Alabaster Sculpture in Europe (1300-1650)
Edited by Marjan Debaene
The popularity of alabaster is illustrated by the many masterpieces preserved and on permanent display in major museums such as the Musee du Louvre in Paris, the British Museum and the V&A in London, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the Staatliche Kunstsammelungen in Berlin.
Alabaster was a popular material in European sculpture, especially from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century. Its relative availability and easy to sculpt characteristic made it a highly suitable material for both large monuments and small objects, for mass production and individual works, from England to Spain and France to the Netherlands, Germany and Poland. This material has been the subject of multidisciplinary research in various European countries for several decades. The research combines material analyses with historical and art-historical approaches. This publication, made for the occasion of the large exhibition on the theme at M Leuven opening on October 14th, brings together all renown specialists on the material and sheds light on the many facets of alabaster, such as its physical and chemical properties as well as its translucency, its whiteness, its softness, and its beautiful sheen, all of which made it a popular material used in different types of sculpture from the middle ages to the baroque, all throughout Europe, ranging from bespoke tombs, funerary monuments and commissioned sculptures and altarpieces to commercially interesting formulas such as English or Mechelen alabaster reliefs.
- Edited by Marjan Debaene
Other Titles in this Series
Making and Meaning of the Liber Floridus
A Study of the Original Manuscript, Ghent, University Library, MS 92
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Pleasure and Politics at the Court of France
The Artistic Patronage of Queen Marie of Brabant (1260-1321)
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Epiphany of Hieronymus Bosch
Imagining Antichrist and Others from the Middle Ages to the Reformation
Early Engravers and their Public
The Master of the Berlin Passion and Manuscripts from Convents in the Rhine-Maas Region, ca. 1450-1500
Volume 39
Venetian Painting in the Fifteenth Century
Jacopo, Gentile and Giovanni Bellini and Andrea Mantegna
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