The Virgin Seated Holding the Child
Unknown · c. 1150-1200, with twentieth-century restorations
The Virgin sits on a bench-like throne and holds the Christ Child on her knee, both looking out at you. Carved in limestone in the Ile-de-France in the second half of the twelfth century, the figure marks the moment when Romanesque stiffness begins to soften: the folds of the mantle fall more naturally, the faces are rounder and calmer, and the Child, though still solemn, sits like a real infant. It is a stone version of the Virgin in Majesty, made for a church rather than a private chapel, and parts were restored in the twentieth century.
The statue was said to come from the church of Crespieres, west of Paris, when the collector Victor Martin Le Roy bought it in 1905, but neither that origin nor a suggested link with the vanished Premonstratensian abbey of Abbecourt at Orgeval has been confirmed. Its striking resemblance to a statue from the Pitcairn collection, now on deposit at the museum in Philadelphia, remains an unsolved puzzle. Martin Le Roy gave his collection to the Louvre in 1914 while keeping the use of it during his lifetime; the works were delivered after his death in 1929.
Did You Know? A near twin of this Virgin sits in Philadelphia, and nobody has yet worked out how the two are related.
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