Gothic Ivories Project | Statuette; known as the Marcigny Virgin and Child (Vierge de Marcigny) (Front)

Seated Virgin (originally part of a Coronation of the Virgin or a Virgin and Child?).

Destève 1906: France, 13th century.
Bertaux 1912: France, 14th century.
Koechlin 1924: France, late 14th century.
Leeuwenberg 1969: France (?), late 18th century or 1st half of the 19th century.
Gaborit-Chopin 2003 and Museum's opinion 2010: England, 1st half of the 14th century.

Attribution
Master of the Agrafe Forgeries (Leeuwenberg 1969)

Reverse
Carved in the round (though back of the Virgin's throne is flat, with scratches for glue).

Object Condition
Ivory cracked and browned.
Chips to the veil, to the right of the Virgin's face, and on the base.
Missing: both forearms; crown (metal).Hole by the Virgin's left elbow.
Hole in the base.

Comments
Koechlin 1924 claimed the object was a Virgin and Child (the Child being lost). While Gaborit-Chopin 2003 does not deny this possibility, she takes the Coronation of the Virgin to be the more likely subject of the piece.

Provenance
Priory of Marcigny (Saône-et-Loire); 'quartier de Passe-Vite, au Donjon' (Allier) (according to Jeannez 1890); collection of Edouard Jeannez, Roanne, 1890. Claudius Côte collection, Lyon (at least from 1912); bequest of Mrs. C. Côte, 1962.

Bibliography
E. Jeannez, Inventaire descriptif et raisonné des principaux objets d'art ayant figuré à l'exposition rétrospective forézienne de Roanne (Roanne, 1890), p. 8, pl. III.
T. Destève, 'La Collection de M. Claudius Côte', in Les Arts 59 (November 1906), pp. 28-32 (pp. 31-32).
E. Bertaux, Quelques pièces de la collection Claudius Côte (Lyon, 1912), plate XIV.
R. Koechlin, Les Ivoires gothiques français (Paris, 1924), I, p. 249; II, no. 705.
H. Landais, 'La collection Claudius Côte. Département des Objets d'art', in Revue du Louvre (1961), p. 129 (fig.).
J. Leeuwenberg, 'Early Nineteenth-Century Gothic Ivories', in Aachener Kunstblätter 39 (1969), p. 121.
N. Stratford, 'Glastonbury and two gothic ivories in the United States', in British Archaeology Association (1983), p. 213, pl. LXXXVIIIb.
W. D. Wixom, 'A Late Thirteenth-Century English Ivory Virgin', in Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 50, no. 3 (1987), pp. 339-340, fig. 3.
D. Gaborit-Chopin, Ivoires médiévaux, Ve-XVe siècle (Paris: Musée du Louvre, 2003), no. 190.
P. Williamson and G. Davies, Medieval Ivory Carvings 1200-1550 (London, 2014), in relation to no. 13.

© TMN-Grand Palais (musée du Louvre)/Stéphane Maréchalle.
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