Mourning Virgin from a Crucifixion Group (about 1620/40): Art, History and Details

Mourning Virgin from a Crucifixion Group (about 1620/40) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

This statuette once formed part of a Crucifixion group intended for a domestic shrine or chapel. Such ensembles were not only used for private devotion and meditation, but were also collected as works of art. This work was long attributed to the Nuremberg artist Veit Stoss. In fact, the carver imitated forms from his repertoire. However, the concave folds do not occur before 1600. The sculpture was created at a time when the appreciation for Albrecht Dürer, the most famous German painter of his time, was also experiencing a renaissance.

Object facts

• Title: Mourning Virgin from a Crucifixion Group
• Date: about 1620/40
• Type: Sculpture
• Technique: pearwood
• Dimensions: Overall: 31 x 9.8 x 8.7 cm (12 3/16 x 3 7/8 x 3 7/16 in.)
• Collection: MED - Gothic
• Department: Medieval Art
• Accession number: 1939.64

A detail from the museum

Looking closely, you can see that the sculptor carved tears under Mary's eyes. They show her pain over Christ hanging on the cross.

Collection credit

Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Germanisches Nationalmuseum Nürnberg, Eberhard Lutze, and Lionel H. Pries. Katalog der Veit Stoss-Ausstellung im Germanischen Museum: Juni bis August, 1933. [Nürnberg]: [Germanisches Museum], 1933.
• Galerie Fischer. Collection R. Paris: Nachlass eines Wiener Arztes ... Gemälde. Luzern: Gallerie Fischer, 1937.
• Karteikarte Luzern: L_10427, Zentralinstitute Fur Kunstgeschichte, 1937.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.