God The Father In Polychrome Limestone Stone - Lorraine, First Half Of The 16th Century

If Christians believe in one God, their faith in the Incarnation led them to affirm a single God in three persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. During the Middle Ages, art explored visual resources to express 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, surmounted by the dove of the Holy Spirit, now missing from our group. According to this diagram, seated on a throne, God the Father holds in his open hands the cross on which lies the body of his son. His face surrounded by a beard and wavy hair, he offers the faithful the impassive expression of divinity rather than that of the grieving father, unflinchingly offering the Redeemer to mankind. This impassivity contrasts with most of the figures in this group, which are often authoritarian and represent an angry God. This is the case in the famous groups of the Hôpital du Saint-Esprit in Dijon, the church of Genlis (Côte-d'Or), or the church of Lignières in the Aube. The petrographic analysis of our sculpture allows us to link it to Lorraine. A true artistic melting pot, this region provided a rich artistic production at the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance, strongly influenced in the field of statuary by neighboring creations sculpted in the Rhineland, Burgundy and Champagne. This phenomenon is materialized both in the compositional scheme chosen by our sculptor and in his stylistic choices. Thus, more than the Burgundian examples mentioned previously, our group can be compared in its "architectural" implementation to the theme of the Throne of Grace of the Trinity of the church of Charleville (Marne), built in the 16th century, which like ours, shows God the Father seated on a throne giving pride of place to the Renaissance architectural vocabulary, flanked by pilasters and crowned with a shell. Still in Champagne, the Eternal Father of the church of Saint-Pierre-Saint-Paul of Longueville-sur-Aube, dating from the 15th century, is wearing a tiara that can be superimposed on that worn by God in our group. The stylistic comparison, however, ends there. Indeed, the physiognomy of the protagonists of our sculpture and the specific treatment of their draperies do not seem to find a precise echo within the small corpus of Trinities listed in this large geographical area. However, its rare miniature format finds a formidable equivalent in 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 about twenty centimeters high is placed in the hollow of one of the altarpiece's niches. It is undoubtedly within a similar ensemble from the first half of the 16th century that our exceptional sculpture once took its place, in a niche of a stone altarpiece, or even more probably as a crowning glory to one of these.