Silences And Sounds: Moravian Gallery

Showing posts with label Moravian Gallery. Show all posts

Friday, December 5, 2025

A bookish saint from Brno

Time to explore another fine example of medieval art from the Moravian Gallery in Brno (Czech: Moravská galerie v Brně), this time a bookish saint.

The “Female Saint with Book” by an anonymous Moravian carver stems from around 1500. The wooden sculpture is tall and narrow, suitable for a niche or other tight space. She is crowned, and there appear to be jewels carved into that crown. There may be a veil over her hair, though its waist-length tresses seem to be otherwise unbound, for one strand has snuck over her shoulder and nestles against the crook of her arm.

This youthful figure gazes out at us directly, her high forehead a sign of beauty, her straightforward gaze a signal of honesty, her rounded cheek a suggestion of affluence, her closed mouth with a hint of lift at the edge a gesture of inner repose.

Her robe boasts a modest scoop neck, and is cinched by a thin belt; yet below the waist, it flairs open in a dramatic upside-down V of imagined drapery to reveal her underkirtle. This is clearly secular garb, and may have had brocade with an elaborately textured surface, but with the insect damage we cannot tell for sure.

The right arm is lowered and has lost its hand – we have only the sleeve – but was bent at a 120-degree angle (pointing down but sort of aiming at the viewer).

The left hand is what interests me most. At that point where the outer garment flares, our figure holds a book. The position of that book is rather curious – she holds it sideways. The book’s back seems to be down; we see the top edge of the book, and if we were taller might see the front leaves as well. Moreover, the book is attached – perhaps by a bit of chain? – to her belt since she neither needs to cradle the book nor press it hard against her side. The book floats, in other words, and she merely rests her hand lightly upon it. The book may be wrapped – is that a hint of gauzy fabric at the top? That would be characteristic of the day. It is clearly a beloved possession as well as an attribute of her sainthood.

And then, following our trajectory downward, we come to her feet, tucked in behind the folds of cloth. She stands on a rounded cushion or low dome rather than directly on the floor or rocks, as many other saints are depicted. In late-medieval sculpture, this kind of grounding signals nobility or spiritual elevation. It gives a lift to the figure – both to align her with our sight and to move her figuratively above the ordinary world – emphasizing her courtly bearing and inner refinement. Combined with her crown, her serene expression, and the cherished book in her hand, the cushion suggests that this is a saint whose sanctity is tied less to dramatic martyrdom or miracles and more to elevated learning, piety, and noble grace.

These details give us clues, but they also leave us guessing about her identity. Saints we might consider as candidates, given the statue's Moravian origins, include the intellectual Catherine of Alexandria, the tower-bound Barbara, or community-activist Elizabeth, all of whom were imagined in late-Gothic Central Europe as dignified, courtly women of faith.

Of course, the other saintly attributes for these women would be the “tell.” If this is Catherine, where is her wheel or sword? Neither seems to fit the dimensions of the space, so even if the hand had survived, the statue would be thrown out of kilter if such “regular attribute” were added. Barbara is perhaps more plausible; imagine the missing right hand holding a tower, and we could imagine her replete and identifiable. But for this statue to work, that tower would need to be curiously small; otherwise it would obscure her face. Though I suppose one that was shoulder height would work. If it were Elizabeth, we would expect some sign of her charity such as loaves, roses, or a small figure of the poor, but none appear here. The sculptor seems to have focused instead on the figure’s nobility and inner devotion, giving us a serene, book-holding figure rather than a tableau of her famous acts. In other words, we can read her sanctity through posture, gaze, crown, and that treasured book, but the overt symbols that would let us give her name are no more.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we knew more about who she is, or about who did the carving? Some artwork tells us stories, and indeed we could talk here about insect damage and the ravages of time, or about the wonderful luck of preservation. But artwork unmoored from its origins also poses questions that the attentive viewer might consider. Who was this lass, and what did she represent to the community that commissioned her, or to the artist who carved her? We cannot know, but we can appreciate the combination of artistry and effort that went into creating this beauty.

