Virgin and Child Walnut Bourbonnais (Center of France), Early 16th c.

Thanks to the patronage of the ducal family and its court, sculpture experienced a veritable golden age in the Bourbonnais at the end of the Middle Ages and at the beginning of the Renaissance. This very beautiful Virgin and Child carved in walnut is a moving testimony to this.
Marked by her high rounded forehead, her very elongated half-moon eyes surmounted by faded eyebrow arches, and by her slender mouth with a melancholy pout, Marie's face, presents all the characteristics and the delicacy of the particular features of the Bourbonnais corpus, observable among others on the Virgin of the famous group of the Education of the Child, dated around 1500 and preserved in the Louvre museum (RF 2763).
However, it is a monumental Virgin and Child in painted wood preserved in the small chapel of the Desert of Saint-Alban-les-Eaux which offers the most striking comparison with our sculpture. Despite a few minor deviations in the treatment of the hair of the Virgin and of Christ, or even in the neckline of Mary's dress, this sculpture dating from the beginning of the 16th century offers itself as the perfect reflection of our work, which make us think that both could have been made by the same workshop or even the same sculptor.
On these two works, Jesus pulls a section of Mary's veil with his left hand, highlighting this symbolic attribute of the Virgin. This gesture finds a certain echo within the famous group of the Virgin of Ivoy-le-Pré (1520, MBA of Tours), attesting to the close links that the sculpture of Bourbonnais maintains with that of the Loire Valley, demonstrating once again the essential role that the river played at the time in the dissemination of artistic forms and modes, but also in the movement of artists.