Sculpture Group of Virgin and Child, Middle Gothic Period

 

Carved and decorated wood, possibly English and first half 14th century, 42 cm high, 13.5 cm wide, 8 cm. deep (16-5/16 x 

5-5/16 x 3-3/16 in.).  The Child’s head and right arm, the Virgin’s right forearm, the front of her nose and a separate metal diadem, and the upper body of a Dove held by the Child, have perished; partial losses to pleats of Virgin’s robe and front of the base; other abrasions, losses and old worming overall.  Patches of the original polychromy and gilding remain.  Mounted on a wooden stand.

 

Provenance:

Sir John Wyndham Pope-Hennessy (1913-1994);

Everett Fahy, by gift from Sir John

 

Selected references cited (fully annotated description available upon request):

 

Age of Chivalry: Art in Plantagenet England, 1200-1400, ed. Jonathan Alexander & Paul Binski (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1987) [hereafter, Age of Chivalry].

 

Andersson, Aron, English Influence in Norwegian and Swedish Figure-Sculpture in Wood, 1220-1270 (Stockholm: Wahlström & Widstrand, 1949) [hereafter, Andersson].

 

Brown, Sarah, ‘Our Magnificent Fabrick,’ York Minster, An Architectural History c 1220-1500 (Swindon: English Heritage, 2003) [hereafter, Brown].

 

Dawton, Nicolas, “The Percy Tomb at Beverley Minster: the Style of the Sculpture,” Studies in Medieval Sculpture, Occasional Paper (New Series ) III (F.H. Thompson, ed.) (London: The Society of Antiquaries of London, 1983), pp. 122-50; __________, “The Percy Tomb Workshop,” Medieval Art and Architecture in the East Riding of Yorkshire (Christopher Wilson, ed.), Conference Transactions for the Year 1983 (London: The British Archaeological Association, 1989), pp. 121-32 [hereafter, Dawton Papers].

 

Little, Charles T., “An English Sculpture attributed to Alexander of Abingdon,” La sculpture en Occident: Études offertes à Jean-René Gaborit, ed. Genevieve Bresc-Bautier, Françoise Baron and Pierre-Yves Le Pogam (Dijon: Éditions Faton, 2007), pp. 58-63 [hereafter, Little].

 

Prior, Edward S., and Gardner, Arthur, An Account of Medieval Figure-Sculpture in England (Cambridge: University Press, 1912) [hereafter, Prior and Gardner].

 

Stone, Lawrence, Sculpture in Britain: the Middle Ages (Hammondsworth and Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1955) [hereafter, Stone].

 

White, Don, “Invisible Saints: The Search for Medieval Wood Sculpture in British Parish Life,” Tenth Warwick Symposium on Parish Research, May 25-27, 2012 [hereafter, White].

 

Williamson, Paul, with Davies, Glyn, Medieval Ivory Carvings: 1200-1550 (London: V & A Publishing, 2014) [hereafter, Williamson Carvings].

 

Williamson, Paul, Northern Gothic Sculpture, 1200-1450 (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1988) [hereafter, Williamson Northern Gothic].

 

Wixom, William D., “A Late Thirteenth-Century English Ivory Virgin,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte (Munich and Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag), v.50 (1987), pp. 337-358 [hereafter, Wixom].

 

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This carved and painted oak statuette, its back unfinished, was traditionally installed in a niche or alcove.  Elevated on a mound, the Virgin cradles the Child on her left hip.  The orbits of her eyes are deeply arched under a high forehead; her dimpled chin is set low beneath her mouth.  Beneath the cap-like base for the missing metal diadem she wears a veil under a closed robe extending below her knees, over the full-length gown covering her feet.  The Child wears a full gown and turns his torso frontally from profile, his left forearm supporting what must be the body of the Dove.  The painted surfaces of the finished carving were prepared with white gesso and red bole, of which much remains.  Surviving patches of polychromy are evident on the Virgin’s face, her blue-black robe and her possibly entirely gilt gown.  The Child’s gown bears traces of gilded ivory paint.  The dark overall patina (possibly varnished in a subsequent era over earlier damages) is in keeping with continuous usage near burning candles.

 

Despite its losses to carving and decoration, this statuette is a consequential survival.  Its immediate prior owners, Sir John Pope-Hennessy and Everett Fahy, stamp the seal of its quality.  Sir John, successively Director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, Director of the British Museum and Consultative Chairman of European Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (he had declined its directorship), was the eminent scholar of Italian sculpture in his time.  Dr. Fahy, early Sir John’s protégé, curator of European Paintings at the Metropolitan, then Director of the Frick Collection, returned to the Metropolitan as Sir John’s successor as Chairman of European Paintings.  When Sir John gifted this statuette to him, Dr. Fahy positioned it as centerpiece on the parlor mantel in his Manhattan home.

