The Virgin and Child in Glory
CultureNetherlandish
Datelate 14th century
MediumSandstone with paint
DimensionsOverall: 33 3/8 × 20 3/4 × 10 5/8 inches (84.77 × 52.71 × 26.99 cm)
Credit LinePurchase: William Rockhill Nelson Trust
Object number33-3/5
On View
On viewGallery Location
- 105
Collections
Exhibition HistoryN/A
Sculptural representations of the Virgin and Child encircled by rays of the sun, as in this example, are rare. One possible source for the image is the Golden Legend, a medieval bestseller by Jacobus de Voragine, which recounts the lives of the saints. In the Legend's story of the Tiburtine Sybil and the Roman Emperor Augustus, the Sybil reveals to the Emperor a miraculous image of the Virgin and Child arranged against a background of the sun's rays. Although the significance of the bird held by Christ is uncertain, it may refer to the goldfinch that plucked a thorn from his brow on the road to Calvary.
Pont St. Maxence, France;
Private collection, Paris, by 1929;
With Jacob Hirsch (1874-1955), New York, by February 1933;
Purchased from Hirsch by The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 1933.
Marilyn Stokstad, A Fifteenth Century Virgin and Child from the Île-de-France (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas, 1980), 1-8, (repro.), as Virgin and Child in Glory.
Dorothy Gillerman, Gothic Sculpture in America, vol. 2, The Museums of the Midwest (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2001), 213-14, (repro.), as Virgin and Child in Glory.
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