The Virgin and Child: on view at Victoria and Albert Museum

The group is one of the earliest French carvings in ivory representing the Standing Virgin and Child. These first gothic ivories share the same stylistic traits as their monumental counterparts on the portals of cathedrals, and this Virgin has a similar arrangement of the drapery to the famous stone Madonna on the south doorway of the west front of Amiens cathedral, of 1230-35.

There is also a connection of this Virgin and Child to the so-called Davillier Virgin in the Musée du Louvre in Paris. There can be little doubt that the seated Davilliers Virgin is actually by the same craftsman as the V&A ivory. The faces are virtually identical and both figures display the same heavy folds of drapery. But not just that, the treatment of the back of the Virgin's veil, is very particular and distinctive and is displayed in the same way on both figures.

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Three dimensional images of the Virgin and Child were ubiquitous from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, produced in a wide range of materials and sizes and testifying the overwhelming devotion to th Virgin. Together with the Crucifixion, statues and statuettes of the Virgin and Child were the pricipal objects of devotion in the Christian Church, and vast numbers were made for ecclesisastical, monastic and private worship.