 

The signifiers of the quality of this statuette are its lines and contours.  The Virgin’s posture bows to her left and slightly backward in a restrained curve from base to neck, induced by the bend in her right knee.  A vertical axis rises through the columnar fold over the Virgin’s right shin in a line bisecting her face precisely.  Between the two folds over the Virgin’s shins a deep furrow carries the long lines diagonally from her knees to a point at her waistline directly below the centerline axis of the Child.  In counterpoint two open V-shaped pleats in the robe descend from the Virgin’s mid-waist, converging on the ascending diagonals; these are mirrored by the pleat in the front of the Child’s gown, which meets the tip of the ascending lines.  The Virgin’s body, her rounded shoulders narrow and squared, is divided by the strong horizontal across the base of the Child’s gown and the Virgin’s missing right forearm.  The cuboid (box-like) compositions of the Virgin’s head and chest and the Child against her chest balance the columnar solidity below.

 

Notwithstanding inherent French influences, when the present statuette was collected from Dr. Fahy, there was an undocumented suggestion, difficult to assess, that Sir John had thought the statuette to be British.  As in France, the sculptural arts developed in England in native schools connected to the flourishing centers of church-building.  The influence of these schools rippled through the multitude of English parishes, amid which the present statuette, if English, may be placed as a once ubiquitous decoration but now a happenchance accident of nearly unique survival after the marathon of destruction extending from the Dissolution through the Reformation.  Of the materials of English religious statuettes of the Gothic age, wood is the scarcest survival, and English oak statuettes of the Virgin and Child surviving the Gothic period are of the utmost rarity.  White, op. cit., lists only eight examples of medieval parochial wood sculpture, from five centuries, indisputably acknowledged by scholarship as of British origin, and only one such example of a Virgin and Child group, the Langham statuette in the Victoria and Albert Museum.  Beyond wood, there are few comparisons, of any material, with which to test the hypothesis that the present statuette may be English.

 

The transition from what Lawrence Stone calls the English “Aesthetic Revolution” is illustrated by the oak statuette of the seated Virgin and Child ca. 1220-30, recovered from St. Mary’s, Langham, Essex and now in the Victoria and Albert Museum (A.79-1925; Stone, op. cit., pp. 104, 107 and pl. 78).  Stone, considering this statuette a “placid, somewhat uninspired” carving, ascribes its interest to its new ideas in the early 13th century.  It projects geometric simplicity and verticality: the Virgin’s columnar shins and the replicated pleats between them; her tightly framed oblong head; her squared, slightly rounded shoulders and almost ramrod posture; the similarly modeled Child replicating the Virgin in miniature.  Alongside the Langham example may be contemplated the oak St. John in the Drammen Museum, Buskerud, Norway, dated by Stone to 1250-60, recovered from Heggen Church in Vestfold but nonetheless assessed only insignificantly less incontrovertibly English.  See Andersson, op. cit., pp. 160-171 and figs. 66, 67, 69 (“... its proper place is the plastic of the 13th century”; “... beyond doubt that the seat of this sculptural school was somewhere in England, but... the products of this school in its home country seem to have suffered the misfortune of total destruction”); Stone, op. cit., pp. 127-8 and pl. 100B (dated to 1250-60, “... its attribution to an English court artist all but certain”).  The same pronounced verticality of the Langham group is enhanced by the sharp pleating of the Heggen saint’s robe and gown converging in long, powerful diagonals to a point centered underneath the large book that he holds.  The bottom of the book forms a strong horizontal with the saint’s waistline, below which the repeated V-shaped pleats and folds enhance the rising diagonals.  The saint’s face is a long and narrow, slightly squared oval, capped by a tight dome of hair.  Aron Andersson (op. cit., pp. 165-7 and figs. 70-73) considers that the type of the saint’s head derives from late Roman classical portrait heads (“the same coiffure..., the same long narrow face, the same absorbed expression achieved through highly arched brows and wide open pointed oval eyes”), a comparison that he extends to standing figures, particularly their drapery, on late classical sarcophagi.

