Head and Back of a Female Saint (Virgin and Child?)

Entry

Restoration work in the tower of the Oude Kerk in Soest in 1905 uncovered in a bricked-up area an important treasure trove of statues, albeit in a deplorable condition.² It is assumed that the sculptures were hidden there either in 1566 at the outbreak of the Iconoclasm or in December 1580, when Calvinists in the Eemland region endeavoured to destroy every last remnant of religious art.³ Alongside wooden carvings there were a great many pieces of pipeclay figurines, including this head and back of a relatively large figure of a saint, in all likelihood a standing Virgin and Child.⁴ Remnants of red paint were found on the lips and there are traces of gilding on the hair, indicating that the figure was originally polychromed.

Pipeclay figures were mass-produced in moulds. This efficient production method, together with the cheapness of the material, made these small figurines of saints popular objects for private devotions by lay people, nuns and monks. Larger works, such as the present figure, were also placed in churches as an alternative to costly one-off statues in wood or stone. In the Centraal Museum in Utrecht there is a still complete standing Virgin and Child (fig. a). The statue, more than half a metre tall, is made of polychromed terracotta (red-firing clay). It has an identical face and the same pleated gown across the breast, with a round neck and narrow collar.⁵ On the basis of the style reminiscent of Adriaen van Wesel (c. 1417-in or after 1490), the folds, the sweet face with the high forehead and the long, waving tresses, the prototype underlying both works is placed in Utrecht, around 1470-80.⁶ The head type and the treatment of the hair in these works are at the same time akin to those of a figure of the Virgin on a sandstone roof boss in Museum Catharijneconvent in Utrecht,⁷ and a head of a woman dredged up from the river Vecht near the district of Lauwerecht in Utrecht.⁸

The pipeclay figure of which the present fragments were part was probably made by a specialist beeldendrucker (statue-squeezer) or heyligenbacker (saint-firer) in Utrecht, which is not far from Soest. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries this cathedral city was an important centre of sculpture and one of the leading sites for the production of pipeclay. The possibility that the figure was made elsewhere with moulds taken from a model made in Utrecht cannot, however, be ruled out. Finds excavated in Amersfoort, which is even closer to Soest, indicate that pipeclay figurines were ‘pressed’ there as well.⁹

Bieke van der Mark, 2024