Schuurmans, Mirthe
(2023)
The mystery of the foliate head in paint.
Master thesis, M Religion and Cultural Heritage.
Abstract
Foliate heads are present in and outside of churches and secular buildings all over Europe, and after Lady Raglan coined them ‘Green Man’ in 1939, their popularity in the United Kingdom
dramatically increased. However, little to no academic literature is available about Dutch foliate heads. Various explanations of the function of these foliate heads in British churches have been discussed: some say they operated as decorative, liminal images; others that they are folkloric images that managed to find their way into church buildings. Most literature on foliate heads focuses on sculpted or carved foliate heads, which is the form in which they most commonly appear. Foliate heads, however, also exist in metalwork, tile decoration, stained glass windows, and paintings. This thesis centres on seven Dutch churches that display painted foliate heads dating from the late fifteenth century until the first half of the sixteenth century. Fieldwork has been conducted in order to analyse the foliate heads in terms of iconography, observe their type and location in the church and collect historic information and photographic documentation. In each case information gathered from the fieldwork and literature review forms the basis of a short historical overview of the church and its paintings. A detailed description and internal comparison are provided based on the following characteristics of the foliate heads: the location in the church, the date, the type, the species, the type of foliage, the use of colour and other figures nearby. Using this information a table was created and with this table comparative analysis was conducted. Throughout this study, it became clear that the foliate head is not uniform in its particulars. It has a wide variety in style, location, type, size, species and material. It seems that although the overall idea and principle of the foliate head was widespread and well known, there were no real rules about how this figure should look or how it should interact with the foliage, which accounts for its many forms.
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