Friday, November 21, 2025

Carving the Nativity in 1520

The anonymous carving of the Nativity of Jesus that is found in the Moravian Gallery in Brno (Czech: Moravská galerie v Brně) dates from around 1520 and is sculpted from linden wood. According to the museum sign, it’s from Southern Bohemia or Lower Austria. It’s a busy image:

To the left, Joseph enters from an arched doorway, while the ox and ass peak in. The woven basket is an interesting detail, and Joseph’s beard has a more exaggerated set of curlicues compared with the torso of Christ dating from around 1500. Clearly, there’s a style.

Mary is observing as a group of children appear to have Christ in a blanket – reminds me of the childhood game with a parachute, but with a baby, not a ball. There might be some safety concerns here.

Standing up behind is the hillside, with flocks, while we peak into a scene with a cradle on one level and a store-room on another. I’m not sure what the round basket-like object is, or the bags (?) on top of it; to my eye the thing on top looks like a lap desk, but then, I like a good lap desk.

In other words, it is a scene of abundance.

Joseph’s square bib with its edging seems very 16^th century to my eye, while the keffiyeh (square headcloth) with brown agal (the rope to hold it in place) is the one gesture to the middle eastern origins that came to my attention

The oversized baby comes with oversized hair for a newborn, but the gestures of the “support staff” that tend to him are visually more interesting. The one at the bottom right is particularly interesting, the turn of her shoulder showing the work she is putting in, and the sweep of the skirt contrasting with the horizontal band of her blouse. I’m pretty sure those are wings on the worker who faces her, the angelic and the human working together in the story.

The flocks deserve a close look, along with the hilltop habitations; the middle one with its miniature walls suggest that all was not always peaceful in these imagined times.

And then there’s the Mary, not, evidently, in “Virgin Mary Blue” but rather a acreamy color. She’s still got the nicely decorated collar line and flowing fabric. Her hair is loose and very, very long – down to her calves, at a minimum

Her chin has a bit of a dimple, and she has the high forehead that was a signal of beauty:

Her headband is more ornate than Joseph’s, a twisting comination of patterned and smoothed side replicated by the sculptor. And, we can see that her hair was likely blond, with all that yellow tinting surviving to the present day.

In short, lots to look at. There’s no single focal point here; instead, everything participates in the story. That shared participation is what gives the carving its warmth. It leaves you with the sense that holiness and humanness are woven together in every inch of the scene.

OTHER BRNO MORAVIAN GALLERY ARTWORKS:

Wednesday, November 19, 2025

Brno’s Torso of Christ

Keeping up my theme of art works from The Moravian Gallery in Brno (Czech: Moravská galerie v Brně) – because who among us doesn’t have a backlog of photos from their phone – today’s post is on the badly charred torso of Christ from ca 1500.

This is an amazing piece, first because it survived at all. The middle portion of the sculpture looks more like what one sees when one rolls a log out of the campfire to start the process of tidying up the campsite for the night. The blackened, charcoal-black interior is exposed to the modern eye as a textural commentary on the substance of the object, carbon transmuted not to diamond but to dust.

Torso of Christ, Brno Moravian Gallery, detail

And then the surprise. Move one's attention from the char to the head, and there is an eloquence to the sculpture that explains its ongoing presence on display. The rough-hewn nose, slightly flat on the top, and shaded from the smoke on its size reminds us of the carver’s art,while the moustached and bearded mouth shows the way that broad incisive lines can add character and heft to a face. The curls at the bottom of the beard seem artifact, not natural curl—made, not grown. This seems stylistically telling, a style “from” somewhere and sometime, the kind of over-the-top taste that makes the grandkids groan. Surely this is a detail that might help us localize the sculpture?

