The Virgin and Child

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 It remained unpublished until 1981, when it was included in the Dürer revival exhibition in Frankfurt as a retrospective piece of the early 17th century and said to derive from a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.