An eagle with a goblet of poison?
Of the four corbels I'm carving for the tower of the St. Eusebius's Church in Arnhem (the Netherlands) and copying in new stone, I got to carve the eagle last week. As I already explained in explained earlier the Eagle symbolizes St. John the evangelist.
To the right the scroll can be found again, as a symbol of the Gospel that John wrote, and to the left of the picture you see a goblet with a snake crawling out (though its head has disappeared). I had seen depictions of the evangelists before, but haven't seen the poisoned cup before.
I didn't understand it at first, because as far as I knew John was the only disciple of Jesus who had died a natural death. But luckily you can gather quite a lot of information from the Internet and so I found an article (in Dutch) that mentions two legends: one about a penalty with boiling oil and one about a poisoned cup. John survived both of them. And so I've just learned something new again.!
Also in this case the original is in Ettringer tuff stone from Germany and the copy is in Muschelkalk, a coarse German limestone which fits well with the new Weiberner tufa around it, and with the design of the reliefs.
I gave the eagle a somewhat fiercer look, and brought some life into the feathers with the tooth chisel. In the copy I kept the simple and rather coarse character of the original.
Nasty the first message about this restoration project.
Nasty the first flying buttress statueā
Nasty the next corbelā
