Virgin and Child

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.¹ 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.²

This statuette of the Virgin and Christ Child has unfortunately sustained major woodworm damage. In her hair, Mary wears a coiled pearl headband. The Mechelen wood quality mark is branded on the sculpture’s flat reverse. Other examples of this specific sculptural type which entails a fairly large Christ Child wearing a long chemise, positioned semi-recumbent with the legs extending horizontally to the right, can be found in Moulins (France), Rotterdam and Maastricht.³ The Christ Child of these carvings typically holds a rosary or small bird. On the present statuette, much of the child’s upper torso has been lost, rendering the attribute he might have held indeterminable. The figure is dated circa 1515-30, based on the trapezoidal neckline and the shallow folds of Mary’s dress.

Bieke van der Mark, 2024