God the Father in polychromed stone, Lorraine First half of the 16th century

If Christians believe in one God, their faith in the Incarnation has led them to affirm one God in three persons, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. During the Middle Ages, art engaged in an exploration of visual resources to tell this mystery. The iconography of the Throne of Grace, highlighted here by our sculptor, is the fruit of this work. It shows, within a vertical composition, God the Father holding before him the Son on the cross, crowned with the dove of the Holy Spirit (which has disappeared from our group today).
According to this formula, seated on a throne, God the Father holds in his open hands the cross where the body of his son lies. His face, with a beard and hair with wavy locks, offers to the faithful the impassive expression of the divinity rather than the one of a grieving father, unflinchingly making the gift of the Redeemer to men. This impassibility differs from most of the figures of this kind of group, often authoritarian, representing a wrathful God. This is the case in the famous groups of the Hospital of the Holy Spirit in Dijon, the church of Genlis (Côte-d'Or), or even the church of Lignières in Aube.
The petrographic analysis of our sculpture makes it possible to link it to Lorraine. At the end of the Middle Ages and at the beginning of the Renaussance, this region provided a rich artistic production, strongly influenced in the field of statuary by neighboring creations sculpted in the Rhineland, Burgundy and Champagne. This phenomenon is materialized here by both the composition scheme chosen by our sculptor but also in his stylistic choices.
Thus, our group can be compared in its "architectural" implementation of the theme of the Throne of Grace to the Trinity of the church of Charleville (Marne), made in the 16th century, which as our sculpture, shows God the Father seated on a throne where the Renaissance architectural vocabulary is taking a great place, confined to pillars and crowned with a shell. Still in Champagne, the Eternal Father of the Saint-Pierre-Saint-Paul church in Longueville-sur-Aube, dating from the 15th century, wears a tiara similar to the one worn by God in our group. However, the stylistic comparison ends there. Indeed, the faces of the protagonists of our sculpture and the specific treatment of their drapery do not seem to find any specific echo within the small corpus of Trinities listed in this large geographical area. However, its rare miniature format finds a formidable equivalent within the altarpiece of the Life of Saint Anne in the chapel of the Sainte-Anne de Godoncourt hermitage in the Vosges, where a stone Trinity of twenty centimeters high takes place in the hollow of one of the niches of the altarpiece. It is undoubtedly within a similar set of the first half of the 16th century that our exceptional sculpture once came to take place, in a niche of a stone altarpiece, or even more probably in the crowning of one of these.