The figures of St. Jerome and St. Gregory, characterized by the realistic rendering of their bony and scorched faces, sagging eyes, as well as by the intellectual superiority of the elders that comes through even in their wretched physical condition, together with the sharply defined folds of their robes that sets the whole composition in motion, are among the major representatives of the school of sculpting marked by the name of Nicolas Gerhaert van Leyden. According to the evidence of the sculptures of the High Altar of Kassa, this school of sculpting arrived in Kassa from Bécsújhely via Buda very early on, sometime around the 1470s. The figures were made around 1480 in the same workshop that produced the high altar of the St. Elizabeth Church in Kassa, and the possibility that originally they, too, were made for the altar, cannot be dismissed. The lion climbing up on St. Jerome's cloak is of Netherlandish origin; examples of it can be found, among other German works of art, on the pulpit from Strassburg.
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