Virgin and Child on the Crescent Moon

Entry

As Leeuwenberg suggested, this figure may originally have been part of a Marianum.² The above-average height of 140 centimeters, the closed outline, the flat reverse and the termination in a crescent moon at the bottom are all indications pointing in this direction. A Marianum usually consists of two statues of the Virgin placed back to back, standing on a crescent moon, surrounded by sunbeams and ringed by a rosary.³ The whole thing was suspended high in the ceiling of the nave, so that the faithful had a good view of one of the Virgins whether they were at the front or the back of the church.

The present Virgin wears a garment with a bodice with deep, vertical folds above the girdle, falling below the waist in generous folds over the crescent moon. Around her shoulders she has a cloak secured with bands across the breast and slung across the body like an apron. The Virgin’s eyelids fall noticeably far over her eyes, so that the pupils that would have originally been painted on would have been directed downwards – another indication that the figure was positioned high up. The naked baby has a sturdy, plump body and with one hand grasps the Virgin’s veil, which has a fringed edge. We do not know what the Virgin was holding in her missing left hand. A replacement hand, holding a sceptre, was made and attached in the nineteenth century, and a wooden crown was placed on the Virgin’s head (fig. a). These replacements were removed shortly before the Rijksmuseum purchased the piece in 1953. The present crown, probably Belgian, dates from the nineteenth century and was added to the statue by the museum.

In the facial type with refined, sharply defined eyes and deep corners of the mouth, the motif of the reaching Christ Child and the Virgin’s heavy robes with creased V-shaped folds in the front, the statue is akin to the figures of the Virgin in a stylistically coherent group around the statue of St Ursula and her Virgins in the Amsterdam Begijnhof.⁴ In an example belonging to this ‘Ursula group’ (fig. b) in Museum Catharijneconvent in Utrecht,⁵ the Virgin wears the same fringed headdress as the figure discussed here. On the other hand, the figures in the Ursula group are of rather more slender proportions and superior quality. The Amsterdam figure, furthermore, does not have the characteristic a-symmetrical fold patterns of these saints, created by holding their robe up under one arm. Instead, she uses both arms to lift her garment. Van Vlierden thought that an origin for the Amsterdam figure in the County of Holland, as Leeuwenberg had suggested earlier, was the most likely.⁶ The similarity to a Virgin on the Crescent Moon (formerly in the Schouten Collection), which came from a church in the North Holland city of Hoorn, would tend to support this.⁷ On the other hand, Van Vlierden placed the more sophisticated figures in the Ursula group that Leeuwenberg and Bouvy had likewise located in Holland, in the city of Utrecht, a position that is generally accepted in the recent literature.⁸

The Amsterdam figure most closely resembles a smaller Virgin and Child on the Crescent Moon that belonged to the parish of De Goorn in the Province of North Holland (fig. c).⁹ There are striking similarities between the figures, among other things in the pose of the Virgin and Child, the V-shaped folds, the tight pleats on the bodice, the fringed veil slipping off, the Virgin’s oval face with its long, straight nose and the hair springing out at the temples. The pictorial motif of the infant clutching the Virgin’s veil also occurs in the figure from De Goorn, although the child uses his other hand and he is not naked but clothed in a shift.¹⁰ Given the tightly laced high waist, the figure from De Goorn, like the statues in the Ursula group, would have been made between around 1460 and 1480. In the present figure, it is somewhat lower and looser, suggesting a date in the last quarter of the fifteenth century.

Bieke van der Mark, 2024