God the Father Blessing, Surrounded by a Glory of Angels
Unknown · 1475-1500
God the Father raises his hand in blessing, an old bearded figure wearing a tall crown and a richly patterned cope, an orb in his other hand, surrounded by a swarm of small angels forming a glory around him. The group keeps traces of paint and gilding. It was not made to stand alone: it once crowned an elaborate sculpted chapel where the whole story of the Passion was played out in stone, and God looked down on the scenes below. Notice how the angels are packed into the space around him like clouds, a favourite device of late fifteenth-century sculptors in Champagne.
The group comes from the church of Saint-Jean-Baptiste at Chaumont in the Haute-Marne, where Marguerite de Baudricourt, widow of Geoffroy de Saint-Belin, founded a chapel on 23 June 1471. The church became a collegiate church in 1474, and the decoration was continued by the founder's daughter Catherine de Saint-Belin, wife of Jean d'Amboise. Their chapel, on the ground floor of the north tower and the neighbouring bays of the aisle, held a Holy Sepulchre and scenes of the Crucifixion, the Deposition and the Resurrection. The Louvre bought this fragment in 1902.
Did You Know? God the Father originally presided from above over a whole sculpted Passion, with an entombed Christ in the chapel beneath him.
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