The Virgin and Child
Unknown · 1385-1400
A standing Virgin, a little under eighty centimetres tall, holds the Child in her arms and looks down at him. The older title of the statue, the Virgin nursing the Child, tells you what to look for: the intimate gesture of a mother feeding her son, a theme that became popular in French sculpture at the end of the fourteenth century as devotion to Mary grew warmer and more human. The carving in limestone shows the fashions of the period, with a mantle gathered in broad loops over the arm and a swaying stance that lets the weight settle on one hip.
The statue was made in Champagne in the last fifteen years of the fourteenth century. According to the dealer who sold it, it came from Rigny-le-Feron in the Aube, a small village south-east of Paris, but that origin has not been confirmed. It belonged to the Paris collector H. Guilliot and was bought by the Louvre in 1888, at a time when the museum was building up its collection of French Gothic sculpture from regional churches.
Did You Know? The museum has changed its mind about what she is doing: once catalogued as nursing the Child, she is now simply the Virgin and Child.
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