Résumé
The Brummer collection of medieval art at the Duke University Museum of Art includes an important group of French Romanesque and Gothic architectural sculpture of unknown provenance. During 1990 and 1991, samples of stone from twenty-three of these limestone sculptures were subjected to neutron activation analysis and their trace-element concentrations were compared to samples from quarries and sculpture from the Paris region and Burgundy already in a database at Brookhaven National Laboratory. This compositional study confirmed the recent attributions of a head identified as that of a Theological Virtue and a head of a patriarch or prophet to the cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris. A Romanesque mask-and-foliage capital, which was also assigned to the Notre-Dame group, is closely related in composition to samples from the twelfth-century portions of the abbey church of Saint-Denis. It may come from a site at which stone from the same quarry as Notre-Dame was used, a quarry as yet unidentified. Two corbels with human heads, once thought to be from the Ile-de-France and Normandy, respectively, have been shown to resemble the compositions of a group of twenty-five sculptures from the destroyed abbey of Moutiers-Saint-Jean in Burgundy. By participating in the neutron activation study of limestone, the Duke University Museum of Art has been able to determine the provenance of several enigmatic pieces as well as to establish the relationship between Brummer sculptures at Duke and those sold to other museums.