Baptismal font

This man’s head is made of dark grey limestone. It must have belonged to a larger sculpture. It is executed in a fairly coarse style, with numerous straight lines and traces of the hacking strokes in the hard stone. Because of this, it looks somewhat ‘unfinished’ to our eyes. Its dimensions, the type of stone and the style all indicate that the head must have been a corner decoration of a Romanesque baptismal font. It may have been made in northern France. Baptismal fonts of this kind were very popular in the Low Countries. Some have survived intact in Dutch churches, especially in the Maasland region.