Men Shoveling Chairs (Scupstoel)

This remarkable drawing – among the few extant fifteenth-century designs for representational sculpture – is a study for one of three narrative capitals carved for the Brussels town hall between 1444 and 1450. The subject is a pun on the word scupstoel (literally “shovel chair”), a contraption used for public humiliation in which felons were raised above water and then dropped in. Scupstoel was also the name of a house that previously stood on the site of the new wing of the town hall. An inscription on the drawing’s reverse indicates that the drawing served as a patroen, a model that may illustrate an intermediary stage between the preliminary sketch and the detailed pattern used by the sculptors of the capital. Its curved design suggests the three-dimensional form of the capital. Traditionally associated with the circle of Rogier van der Weyden, the renowned Netherlandish master who oversaw a large workshop as town painter of Brussels, the drawing recently has been attributed to Rogier’s successor in this role: the painter Vrancke van der Stockt. A 19th-century reconstruction of the “Scupstoel” capital (after the original, Musée Communal, Brussels) is now on the ground floor arcade, L’Hôtel de Ville, Grande Place, Brussels.