Likewise, the carved curls to the side of the face show the lions-mane hairstyle of a glamour boy. A bit Fabio-esque, am I right? Compare the sculpted image to the profiles of the 1980's mega-model bedecking romance novels from the Guardian retrospective of 2015:

"Fabio: a man of many book covers" from The Guardian

Both have voluminous and abundant hair, with curled whisps providing shape. Those enviable tresses are slightly longer than shoulder-length. A heavier curve of especially dense locks right at cheek level then extends the gesture of the cheekbone out into airier, hairier space. Good hair is an attractive trait, in martyr or in model.

Fabio is fun, of course, but the Christ figure is also a man of sorrows, a vivid reminder of the passion story, so let us return our focus there.

The moustache, of course, adds a countervailing curve, turned up where the beard turns down, adding a bit of sinuous shaping; not so much an S- curve as a mini-recurve bow, adding interest to the downward droop of sorrow from the eye. You know that tears would catch there.

The statue’s worry lines are again a reminder that a simple wedge-shaped line can do a lot to tell a story, and the slit of the eye asks the viewer to imagine the loss of closure.

In all, it is a gripping statue, one that speaks volumes through its silence, the parted lips a final exhalation heard across the centuries.

RESOURCES

Cynthia J. Cyrus "The 15thc Swabian Madonna of Brno" [blog post], Silences And Sounds, 18 Nov 2025, https://silencesandsounds.blogspot.com/2025/11/the-15thc-swabian-madonna-of-brno.html, part of a series of posts on art works from The Moravian Gallery in Brno (Czech: Moravská galerie v Brně)
Hannah Marriott, “Fabio: confessions of the original male supermodel,” The Guardian, 15 Jul 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2015/jul/15/fabio-confessions-original-male-supermodel

Tuesday, November 18, 2025

The 15thc Swabian Madonna of Brno

The Moravian Gallery in Brno (Czech: Moravská galerie v Brně) is the second largest art museum in the Czech Republic. It’s also free (freeee freeeee freeee), and a nice destination for a stroll out of the city center. It’s easy to find, since it’s adjacent to the equestrian statue of Jobst of Moravia, created in 2015 by Jaroslav Róna. There’s also a little carousel on the square. When I was there, they were just starting to set up for the Christmas market.

The gallery itself has a number of treasures, but I’m going talk today about the wooden sculpture by an unknown Swabian sculptor, a Madonna with Child on a crescent moon. Swabia, for those of you who've forgotten, is in southwestern Germany, and was generally centered on one of those stem Dutchies, linked by tribal identity and language (one of the Alemannic dialects).

Swabia, CC-BY Shaqspeare, Wikipedia

The image of the Madonna and child is quite standard for the period; quite tall, relative to its width, suitable for fitting into a prescribed architectural niche. It's interest is generally in the waist-and-up region, with the crowned head of Mary as one distinct "top" and that of the babe as a second, creating an interesting tension between these two areas of activity. Unlike some other statues of the period, Mary looks out at the viewer, rather than at the infant in her arms. And the focus of the child is in a different place than that of Mary, which enlivens the sculpture in some interesting ways.

This late fifteenth century Madonna has the classic fabric folds typical of the period. What I like about this one is that she makes herself into a kind of curved bench for the child, jutting out her right hip to make a place-holder for the babe. Who among us when holding a squirming infant hasn’t adopted that trick? The humanizing element of that gesture quite caught my attention.

Then there’s the child. Here, the artist is perhaps a bit less realistic; the close-to-round face and the receding hairline seem less authentically child-like and more cartoonish than the more oval face of his mother. Perhaps the artist was going for the chubby innocence of a protected and indulged child, Mary’s care mapped into healthy youth. But the artist also invites us to look beyond the round cheeks and tend more closely to the story line. By depicting the child’s direct gaze and introducing a slight droop of the babe’s left lower eyelid, the unnamed artist evoke a sadness that predicts where the story will go; it is an affective choice that compresses the whole story into the single scene.

The Madonna stands on the crescent moon, a reference to Mary as the apocalyptic woman of Revelation 12: “A woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars.” The moon is here literally “under her feet,” in the position of the defeated dragon of saints’ imagery – another element that maps back to Revelations and the serpent/Satan’s defeat.

