Michel Lefftz

For the past twenty years, my scientific work has focused mainly on relief art and religious furniture. My ambition is to contribute to a better understanding of the artistic heritage of the Middle Ages and Modern Times by perfecting analysis methods and compiling catalogues of works. As early as 1990, the sheer volume of material collected during my doctoral thesis - some 5,000 sculptures - necessitated the development of analysis tools adapted to morphological characterisation in order to organise this immense corpus and select the 1,500 sculptures that would find their way into the thirteen monographs on Liège's baroque sculptors of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I subsequently drew up or completed catalogues of sculptors from the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries: the Master of the Sedes in the church of Saint-Jean in Liège, the Pseudo Gilles of Liège, the Master of the Calvary of Waha, the Master of the Calvary of Waha, Balthazar, the Master of Elsloo, the Thonons, Thomas Tollet, Guyot de Beaugrant, Ligier Richier and the Borman dynasty. Most of these artists' monographs were produced for exhibitions. Over the years, more than 2,000 new sculptures have been attributed.

In addition to the prosopographical aspect and the compilation of catalogues of works, the aim is to understand the transfer of ideas and forms, as well as the place of art and artists from the former Southern Netherlands within Europe.