"Pieta In Walnut - Burgundian Netherlands, Second Half Of The 15th Century"
This moving Pietà represents the Virgin carrying the lifeless body of her son on her knees. Like many other devotional images produced in Europe in the second half of the 15th century and at the beginning of the 16th century, this sculpture encourages the faithful to contemplate the sufferings of Christ and to draw closer to him out of empathy. She thus participated in the Devotio moderna, a vast movement of spiritual renewal which, at the end of the Middle Ages, developed and advocated a more emotional vision of Christian life. By its typology, our work can be linked to the production of large carved wooden altarpieces made at the end of the Middle Ages in the Burgundian Netherlands, in one of which our sculpture had to be inserted. From a formal point of view, our sculpture maintains close links with the Pieta of the region, such as that of Arnay-le-Duc, of Beaufort, or even with a very beautiful BourgundianvPieta kept at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. (26.63.36).
Bibliography: Forsyth, William H., La Pietà in French Late Gothic Sculpture: Regional Variations, 1995.