Word: zoutleeuw
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Pain into Wood. In the days of its prosperity, Zoutleeuw could afford the best artists available, and drew them from centers like Louvain, Antwerp and Brussels. The earliest major piece in the church, a 12th century Crucifixion carved in lindenwood, has all the pathos of a spiritualized image discovering the resistances of the body: the long oval face, the crudely gouged hair, the hacked spear wound and the thin, knob-bled torso almost physically displace the pain of nailed flesh into the pain of wood attacked by a chisel...
...fortunes of Zoutleeuw rose, so did the rate of commissions-and the burghers' desire to see themselves echoed, if not specifically portrayed, in their altarpieces. A 15th century triptych carved in oak, probably by a sculptor from Louvain, retains some of the hieratic frontality of Gothic art in its left-hand figure, St. Catherine; but Mary, in the center, decorously extends her hand to her child, whose eager little arm is poking over the edge of the strict Gothic frame, while St. Joseph, with purse, rich robes and amply confident gestures, is already a Flemish businessman...
...rare, at this period, to give such prominence and independence to a figure of St. Joseph; usually he was relegated to the background of paintings and carvings. In terms of the advances made in Italian art by the end of the 15th century, a work like Zoutleeuw's carving of St. Anne and the Virgin seems archaic, even naive. But it is a stunning design, the deeply cut folds, strict as metal, building up a system of pyramids that finishes in the smooth, serene, Gothic arch of St. Anne's wimple. By the 16th century the church...
Expository Form. St. Anne, the mother of Mary, was the patron saint of rhetoricians, and the altarpiece was commissioned from an unknown artist living in Antwerp to commemorate Zoutleeuw's well-off circle of public speakers, grammarians and logic-choppers. Indeed, the unfolding of the events in St. Anne's life as depicted on it (see caption below) has something of the intricate, expository form that was required of formal discourse in those years, while the rhetoricians themselves are shown in conclave at the bottom of the center panel. "This scene," says Dean René Overstyns, "shows...
...major restoration and refurbishing-to the astonishment of the local villagers who simply considered it their own place of worship, of no possible interest to outsiders. According to Pastor Overstyns, some 10,000 tourists entered the church doors last year-"quite a number as far as people in Zoutleeuw are concerned." It is, in fact, four times the village's resident population...