 

The association of the Langham Virgin and Child and the Heggen St. John finds a plausible correspondence in a later pair of examples from Stone’s “Age of Elegance,” ca. 1275-1310, at the beginning of the Decorated period.  The first of these, the much-commented English ivory seated Virgin and Child ca. 1290-1300 that is a great treasure of The Cloisters Collection (1979.402; Wixom, op. cit.), presents, notwithstanding its exquisite courtliness, the rigid sculptural form of a tall narrow pyramid anchored by the solid columns of the Virgin’s draped shins, rising elegantly with the crossover folds and pleats at her midsection.  From the neckline of her chemise to the top of her tightly capped veil, the Virgin’s high-browed face seems more stoic and more set in a well-defined cuboid space than the softer, more idealized open faces in French examples of comparable quality.  And as the Cloisters ivory group to its earlier Langham counterpart, so also to the earlier Heggen St. John can be juxtaposed the Virgin and Child carved into the Purbeck stone trumeau of the double arched doorway of the Chapter House of York Minster (Brown, op. cit., fig. 2.33, p. 72; pp. 71-4, figs. 2.34-.36).  The sweeping diagonals of the pleats of the gown and robe of St. John rising to a point at the waistline are replicated in the very similar drapery of the Chapter House Virgin and Child, which must be dated the same date as the doorway construction with which it was carved of a piece, ca. 1290.  The geometric verticality of these sculptures, simply executed, is an insignia of their Englishness.

 

Among royal projects of Edward I of the 1290’s the statues of the Queen Eleanor Crosses and the “weeper” statuettes of the Westminster Abbey tomb of Edmund “Crouchback” are often cited as exemplars of early Decorated Gothic.  Alexander of Abingdon carved the statues for the Crosses at Waltham and Charing, no longer in situ.  His conservative court style may be gleaned from the Virgin and Child attributed to him in the Metropolitan Museum (2003.456; Little, op. cit.).  Its monumental verticality is carried by the long diagonal pleats and the cascades on the robe on the right, balanced by the repeated deeply carved V-shaped pleats and folds under the Virgin’s arm on the left.  At the apex the Child and the head of the Virgin, their miens calm and reserved, occupy well-defined cuboid spaces.  William of Ireland carved the statues for the surviving Cross at Hardingstone, Northants (its statues brought from London 1292; see Stone, op. cit., p. 144, pl. 109(B)).  Stone assesses William’s style “nervous and restless” and, particularly in the columnar folds of the gown below the robe curving horizontally across the knees, suggestive of a date three decades forward absent the surviving documentation.  The influences of Alexander and William also show in the statuettes in the arched niches on the sides of the royal tombs of Crouchback (d. 1296, second son of Henry III) and his wife Aveline in Westminster Abbey.  See Stone, op. cit., pp. 146-7 (singling out a pair of “weepers” as evidencing the two styles of Alexander and William); Prior and Gardner, op. cit., p. 377 (illustrating a similar pair of “weepers” in the two styles); Age of Chivalry, op. cit., cat. 326, p. 326 (dating tomb to 1297).  With the Eleanor Crosses, these sculptures, notwithstanding the French genesis of their formal types, “display a new kind of ornamental Gothic, more exotic and inventive than its equivalent on the Continent” (Age of Chivalry, op. cit., p. 335).

 

The foregoing 13th-century precedents presage the few examples extant from the first half of the 14th century that bear more closely on the style of the present statuette.  Among ivories the prime early exemplar is the Virgin and Child of the left wing of the Salting Diptych (Victoria and Albert Museum, A.545-1910), not simply because this exceptional survival shares, with the Virgin and Child group in The Cloisters and the Grandisson ensemble in the British Museum, the pinnacle among English ivory carving after 1200, but also by default because of its extreme rarity.  Thought an important commission in Westminster ca. 1310-20, this carving has been repeatedly noted for parallels with the sculpture of Queen Eleanor’s Crosses and on the Westminster Abbey tombs of the 1290’s (Williamson Carvings, op. cit., no. 79, pp. 248-251).  In comparison with French examples of ivory Virgin and Child groups of the same period (e.g., Victoria and Albert Museum 7-1872, Champagne or Burgundy ca. 1300-20, Williamson Carvings, op. cit., no. 7) the Salting figure of the Virgin is more linearly vertical, her drapery more flat and regularly rendered, her head and torso more rectangular and embedded, with the figure of the Child, in cuboid spaces. 

 

In stone two examples of life-size sculpture from York Minster in the time of Archbishop William de Melton (1316-40) provide comparison to the present statuette.  One of these is the figure of St. Margaret (Yorkshire Museum 1980.51.3; Age of Chivalry, op. cit., pp. 422-3, cat. 516) on a supporting pillar of the cenotaph of St. William of York rebuilt in the easternmost nave of the Minster (see Brown, op. cit., pp. 93, 107, 123).  The other example is the Virgin and Child surmounting the arched doorway in the seventh bay of the north nave aisle of the Minster, now blocked but generally thought to have led through to the former Chapel of St. Mary and All Angels (“St. Sepulchre’s Chapel”) (Brown, op. cit., pp. 128-9).  Notwithstanding their different appearances, these sculptures have been placed within the same few years ca. 1330 of the building program in the nave of the Minster and have each been associated with a close tradition of sculptural style extending from the Virgin and Child on the doorway trumeau of the Chapter House and appearing in different venues in Yorkshire in the second quarter of the 14th century (see Dawton Papers, op. cit.).  The St. Margaret from St. William’s cenotaph, its verticality and slight sway only accentuated by the atypical soft drapery falling around the ankles, replicates the tight narrow volumes of the present statuette above their respective waistlines, while the Virgin and Child group over the doorway to St. Sepulchre’s Chapel recalls the present statuette in the contrast of flat, plain areas and the deep, long carving of the folds of the mid-length robe and the gown.