This "moon sickle" image is multi-valent. Depending on the interests of the devotee, the symbol could be read in one of several ways.

Through her dominion over the moon, Mary signals Christ’s upcoming mastery of the celestial order, itself perhaps signaled by the crown-of-stars. (Might the stars have been painted on the statue’s crown? Perhaps, but too much time and too many wood-boring worms have had their way with the statue to be sure.) At the same time, in German-speaking lands of the fifteenth century, the moon’s crescent had become a convenient visual shorthand for the Immaculata tradition. It marked Mary’s exceptional purity, and the belief that she stands outside the stain of earthly corruption. Some devotional writers also aligned the moon with the Church itself; it reflects the sun’s light just as the Church reflect’s Christ’s light. Mary’s stand, in other words, is both the mother of Christ, and the mother of ecclesia. (And yes, I’ve read a LOT of Hildegard in the last two weeks!)

I’ve thought about that moon shape; it’s a waxing moon, its mouth upward. The upward curve telegraphs growth and upward momentum; not only does it lift her up, it is also an uplifting object, one that represents light gaining on darkness. She is lifted outside of the plane of human concerns (plague and marauders and storms) and as such able to intercede from above. The moon places the mother figure in the heavens, a salvific force for good. Likewise, the waxing moon is the moon of beginnings: the start of the month and the start of the salvation story simultaneously. And if we read the moon as Mary herself, she too is light, and grows in her role; she too is pure and “full of grace,” the intercessor of intercessors.

Yet, at the same time, this is a triumphalist image. Late medieval viewers recognized the moon as a symbol of mutability, its phases shifting and unstable. If we read the image as conflictual, Mary against the moon, we get another set of associations. Her foot-grinding stance vis-a-vis the moon suggests her win over the negative valences of change. Mary’s constancy and care for the baby Jesus implicitly contrasts with the fickleness of the moon with its variable phases and inconstancy. We can learn from that: Mary is constant; the moon is not. She is light and truth triumphant; it will wax and wane, fading into darkness. She is human, embodied love; it is distant, abstract, untouchable.

No wonder iconography of the period was full of the moon-sickle: it offered artists a graceful compositional device to serve as imagistic pedestal, and gave devotees a symbol dense with cosmic, theological, and personal meanings. Much to muse on, eh?

Of course, the lacy texture of the statue gives it much of its current charm, but that’s an unintentional collaboration with various kinds of woodworms.

The small bore-holes suggest that this statue has been the focus of Anobium punctatum, also known as the furniture woodworm, though there are a large array of woodworms that could have been the culprites. The small 1-2mm holes weaken the wood structurally, but leave behind the intricate textured surface that we see. The statue was probably carved in a soft wood like linden or pine, though I don’t know if the wood type has been formally identified. The fluctuating humidity of churches lends itself to wood-boring larvae, and the timeframe has granted repeated generations the chance to chow down on some cellulose and change the surface texture of the work before our eyes.

So, Mary might be constant, but her evocation in wood is somewhat less stable. Time and clime have created a textured surface, one that bears the marks of centuries as much as the marks of devotion. Those tiny tunnels and bore-holes are reminders that even sacred objects are subject to earthly forces—decay, insects, and the slow passage of time. And yet, those very imperfections give the statue a tactile intimacy: you can almost feel the layered history of hands, prayers, and centuries pressing into the wood alongside the tiny, patient work of the worms.

In the end, the Swabian Madonna of Brno is a study in contrasts: the eternal and the temporal, constancy and change, human care and nature’s stolid emphasis on mutability. Standing on her crescent moon, Mary embodies celestial triumph maternal constancy. But she also serves as a witness to the realities of our human existence, in which even strength is inevitably shaped by the forces of nature and time. There is, I think, beauty in such change; we can see back to the symbol that was, while still loving the lacework that is its present representation. In short, the marks of woodworms and the patina of centuries have ultimately become part of the sculpture’s narrative, connecting us to both its creation and its long life.

RESOURCES

Silences And Sounds

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