In the 14th century, Marian statuary experienced its golden age. In Île-de-France, with Paris as the center of court art, the models of the royal workshops and those of great princely and ecclesiastical patrons shone, taking the genre to stylistic and iconographic heights. Full-length, the Virgin is represented breastfeeding her son according to an iconography very frequent in Parisian production of the second half of the 14th century. Standing, she carries Christ on her left arm who looks at her tenderly while he seizes her breast. The way in which Mary turns her face towards the Child gives the whole figure a twisting movement that is characteristic of late 14th-century art. This scultpure is representative of a trend specific to the Gothic period, that of the marked interest in the representation of the intimate relationship between these two beings, and the insistence of artists on their carnal community via this iconography. The Nursing Virgins of Royaumont, Notre-Dame du Port and that of the Louvre Museum present in the 19th century in the Saint-Pierre cemetery in Amiens are all essential masterpieces of Gothic art, which alongside our rare sculpture still bear witness to this today.
