Sluter meaning

Claus sluter well of moses
Claus Sluter was an influential master of early Netherlandish sculpture, who moved beyond the dominant French taste of the time and into highly individual.
They are part of a new iconographical tradition led by Claus Sluter that continued until the end of the fifteenth century.

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Mourners of Dijon

Tomb sculptures, representing mourners

The Mourners of Dijon (pleurants of Dijon) are tomb sculptures made in Burgundy during the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. They are part of a new iconographical tradition led by Claus Sluter that continued until the end of the fifteenth century. In this tradition, free-standing sculptures depict mourners who stand next to a bier or platform that holds a body in state. The figures are cloaked in robes which mostly hide their faces.^[1]

The Dutch historian Johan Huizinga described the tomb as the "most profound expression of mourning known in art, a funeral march in stone."^[2] The pleurants were commissioned to resemble those in the Tomb of Philip the Bold.^[3]

Description

The mourners stand sixteen inches high and originally occupied niches around the tomb of Philip the Bold (1342-1404), the first Duke of Burgundy, his son, John the Fearless (1371-1419), the second Duke of Burgundy, and John's wife, Margaret of Bavaria (1363-1423). The original location was Champmo

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Claus Sluter

The Dutch-Burgundian sculptor Claus Sluter (ca. 1350-1405/1406) was the most important northern European sculptor of his age. He restored figural sculpture to its former monumental scale. He is considered a pioneer of "northern realism."

Claus Sluter was born in Haarlem. Records indicate that by 1380 he was active in the stonecutters' guild in Brussels. The present state of our knowledge does not afford a satisfactory answer to the question of his training and the formative influences on his style. It is conjectured that in this early period he worked on a set of seated prophets for the Brussels Town Hall.

Sluter's first certain activity occurred in 1385, when Philip the Bold called him to the court at Dijon to assist Jean de Marville in the design and preparation of statues for the facade of the chapel at the Chartreuse de Champmol, a nearby Carthusian monastery founded as a place of interment for the ducal succession. Whatever the nature of Sluter's apprenticeship, he apparently arrived at Dijon a complete master of his craft. At Marville's death in 1389, Sl

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Generally speaking, Europe (or at least most of the European countries with the exception, in some aspects, of Italy) was during the course of two centuries essentially “Gothic” under the influence of French styles. But since the end of the 13th century or the beginning of the 14th, artists grew more and more interested in the study of the natural forms, which implied realism that little by little became more perceptible and apparent in artworks. This artistic trend was apparent in both France and the Germanic countries with the spread of the new pictorial wave of the international Gothic style at the beginning of the 15th century. Meanwhile in Italy, all these processes ultimately led to a momentous change: the Renaissance explosion.

As the 15th century progressed, that phenomenon of transformation accelerated. While the flamboyant architectural style triumphed especially in the northern regions of France and above all in the southern regions of the Lower Countries, the Renaissance ideas finally flew into Florence in a completely new environment: in architectural t