A Masterly Hand / Scientia Artis 9

could be related to the rather mediocre quality of the wood which would cause damage of the polychromy. This third possibility could, however, also be related to the aforementioned Holzsichtigkeit tradition. Conclusion The artists of the Elsloo group clearly preferred to work in oak, as did their Lower Rhenish contemporaries in Kalkar or Cleves, for example. That this cannot be said of the broad Meuse-Rhine region, however, is shown by the work of artists such as the Maastricht sculptor Jan van Steffesw ert, 46 or the woodcarvers of the major centre of Colog ne, 47 w ho in addition to oak used other kinds of wood such as lime and walnut. Within the Elsloo group there are also a few exceptions – sculptures that were made in boxwood, walnut and pear. Boxwood, as used for the Virgin and Child on the Crescent Moon in Chicago and the Samson and the Lion in London, is a wood species rarely used in the Meuse and Lower Rhine region. But in these cases it seems a logical choice, for coarse-grained oak lacks the physical features that would allow details to be rendered in such small statuet tes. 48 The oak wood used in the Elsloo group was often of inferior quality to wood that came from the Baltic, implying perhaps that guild or craft regulations relating to wood quality – if indeed such rules existed – may not have been as strict as in centres like Brussels. It raises the question of whether the purchase of a knot-free log from the wood merchant was even an option for the Elsloo artists. This needs further research. Furthermore, the oak wood used was unseasoned. This is shown not only by the wooden wedges which fill the cracks that appeared during the carving process but also by the detailed carving, which is almost impossible to achieve when using seasoned oak. The position of the log heart and the knots in the sculptures also shows that the artists knew very well how to turn this imperfect wood into a high quality finished product. Moreover, most sculptures from the Elsloo group were produced from a single piece of wood. Apparently their sculptors had no hesitation in carving the sculpture with all its ornate details from one single log. On many of the sculptures the marks of workbench clamps have been found. Caution is needed, however, in the interpretation of these traces. Wood deformation caused by drying and half a millennium of manipulation and degradation can of course (slightly) change the distances between related marks. This makes the comparison of measurements difficult. In cases where the sculptures are in the same location and belong to the same iconographic ensemble, similar distances between the marks must mean that they were produced on the same workbench. However, interpreting similar measure- ments on sculptures preserved in different places, such as the Bishop Saint from Siersdorf and the apostles from Neeroeteren, is more difficult. The greater the number of sculptures examined, the higher the statistical chance that sim- ilar measurements are found. In these cases, the exact shape of the marks can be deemed decisive. Moreover, other criteria are required to further establish the relationship between the works. In the case of Siersdorf and Neeroeteren there are convincing stylistic commonalities as well. The similar workbench marks can therefore indicate the use of the same workbench clamp and thus