 

The style, then, of the present statuette traces back to the influences evident in the Heggen oak St. John and emerges in the dissemination of the London and York schools at the turn of the 14th century.  The first half of the new century “witnessed the most brilliantly inventive period in the history of English medieval architecture” (Age of Chivalry, op. cit., p. 411), and this architectural richness begot “the enrichment of the imager’s art by the energies that had developed in Gothic stone-sculpture” (Prior and Gardner, op. cit., p. 354).  Wood of course presented a less expensive medium than stone, metal or ivory.  Nevertheless, wood-carving was not creatively an inferior craft but evidenced a corresponding diverse spectrum of quality.  The oak effigy of John Peckham (d. 1292), Archbishop of Canterbury, in the transept of his Cathedral illustrates excellence (Prior and Gardner, op. cit., fig. 740, p. 662), and the use of oak became widespread for effigies of knights and ladies as the cathedral styles dispersed all over England in the first half of the new century, petering out in the second half as alabaster became fashionable and commonplace (id., pp. 664-671, as to oak parish effigies of knights and ladies).

 

After the Black Death worthwhile comparables to the present statuette fairly disappear.  Beyond localized decimation of the ranks of sculptors and carvers, there ensued in the second half of the 14th century a trend to secularization and ordinariness of images.  Three examples suffice.  The alabaster statuettes ca. 1370 recovered from the Church of St. Peter, Flawford, Notts (now in the Nottingham Castle Museum) include a Virgin and Child group (Stone, op. cit., pl. 145) undeniably static and “humanized” in expression and posture and awkward in proportions (the Child now carried on the Virgin’s right arm, as predominantly after 1350).  The Virgin of the oak Annunciation group ca. 1350-63 from Wells Cathedral, now in its Vicars’ Hall (Age of Chivalry, op. cit., cats. 526-7, p. 429), has been described by Stone (op. cit., p. 187) as a “well dressed lady... an empty iconographical husk enclosing the new secularized core.”  Similarly, Stone deems the gilt copper “weepers” from the tomb of Edward III in Westminster Abbey (ca. 1377-80; id., pl. 149 and p. 193) “ladies and gentlemen in attitudes of impassive calm.”  In the span of 200 years from 1350 to 1550, after which religious imagery shut down, no convincing comparable to the present statuette has been found in the surveys of the English Gothic, including particularly Prior and Gardner, op. cit. (to 1520), Stone, op. cit. (to 1540), Age of Chivalry, op. cit. (through ca. 1400), and Paul Williamson’s catalogues of the Victoria and Albert Museum collections (e.g., Carvings, op. cit., to 1550).

 

The catalogue of the present statuette’s “Englishness” begins with its linear verticality impressed onto its characteristic déhanchement and its understated backward bow.  Above its elevating mound-like base the statuette is anchored on the Virgin’s columnar shins rising in deeply cut diagonals in her robe to a point with the mirroring diagonals in the Child’s robe.  Notwithstanding the rhythm of the horizontal and vertical folds, the simplified drapery scheme, especially the two vertical columnar folds of the dress below the Virgin’s knees, suggests an English modeling exemplified in the limestone group ca. 1330 over the gateway to St. Sepulchre’s in York Minster.  The Virgin’s rectangular face exhibits the high forehead, boldly arched sockets, bulging eyes and cleft chin of other English examples.  Unlike the typical French model, her close veil melds into the narrow robe after the Sienese Trecento type, and her flat chest slopes gently backward above the emphatic midriff horizontal.  The Virgin’s head, her chest and the Child occupy cuboid spaces enhancing the slender geometrical linearity of the statuette.  The Child sits on the Virgin’s left arm in a typically English contra-posture.  The similarities overall are striking with the St. Margaret ca. 1330 from St. William’s cenotaph in York Minster.  An archaism in the carving of some elements of the statuette, such as the Virgin’s flattened left hand supporting the Child and the Child’s abstract left forearm holding the Dove, attests to likely parish origin. 

 

In summary, the present precious example of once ubiquitous parish decoration is entirely consistent with English sculpture and carving in the Middle Gothic period, before the Black Death.