The Virgin and Child with St Anne

Entry

In the late Middle Ages, a local ‘industry’ centring on the production of simple saintly statuettes, available in a uniform number of iconographic types, flourished in the city of Mechelen. Given the many examples surviving today, this production is certain to have occurred on a massive scale.³ Referred to as poupées de Malines (Mechelen dolls), these figures derive their name from their full-round faces and doll-like features. After the Virgin and Child, by far the most predominant themes were small groups of the Virgin and Child with St Anne (also known as St Anne Trinity, or in Dutch Anna-te-Drieeën) and statuettes of St Catherine and St Barbara. As established by the St Luke’s Guild of Mechelen, the wood and the polychromy were subjected to very strict quality standards. If meeting this standard, appraisers applied the city’s quality mark to the figure’s reverse – three vertical pales (from the city’s coat of arms) – thus conveying the inspection and approval of both the wood and the carving itself. The presence of the letter ‘M’ (for Mechelen), stamped or branded in front, signified the same for the polychromy. As freestanding works, the completed ‘dolls’ chiefly functioned as objects of saintly veneration. In rare cases, these figurines were displayed in special retables conceived as Enclosed Gardens (Besloten Hofjes), filled with hand-made silk flowers and a wide variety of miniature objects, devoltionalia and decorations in different media, such as saintly relics, metal pilgrim badges, wax medallions, glass-blown grapes, parchment, alabaster, pipeclay, pearls, amber and coral.⁴

The Rijksmuseum purchased the present group, together with a large number of other sculptures, from the Maria Refugie convent in Uden in 1875. This was the immediate successor of the Bridgettine abbey Mariënwater, a double abbey in Koudewater shut down in 1713. The founder of the Bridgettine order, Birgitta of Sweden, was a key propagator of the veneration of Mary’s mother, St Anne.⁵ For this reason, the St Anne Trinity was a popular theme for Bridgettine devotees. Given its modest size, the present Virgin and Child with St Anne clearly served as an object of private devotion, likely in one of the abbey’s cells. The same can be said of a second, almost identical group in the Rijksmuseum, as well from the convent of Maria Refugie, which bears the Mechelen quality mark for wood on the reverse.⁶ Both objects testify to the large-scale production of devotional figures that occurred in Mechelen primarily during the first half of the sixteenth century. Details such as the flat rendering of the drapery folds indicate the present work dates from the later phase of this production. Contrary to a majority of the St Anne Trinity groups, the Virgin in the present group sits on Anne’s left forearm as opposed to her right.⁷ As the socles accompanying these serially produced Mechelen ‘dolls’ were often prefabricated, the fit is sometimes less than perfect. Accordingly, the separately carved, profiled socle on the present work may very well be original, despite the ill match with the reverse. While no quality marks have ever been discerned on either the figurine or socle, they may possibly lie hidden beneath the inept overpainting that currently covers its entire surface.

Bieke van der Mark, 2024