Saint Luke's bull

As I mentioned earlier, these weeks I'm still busy carving corbels for St Eusebius' Church in Arnhem, for its tower to be exact. Last week the (large) blocks for the four evangelists arrived, and now the relief with the bull is finished.

This symbolism comes from the Book of Revelation, in which St. John writes that in a vision he sees four beings standing before the throne of God:  “Right before the throne and surrounding it were four creatures, that from the front and the rear were all eyes .  The first being looked like a lion and the second like a young bull; the third had a face like a human and the fourth looked like a flying eagle.“(Revelation 4:6+7)

These four creatures have since long ago been interpreted as the four Gospels or the writers of the four Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. That's why these four also appear on the Eusebius church: The lion stands for St. Mark, the bull for Luke, the angel or man is Matthew and John himself is the eagle.

These are quite large blocks of stone; I've not actually measured them but I estimate that they are about sixty centimeters wide. Because the bull was in front, that was the one I took first, and that is now finished. Aside from a little more detail in the wings and sharper details I didn't change much on this one. And now St. Mark is placed on the block, and from that too I will take a snapshot later.

Strangely enough, all these eyes are never shown. I suspect even in the early days they already realized that it's all meant symbolic or allegorical.

Just as the previous one, smaller corbels, the original is in tuff stone and is starting to crumble away (with the danger of falling debris in coming years), and the copy is from the same course Muschelkalk. First I started with cutting away some unnecessary bulk mass, then with the pointing machine I transferred a number of points , and from there I carved the rest of it mostly by eyeballing, in order to preserve the directness of the original.

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To the first message about this restoration project.