Autour de l'atelier des frères Maurins CHAPEL... Lot 5

Autour de l'atelier des frères Maurins CHAPEL WITH DRONERIES decoration Southwest France, Montauban region, second half of the 14th century Marble from Saint-Béat (Haute-Garonne) H. 56 cm ; W. 48 cm ; D. 32.5 cm This piece of architecture, made of Saint-Béat marble, was once placed at the reception of the arches in the cloister of a convent in the Montauban region, topping a pair of colonnettes. It has an important sculpted decoration, evocative of the funny things painted in the margins of illuminated manuscripts of the Gothic period. Under the molded abacus, two bands are decorated with large fat leaves centered on a figure. On one side, in the upper register, the face of a jester can be recognised by its moon-like face emerging from a hood with bells (fig. 1), while in the lower register there is a creature with pointed ears. On the opposite side, the mitred bust of a bishop towers over the head of a canon wearing a mantle (Fig. 2). Because of its structure and iconography, our capital is to be compared with a group of geminated capitals attributed to the Maurins brothers and their followers. These sculptors, active in the Midi-Pyrénées in the second half of the 14th century, seem to have run a large-scale workshop. Céline Brugeat-Peuffier gives them the double capitals of the Bonnefont cloister, now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York, one of which is decorated on one side with a funny creature with big ears and an acrobatic jester (Fig. 3). Another capital from the cloister of the Cordeliers in Montauban has a composition closer to ours, with its face stamped with a strange canon flanked by thick foliage at the corners (fig. 4).