Souffleur, what is the meaning of 'Emergency name'?
Reliekostensorium van Onze-Lieve-Vrouw (keerzijde), Meester met kruikje, Leuven, 1570 © foto: Dominique Provost voor meemoo. Art in Flanders
SOUFFLEUR
Emergency name
Like all domains, art has its own vocabulary. In ‘Souffleur', employees of M explain and give background to professional terms that may sound familiar to you, but of which you may not know, or no longer know, exactly what they mean.
Reliekostensorium van Onze-Lieve-Vrouw (keerzijde), Meester met kruikje, Leuven, 1570 © foto: Dominique Provost voor meemoo. Art in Flanders
Ko Goubert, collection registrar: "There are quite a few works of art whose creator is not known by name. Sometimes we get no further than an approximate demarcation such as 'Antwerp School' or 'Southern Netherlands'. In other cases, we have better leads, but the identity of the creator remains unknown."
"Then we use an emergency name. We do that in different ways. Sometimes we refer to a key work. Other works can then be attributed to the same master on the basis of stylistic, compositional and/or material-technical similarities. This is the case, for example, with the Master of the St. Nicolas Triptych, a work that probably originated in the St. Peter's Church here in Leuven and is now kept in the KMSKB in Brussels. Sometimes we also refer to the place where the work of art is kept, for example the Master of Hakendover."
"An emergency name can also refer to the mark or monogram with which the maker signed. For goldsmithing , for example, it is common practice to use elements of the silversmith's master's mark as a fallback name: Master with jar, Master with skull, Master KW..."
"Sometimes, once we have done some research, we can be more specific with the emergency name, or even discover that it has been wrongly assigned. This was the case, for example, with research carried out in connection with our exhibition 'Borman and Sons. The best sculptors.” Work that had previously been attributed to the fictitious Master of Christ on the Cold Stone actually turned out to be the work of Jan I and Jan II Borman, the most important family of sculptors from late-Gothic Brabant."
