A Masterly Hand / Scientia Artis 9

99 Famke Peters 4 98 or ‘to equip’, which could imply the furnishing or decorating of the chu rch. 36 This may have involved the making of new statues – perhaps some (if not all) of the Elsloo statues which still survive in the church. The results of the den- drochronological analysis show that at least some of these may date from not long after 1 513. 37 Although no references to the saints represented by surviving sculptures were found in the registers of benefices, so that the original connection between the statues and the church could not be confirmed in this way, several other factors do support the idea that the late-medieval Neeroeteren church had a rich interior and that the sculptures were originally made for it. The dependence on Thorn Abbey, for example, the presence of Elsloo works in other churches belonging to this abbey, the 1513 document that may relate to the decoration of the church, and the existence around 1500 of an archer’s guild and other con- fraternities with which certain statues might have been connected, all argue in favour of this hypothesis. In fact scarcely any of the Elsloo sculptures preserved in Belgian Limburg can be associated with altars mentioned in the registers of benefices. Is there a connection between the statue of St Lucy in St Martin’s Church in Beek and the altar of St Nicholas and St Lucy mentioned in the 1558 regis ter? 38 Th e late- fifteenth-century (1497) and mid-sixteenth-century registers refer to two altars dedicated to St Lawrence in St Lawrence’s Church in Boch olt. 39 It may be that the statue of Lawrence from the Elsloo group was originally part of one of them. In the Bocholt church now is a Marian retable (1525-1530) , to which early-sixteenth-century wings (1500-1515) have been attached, which illustrate scenes from the life of St Lawre nce. 40 It has already been suggested that they may have come from an earlier high altarpiece dedicated to the patron saint. Whether these wings and the statue of St Lawrence came from the same altar- piece is an interesting question. Finally, during an early-eighteenth-century visitation of the Reppel church, where a statue of St Barbara from the Elsloo group is preserved, a St Barbara altar is mentioned. In the seventeenth and eighteenth century Barbara was named as a patron saint of the church in addi- tion to Willibrord, the present patron saint. Only rarely are sculptures mentioned in the seventeenth- and eighteenth- century archidiaconal visitation reports. The 1726 report cites, among others, twelve small apostles and Christ, and large statues of Christ on the Cross and Mary and St John under the Cross in the Ellikom church, a St Quirinus and a Virgin and Child in the Church of Our Lady in Gerdingen and a St Barbara in the Reppel chur ch. 41 Th ey may correspond with Elsloo sculptures. This would mean that these works were already in the church before the French Revolution, which increases the chance that they were originally made for those pla ces. 42 In iconographic terms, it is not only interesting to discover what or whom the sculptures depicted and in what way, but also where they may originally have stood in the church and what their status may have been. St Lambert’s Church in Neeroeteren with its exceptionally rich late-Gothic sculptural embellishment gives a good idea of what a medieval church interior might have