Zyfflich

Noted and illustrated in Weerth (1857) as a Romanesque baptismal font of the 12th century. In Otte (1883) [after Weerth]. Enlart (1902: 777n1, 771n3) lists this font as a "fonts à cinq supports de Tournai" [=Tournai font on a 5-column base]. Listed as a Tournai font in Bond (1908: 205), who cites Enlart as source. Drake (2002: 176), a reliable source on Tournai fonts, classes it as a Mosan font of an exception type: "round tub font, near hemispherical, with small salient heads". A communication from Pol Herman to BSI (e-mail of 10 September 2022) adds: "In Zyfflich stands a Mosan baptismal font that is difficult to date. In 1857, Ernst Aus’m Weerth published a drawing of it, and the font then had a central shaft and four corner columns. On the 16th of December 1944, the church was destroyed by a bombardment, and only the basin survived. Reconstruction of the church started in 1950, and archaeological excavations were done. Among other things, a baptismal font (round structure with tufa walls and a base diameter of 3 meters) from the original monastery church was discovered (built 1014-1016, certainly finished 1021). The basin had an internal diameter of 224 cm. The report of these finds is in : “Der Grundungsbau der Stiftskirche St. Martin in Zyfflich“ bei Leo Schaefer in Die Kunstdenkmäler des Rheinlandes, Beiheft 9, Essen, 1963 [no way to find this on Internet.] This means that the Mosan font is younger. I would estimate late Romanesque because of the form of the basin, or early gothic because of the moulding above the heads. Probably later in the 13th century?"