Virgin and Child

Entry

The Virgin appears as the Woman of the Apocalypse, cradling the Christ Child in her hands. She stands on the schematic representation of a crescent moon, with its upturned ends now broken off, and a cloud. In her role as Queen of Heaven, Mary tramples the devil beneath her feet, thus representing her triumph over evil as told in Revelation 12. The emphatic crossing of the Christ Child’s legs refers to his later crucifixion and death on the cross. The bunch of grapes in his left hand alludes not only to the blood that flowed at this time, but also Christ’s blood turned into wine during the sacrament of the Eucharist.

Based on considerations of style, the sculpture’s origin has shifted back and forth between Utrecht and the Lower Rhine region. The sharp, graphic execution of the carving, however, as well as the organisation of the complex drapery folds and the form of the face, with its characteristically broad forehead, are more reminiscent of Lower Rhenish and eastern Netherlandish sculpture produced around 1530. At the same time, its style lacks pronounced traits necessary for an attribution to a known woodcarver originating from either of these regions. A sculpture from Cleves-Guelders, somewhat similar in both iconography and style, is preserved in the Museum Catharijneconvent in Utrecht.¹

Because the dragon beneath Mary’s feet can only be adequately viewed when looking from below, one may safely conclude that the sculpture, with its flat reverse side, originally stood above eye-level, for instance, higher up in a retable. It could also have been part of a Marianum, a structure that hangs from a ceiling vault bearing two separate statues of the Virgin mounted back-to-back. This particular sculpture, however, is perhaps too small for such a purpose.² A virtually identical figure from the former Van Stolk Collection in Haarlem was identified by De Werd as a possible pendant on the basis of photos (fig. a).³ Nevertheless, he also acknowledged that the latter work might be a nineteenth-century copy, as was indeed the conclusion following an in-depth visual analysis conducted in 2014, involving a direct comparison with the Rijksmuseum piece. Key arguments centred on the misinterpretation of the dragon’s wing, the illogical manner in which his horn converges with Mary’s robe, and the poorly finished, scarcely convincing folds of the draperies on the sides of the sculpture. Another detail is the rather remarkably flat surface of the sculpture’s reverse, as if it had been carved from an old wooden beam.

Guido de Werd, 2004 (updated by Bieke van der Mark, 2024)
This entry was originally published in F. Scholten and G. de Werd, Een hogere werkelijkheid: Duitse en Franse beeldhouwkunst 1200-1600 uit het Rijksmuseum Amsterdam/Eine höhere Wirklichkeit, Deutsche und Französische Skulptur 1200-1600 aus dem Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, exh. cat. Cleves (Museum Kurhaus Kleve) 2004-06, no. 19