Chapter 24. Lübeck [October 15, 1347] Cultural Explanations

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	In this chapter Bávlos arrives in Lübeck and meets a man named Simon.
Ship arriving in Lübeck

In this chapter, Bávlos witnesses the mass production of statuary that made Lübeck such an important city in the Christian art trade. Where Master Claes produced one statue at a time, perhaps with the assistance of a single or several apprentices, Master Hans produces his statues in a kind of assembly line. Although such production is generally associated with twentieth-century factories, medieval workshops in Lübeck seem to have been well along the way toward creating an assembly-line system during the fourteenth century. We can tell from the statues produced in Lübeck (and today found in churches throughout Northern Europe) that carvers used basic forms for saints, adding attributes secondarily to help viewers recognize which saint was being depicted. So the same statue could serve as a St. Barbara or a St. Catherine, depending on the objects placed in her hands or the colors used in painting it. Statues were made in pieces, with apprentices working on smaller parts like hands and feet, and master carvers working on prime elements of the sculpture, like heads. Then the pieces were assembled to produce a whole. In this way, workshops could produce many more statues in the same amount of time and employ a larger workforce. For Bávlos, this is a completely new concept of production unlike anything he would know from his life within a hunter-gatherer society on the northern periphery of Europe. But it is a way of life that he is going to learn lots more about in coming chapters.