The Virgin and child crowned by two angels.

One of the themes which most preoccupied the creative talents of Albrecht Dürer is that of the Virgin Mary and the Christ Child. His concern with this image was almost lifelong, and second only in importance to his involvement with the Passion of Christ. At first glance this could be taken to reflect the average Renaissance artist’s response to the prevailing concern and commissions of the time, for the cult of the Virgin Mary reached a peak in Germany around 1500. Pilgrimage sites dedicated to the devotion of Mary displayed her relics at various times of the year, and each prominent town in Germany had a church dedicated to her.

In Nuremberg, Dürer’s home town, the Liebfrauenkirche was commissioned as early as 1349 by Emperor Charles IV, who dedicated it ‘to the honour of the principal intercessor of the Holy Roman Empire, the most pure Virgin Mary’. It stood in the centre of the city, facing Nuremberg’s newly established marketplace.

A chronological survey of Dürer’s works shows that he was involved with the subject matter throughout his mature career. In all, fourteen copperplate engravings of the Virgin and Child survive, and there are five woodcuts, about twenty paintings and over seventy drawings.

A distinctive feature of Dürer’s small-scale devotional images of the Virgin and Child is their repeatedly referred to ‘life-likeness’, all the more apparent for the seeming lack of dogmatic religious attributes. In the engravings Mary, following a popular northern European tradition, is predominantly shown seated outdoors on a bench as in this engraving, rarely if ever on a throne, and never without the Christ Child.

The Virgin held a variety of roles in late medieval piety, and Dürer refers to several in this print. She is shown as Queen of Heaven, crowned by two angels, and, in the apple that she holds, as the New Testament counterpart to Eve, she refers to Eve’s Original Sin for which Christ’s Crucifixion would atone. She wears a circlet of roses, a symbol of her popular identity as the ‘rose without thorns’, while the picket fence shows her as the 'hortus conclusus' (or ‘enclosed garden’) in the biblical Song of Songs, a reference to her virginity. Dürer made a woodcut of the same theme in the same year. This includes many of the same motifs: the crowning by angels, the circlet of roses, the apple held by the Virgin. But the woodcut shows Mary in the midst of a crowd of angels and putti, a contrast to the present engraving, which shows the Virgin and Child isolated in a calm landscape.

See Angela Hass, 'Albrecht Dürer's devotional images of the Virgin and Child', http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/essay/albrecht-durers-devotional-images-of-the-virgin-and-child/

https://www.royalcollection.org.uk/collection/800052/the-virgin-and-child-crowned-by-two-angels

Dr Mark Stocker, Curator Historical International Art         December 2016