Wermelskirchen

Listed in Drake (2002) as a Mosan font of the round-bowl on multisupport group 2b, a large group to which well-known fonts such as Gerpinnes, Herpen, Laon, Nouvion-sur-Meuse, St-Severin-en-Condroz, and many others belong: "Among the trachyte fonts, but neither 'suspended', nor a cylinder, is Wermelskirchen. It is in fact like Herkenrath, a typical Namur font on five supports with decorated panels between the salient heads, including a dragon, a winged dragon, a pair of lions' bodies sharing a single head, and the Lamb and flag. Being made of local stone but in the Namur style, it is perhaps the work of an itinerant mason." [NB: in addition to the items mentioned in Drake above, the side with the Agnus Dei has also a dove (?) drinking from a vessel that looks like a baptismal font]. An article in the RGA [RemscheiderGeneral-Anzeiger [www.rga.de/lokales/wermelskirchen/schatten-licht-4191838.html] [accessed 10 February 2016] informs that the font here was probably discarded after being damaged in a 1756 fire in which the roof collapsed onto the nave; the surviving basin, one of the heads missing, was relegated to the garden of the Schumacher family; an offer was made in 1932 by Dr. Friedrich Schumacher to return the font to the church but the offer went ignored; the font was eventually restored by Wolf Münninghoff in 2001 using Namur stone for the base, although the basin itself is made of trachyte from the nearby Siebengebirge quarries, as identified by Dr. Hans-Gerd Schöneweiß, who suggested a date of 1180 for the font, the same as the date of the lower part of the tower.