Six statues from the Church of St. Nicholas in Cheb

The faces are dominated by closed and deep-set eyes with distinctive framing, a slender straight nose and full lips.

Her dreamy face has closed and deep-set eyes, a slender and straight nose and a fuller mouth with a protruding lower lip.

Elizabeth of Thuringia was the founder of hospitals and the patroness of the poor, so she is depicted with a kneeling supplicant leaning on a crutch, and with bread in her left hand and a teapot in her right.

Mary Magdalene is holding in both hands a jar of ointment with which, according to Matthew's Gospel, she went to anoint the dead body of Jesus.

The softly sculpted head of the saint with flowing hair is framed on the right side by a veil that falls loosely from the headdress and winds across the chest to the vessel of ointment.

The sculpture has been identified as St. Clare by her bare feet in sandals, her nun's habit girded with rope, her double veil, her wrapped neck, and the bag-bound book she holds in her right hand.

Margaret of Antioch is depicted with a dragon devouring a male figure, probably representing her tormentor, the Roman official Olybrius.

The undergarment is divided by simple vertical folds, and the cloak, held by the left hand, is draped according to an established pattern.

The stylistic orientation to the Zwikov models persisted in Cheb until the second decade of the 16th century, but led to their gradual simplification and rustication (the face of St Henry in the assistant figures of the Lamentation of Seeberg).

[8] From the carving workshop in the nearby Hof, which is based on Freiberg´s sculpture in style, a number of retables have survived in the surrounding villages, which show considerable similarities with those of Cheb in the treatment of faces and the scheme of drapery.

[5] It is probable that Cheb, as a much more important trade centre, exported the retables directly or that some of the carvers went from there to Hof, where the activity of carving workshops is documented only after 1509.

[9][10] For example, the carver Michael Heuffner (1483, Cheb-1511, Zwickau), who trained under Peter Breuer and was the author of the Marian altar (1511) in the hospital church in Hof, came from Cheb.