The Virgin and Child
May one see it?
Not receiving at present
Victoria and Albert Museum
London, United Kingdom
It belongs to the collection, but is not on display at present.
- Checked
- In this state since
- Source
- The museum
About the sculpture
This statuette in ivory of the Virgin and Child was made in the 19th century in Germany as a forgery in the style of the late 15th or beginning of 16th century. On acquisition the statuette was believed to be Flemish, from the end of 15th or early 16th century. It remained unpublished until 1981, when it was included in the Dürer revival exhibition in Frankfurt as a retrospective piece of the early 17th century and said to derive from a painting by Cranach in Innsbruck. Everything here though points to a nineteenth-century origin. For instance, the facture of the piece, with no obvious signs of wear or of fixing to a background, is inconsistent with a late medieval date. The figure demonstrates a mixing of sources by the nineteenth century forger.
Read on
Three dimensional images of the Virgin and Child were ubiquitous from the 12th to the 15thh centuries, produced in a wide range of materials and sizes and testifying to the overwhelming devotion to the Virgin. Together with the Crucifixion, statues and statuettes of the Virgin and Child were the principal objects of devotion in the Christian Church, and vast numbers were made for ecclesiastical, monastic and private worship.
Victoria and Albert Museum
Particulars
- Accession number
- A.19-1949
