The Swoon of the Virgin, from a Calvary Scene

Entry

This polychromed relief once formed the left section of a pipeclay scene of the Crucifixion. The swooning figure of Mary appears at the centre, with John supporting her directly from behind. Rear left, three saintly female figures appear. Like John, the woman far left gazes up at the cross. Two soldiers on the upper right are doing the same: the front figure, Longinus, is the Roman soldier who pierced Christ’s flank with his lance. The second soldier, wearing a coat of mail, assists the blind Longinus in aiming his spear, of which only the lower section has survived. The upper section was presumably made of another material, such as wood or metal.

At least four virtually identical scenes survive to this day. The first example is preserved in the parish church of the French village Saint-Agnan-sur-Erre, the second in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Chartres,¹ the third in the Museo Arqueológico Nacional in Madrid, and the fourth in the monastery of San Antonio el Real in Segovia, Spain.² This latter work belongs to a Passion altarpiece, bricked into the chapel wall, comprising three reliefs: the Calvary in the centre, and the Carrying of the Cross and Deposition flanking on either side. At the centre of the Calvary scene (fig. a) is the crucified figure of Christ on the cross, with Mary Magdalene appearing at its foot. Left of the cross is a scene of the Swoon of the Virgin; right of the cross is a group of Pharisees and Roman soldiers. Each of the two outer reliefs contains a cross bearing one of the two thieves, Gestas and Dismas, tried at the same time as Christ. The Amsterdam relief is certain to have functioned in the same kind of ensemble: the onset of a cross rear centre confirms a similar iconography.

Although the style of the figures in the present relief is somewhat cruder than that of the figures in the Utrecht altarpiece known as the Retable of St Lambert,³ this pipeclay work, like a comparable swooning Virgin in the collection of the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam,⁴ can also be attributed to a Utrecht workshop. Also noteworthy in this context is the similarity, especially discernible in the drapery folds, to a pipeclay fragment of a relief with the Swoon of the Virgin in the collection of the Centraal Museum in Utrecht.⁵ The fact that this fragment was unearthed during the demolition of the Utrecht city ramparts in 1844 confirms its identification as a work produced in this city. Utrecht was unquestionably an important centre for the fabrication of pipeclay devotional objects, as affirmed by the vast quantities of moulds, misfires and (remnants of) pipeclay sculptures unearthed there. More recent archaeological evidence, however, shows that the mass production of pipeclay sculpture also occurred in other cities, including Amsterdam, Leiden, Deventer, Kampen, Antwerp, Liège and Cologne.⁶

Ingmar Reesing, 2012 (updated by Bieke van der Mark, 2024)
This entry was originally published in M. Leeflang et al., Middeleeuwse beelden uit Utrecht 1430-1530, exh. cat. Utrecht (Museum Catharijneconvent)/Aachen (Suermondt-Ludwig-Museum) 2012-13, no. 22