Claus Sluter: The Simultaneous Realist-Spiritualist
Claus Sluter was born c. 1340, in what is now The Netherlands, and he died at some point between Sept. 24, 1405 and Jan. 30, 1406, in Dijon, Burgundy (now in France). Sluter was an influential master of early Netherlandish sculpture, who moved beyond the dominant French taste of the time and into highly individual monumental, naturalistic forms.
The works of Sluter are infused with a simultaneous realism, spirituality and monumental grandeur. His influence was far reaching, among both painters and sculptors of 15th-century northern Europe. From ducal archives, he is known to have entered the service of Philip II the Bold, duke of Burgundy, in around 1385. Philip II was ruler of the Netherlands and regent of France in the last decades of the century.
Spiritualist and naturalist in one, Sluter epitomized in sculpture the growing awareness of an individualized nature with discoverable laws and an enduring grandeur.