Our very last flying buttress figurine!

The Faith

The very last

Four flying buttresses on the north side

Well honestly I hope it's not the very last ever, but we are finished and done at the Eusebius Church in Arnhem. After having copied 83 flying buttress figurines the job's over, unfortunately.

There were actually still 13 more to go, but those sculptures are to be replaced by a modern work of art by Arno Coenen. New decorations, inspired by the existing flying buttress images. The old figurines apparently were too weathered to save.

So we recently completed the last three figurines: Jelle made man with a watering can, I got to carve the two-headed eagle and Stide would be the one to finish the last statue from arc no. 23 out of new limestone, The Faith. One of the Seven Virtues. But because Stide is currently very busy with other things, he didn't get around to it anymore and I got to finish this one. It depicts a woman with a wavy hairstyle and a cross in her hand.

Overview and retrospect

Sculpture The Night by Eduard van Kuilenburg- new copy in Muschelkalk limestone

Corbel Stone of The Night

What sculptures have we been carving for the Eusebius Church over the past seven years now? Actually too much to mention. If you click on the following link you can find all the sculptures I got to carve for the Eusebius Church, including the over 50 flying buttress figurines I got my hands on. But Stide has also copied all kinds of sculptures from its tower for years and carved eight flying buttress statues, and since 2018 Jelle has also been closely involved and has, among other things, copied 24 flying buttress statues and made ornaments on pinnacles.

A bit of an acquired taste

The Arch with Six Apostles

It was a beautiful assignment. At first I wrinkled my nose a bit at the sculptures of the Eusebius Church. It all stemmed from after the war and was very expressively carved in a coarse tuffstone. But I needed to get to know it a bit before the appreciation came. I was used to the particularly detailed sculptures from earlier periods, such as those I saw from, for example, St John's Cathedral in Den Bosch, The Netherlands, or from the castles of Twickel and Cannenburgh. But this directly carved work has conquered a place in my heart, especially after we copied the Seven Sins and the Apostles in later years.

Educational project

Apostles and musicians

We immediately dived into carving other sculptural and ornamental work again, that's just how it goes, but i will miss these flying buttress figurines. Of course it has also guaranteed us a stable income for years. But most importantly, we enjoyed working on it so much, and it also taught me a lot about composition and storytelling. Because that's one thing that these flying buttress figurines evoke: we've often had conversations about what moved the original sculptor to represent a theme in a certain way, about the composition of the entire group of sculptures together, about attributes and themes and how we would have tackled this ourselves if we had been asked that question.