Corbel: Fat man with ears of corn

The next corbel for the Eusebius Tower the head of a man holding ears of corn. The tuffstone original was a bit damaged and missed part of his nose. Before I began carving in new Muschelkalksteen I first reconstructed with plastiline clay his nose, so I had some idea of what I was about to make. Plastiline is clay that never hardens, so I can easily remove it again after work.

Theme and finishing

I do not know quite what the theme of these heads is; there are two women (with tulips and doves) and three men (with a falcon?, corn and owls). But in any case, the representation is consistent.

I carved the last man's head quite coarse to resemble the weathered head, but I finished this man with ears of corn with a coarse rasp to do justice to the smoother look of the original. As you can see the hands with the cornstalks all fall within a single large circular area. From there point on I could quite easily copy the major shapes with a template. These are very nice objects to carve, because I like the search for the character of the head in question. The whole thing has not much artistic pretense, which is actually sort of a given with architectural sculpture. Often there is a certain playfulness and not much pretension. I think it is unfortunate that we completely banned architectural sculpture from the street scene. Apart from a single project, for example, the Haarlem gable stone reliefs. More about corbels later!

Nasty the next corbel.