Virgin and Child Enthroned
Unknown · c. 1240-1250
The Virgin sits enthroned and holds an apple in her right hand; the Child, dressed in a long shirt, sits on her left knee, also holding an apple in his left hand while he blesses with the right. Her ample mantle falls between her knees in a great beak-shaped fold. Except for the Child, who is set slightly off axis, the carver chose a strictly frontal view and organised the drapery symmetrically around the full, regular face of the Virgin. The result is a calm, hieratic image that still belongs to the Romanesque tradition of the Throne of Wisdom, even as the soft treatment of the face and folds announces the Gothic manner of the middle of the thirteenth century. Remains of colour survive on the ivory.
The statuette was carved in northern France around twelve forty to twelve fifty, in the reign of Saint Louis, when the demand for small devotional images in ivory was beginning to grow. Twenty three centimetres high, it was probably meant for a private chapel or a small altar. It belonged to Baron Charles Davillier, the Paris collector and historian of Spanish art, whose bequest of eighteen eighty three brought it to the Louvre.
Did You Know? Mother and son each hold an apple, the fruit of the Fall that Christ came to redeem.
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