( fl c. 1510–30). French sculptor. He worked in the Champagne region, near Troyes. Koechlin and Marquet de Vasselot named him the Master of St Martha, after a celebrated stone statue of St Martha in the church of La Madeleine, Troyes. The serenity of this figure, its seriousness of expression and the fluidity of its draperies made an original departure from the stiffness of Late Gothic sculpture. Devaux (1956) identified similar characteristics in the Entombment (Chaource, St Jean-Baptiste), a stone group produced in 1515 for Nicolas de Moustier, Captain of Chaource; he consequently named the artist the Master of Chaource. the Entombment is among the most poignant examples of the genre. It still conforms to the Gothic tradition, but, in the grouping of the figures and their naturalness of movement and gesture, the sculptor has introduced a new expressiveness and a dramatic tension. The sober and statuesque style and the distinctive facial type, with flat planes of the forehead, cheeks and chin, are found in a number of other examples of sculpture from this period, such as the Pietà in St Jean, Troyes, and two groups of Donors with Saints (Troyes, St Nicolas). The composition of the Entombment and Deposition in the church of Villeneuve-L’Archevêque, which came from the Cistercian abbey of Vauluisant, clearly shows the influence of Italian examples, while the two Holy Women (New York, Cloisters) may be the work of a follower. The work of the Master of Chaource shows the persistence of the Gothic spirit, while more decorative, emphatic and mannered tendencies were gradually developing. Devaux (1959 and 1970) has proposed that the Master of Chaource may have been Nicolas Halins ( fl 1502/3–41).

Part of the Masters, anonymous, and monogrammists family