Panel with Virgin and Child

This diminutive ivory carving represents the Virgin Mary standing with Jesus on her left hip, replicating a format well known in French sculpture and painting from the thirteenth through the sixteenth century. The virgin is crowned, a nod to her status in Latin Christianity as Queen of Heaven and heiress of the royal house of King David. In her left hand she holds a flower, evoking the flower growing among thorns from the Songs of Solomon 2:2. Medieval Christians interpreted this poem as a foreshadowing of Mary’s miraculous conception and role in the salvation of humanity. Jesus holds a small object in his left hand, perhaps a small book, a reference to his status as the Word incarnate, or an orb, which suggests his rule alongside his mother as the King of Heaven. The figural plaque is currently mounted on an L-shaped wooden base that allows it to stand upright on a flat surface. A post-medieval dealer or collector clearly added this element to facilitate display. The placement of the Virgin and Child within the diminutive architectural frame may date to the same intervention. The Virgin stands upon a dentil frieze that is replicated in the plinth beneath it, suggesting that the two elements were not originally arranged in this fashion.

The composition of this ivory is highly eccentric and its origin and history is unclear. Stylistically, the figural group resembles low-relief carvings of the Virgin and Child made in the north of France in the fourteenth century and comparisons may be made to devotional diptychs in the Museum’s collection (acc. nos. 17.190.294; 11.12). Like the current Virgin and Child, three independent ivory plaques in the collection (acc. nos. 32.100.208; 32.100.210; 32.100.209) represent standing figures carved in low relief out of a wafer-thin piece of ivory. Royal inventories of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries demonstrate that ivory carvers affixed small plaques like these to wood and metal frames to form eye-catching openwork diptychs and boxes. The pinhole in each plaque in this group suggests they were affixed to a backing in this way. The current plaque lacks comparable traces of previous hardware and, barring it being a modern replica, it is possible that glue once attached it to a comparable ground. The survival of the dentil frieze below the Virgin and the crude cuts to the draperies on the left and the right of the Virgin’s feet suggest another possibility, that it was cut out of conventional low relief diptych of the fourteenth century, perhaps at the time it was reassembled into the current composition.




Catalogue Entry by Scott Miller, Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial and Research Collections Specialist, Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters, 2020–2022

Theodore M. Davis, New York