A Masterly Hand / Scientia Artis 9

97 Famke Peters 4 96 determining factors for the richness of its interior and thus for the possible presence of sculptures. This third type of source yielded interesting information about the Limburg churches. But in not a single case was the data sufficient to confirm the origin of the Elsloo sculptures that are nowadays present in them, or to reconstruct their interiors with altars associated with the sculptures. There are also hardly any contemporary church archives available to provide additional and support- ing information. The use (and limitations) of these registers and visitation reports in this art-historical research can be illustrated by the case of St Lambert’s Church in Neeroeteren (fig. 4.6). Here, no old church archives survive. The church houses an extraordinary collection of late-Gothic sculp- tures, twenty-one of which have been associated with the Master of Elsloo. The church (an ecclesia integra ) belonged to the highly influential Thorn Ab bey. 25 As the collector of the great tithes, the abbess of Thorn was responsible for the maintenance of the nave, for a church bell, and for the requisites for the mass at the high altar among other thi ngs. 26 Th e abbess also had the right of patron- age ( jus patronatus ). There are sculptures from the Elsloo group in the Thorn abbey church, as well as in several other churches belonging to the abbey such as those of Beek, Ittervoort and Stramproy. This raises the question of the role the abbey might have played in commissioning and spreading Elsloo sculptures. We know that around 1500 many parish churches of comparable size con- tained several reta bles. 27 Th e free-standing statues of saints in the Neeroeteren church may also have belonged to retables. Only two altars are mentioned in the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century registers of benefices, however, one dedi- cated to St Catherine, the other to St Nich olas. 28 A lthough these saints were very popular in the late Middle Ages, as evidenced by the numerous refer- ences in the registers of benefices, there are no surviving figures of them in Neeroeteren. Late-nineteenth-century documents, however, mention an old statue of St Catherine in a very dire state, which has probably been l ost. 29 Perhaps this once belonged to the St Catherine altar. A visitation report from the second half of the seventeenth century refers to a benefice of St Agatha, but neither has a statue of this saint been preser ved. 30 T hus it was not possible to associate the altars mentioned in these specific sources to the surviving sculptures of saints. There were confraternities of St James and of Our Lady in Neeroeteren, certainly in the second half of the fifteenth century, and there also had been an archers’ guild of St George since 1 478. 31 It may be that some of the sculptures in the church were once related to one of these bodies. The church houses a late-Gothic sculpture of St George (which does not belong to the Elsloo group), and more than one statue of St James. Apart from the Marianum, no late- medieval sculpture of the Virgin has been preserved, although late-nineteenth- century documents mention a sculpture of an Enthroned Virgin and Child and another of a Mater Dolor osa. 32 T hey were both in a poor condition and have probably been lost. Although not referred to in the fifteenth- and sixteenth- century lists of benefices, the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century archidiaconal visitation reports and the church records from that later period mention altars of the confraternities of Our Lady and of St Ja mes. 33 4.5 k 4.5 l Fig. 4.5a-l Systematic series of photographs of the Apostle James the Great, Ellikom, Church of St Harlindis and St Relindis