elsloo’ Phenomenon: Challenges for New Research The study of the Master of Elsloo was something of a leap in the dark. We had no idea of exactly what awaited us or where we might end up. Moreover, our objectives were ambitious and the expectations were high. Soon enough the enormous size and problematic nature of the material became clear. And we had only two years... What started out modestly in 1940 with a statue of St Anne with the Virgin and Child in Elsloo whose anonymous maker was given the provisional name of the Master of Elsloo expanded in a matter of seventy years or so into a ­ complex oeuvre of at least two hundred works. The Master of Elsloo became a kind of catch-all for sculptures displaying more or less similar stylistic charac- teristics in Dutch and Belgian Limburg and the neighbouring German region. The complexity lay not only in the sheer number of works but also and espe- cially in their stylistic diversity. Furthermore, there was no information about the identity of the maker, or rather the makers, covered by the provisional name or about the context in which this huge oeuvre was produced. Added to which was the fact that up until now only piecemeal research had been done on this ‘Master’, and then purely from a stylistic point of view. Moreover, interest in and knowledge about artistic activity in this region in the late ­ Middle Ages is fairly limited. It was therefore high time to blow new life into this moribund state of affairs. This meant that the complex phenomenon known as the ‘Master of Elsloo’ and all the attributions to ‘him’ had to be critically reviewed. One of the first hurdles we faced was the naming of the master. Given the immensity of the oeuvre and the diversity of styles, ‘Master of Elsloo’ seemed to denote not a lone craftsman but rather several sculptors and possibly even workshops, as various scholars had already suggested. A reconsideration of the name was called for – as is a word of explanation about the terminology used in this book. In the following articles the term ‘Master of Elsloo’ is not used systematically to refer to the maker of a particular sculpture or group of ­ sculptures but as a reference to the phenomenon that has evolved over time and also to represent attributions to this ‘Master’ in the literature. To circumvent the problematic nature of a name that suggests a single sculptor, the umbrella term ‘Elsloo group’ is generally employed in this publication to refer to the large group of works associated with the Master of Elsloo and exhibiting ­ recognizable stylistic traits, and also to the sculptors and workshops who