Footnotes

• From the late 15th century onwards the usual manifestation of the Christ child showed the naked child standing with his right hand raised in benediction and holding an orb in his left. Representations of the Child seated and playing with animals or fruit are. The dove at the Child's side, the attribute of St. Scholastica, the founder of the order of Benedictine nuns, signifies chastity, humility and concord, while the split nut, from which it feeds, is a traditional symbol for the Passion.
  
  The expressiveness of the Child's facial features and finely articulated hands, as well as the palpable rendering of the anatomy, are characteristic of early Renaissance sculpture in the North, when close observation of the human form and nature transcended the formality of the Gothic stylistic canon. This phenomenon arose in the last decades of the 15th century.
  The closest stylistic analogies with the present sculpture can be observed in the carvings of the Upper Rhine regions dating from the first and second quarter of the 16th century. Good examples for this characteristic child-type can be found on the Locher altarpiece in the Freiburg cathedral, which the sculptor Sixt von Stauffen carved between 1522 and 1530.
  

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Category: Furniture / European Furniture and Works of Art

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