Two Standing Apostles (probably Saint John the Evangelist and St. Paul) (c. 1430): Art, History and Details

Two Standing Apostles (probably Saint John the Evangelist and St. Paul) (c. 1430) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Master of the Saint-Omer Apostles (Southern Netherlandish, active Bruges?).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

The two sculptures come from an altarpiece in the cathedral of Saint Omer in northern France. Four other figures have been preserved there, and possibly one at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The workshop was probably located in Bruges, in what is now Belgium. Sculpture was the leading art genre at that time. The specialized workshops obtained the stone alabaster from distant quarries, in this case from the area of Würzburg in Bavaria (Germany), to form it intricately and deliver it to customers in almost all of Europe.

Object facts

• Title: Two Standing Apostles (probably Saint John the Evangelist and St. Paul)
• Date: c. 1430
• Creator attribution: Master of the Saint-Omer Apostles (Southern Netherlandish, active Bruges?)
• Culture: Southern Netherlands or Northern France
• Type: Sculpture
• Technique: Alabaster
• Dimensions: Overall: 23.7 x 9.3 x 5.8 cm (9 5/16 x 3 11/16 x 2 5/16 in.); Overall: 23.7 x 10.2 x 5.9 cm (9 5/16 x 4 x 2 5/16 in.)
• Collection: MED - Gothic
• Department: Medieval Art
• Accession number: 2022.41

A detail from the museum

Alabaster is very soft; after 20 minutes of treatment with water the surface will dissolve.

Collection credit

Severance and Greta Millikin Purchase Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Van Drival, Eugène. Catalogue de l'exposition d'objets d'art religieux: ouverte à Lille en 1874. Bishops Stortford, Herts: Chadwyck-Healey, 1874.
• Kunsthalle Köln, Schnütgen-Museum, Belgium, and Musées royaux d'art et d'histoire (Belgium). Rhein Und Maas: Kunst Und Kultur, 800-1400. 1972.
• Steyaert, John William, and Monique Tahon-Vanroose. Late Gothic Sculpture: The Burgundian Netherlands. Ghent: Ludion Press, 1994.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.