"Virgin and Child from the Abbey Church of Saint-Denis" c. 1250-1260 CE, Taft Museum of Art, Cincinnati
A statue from the collection of Cincinnati’s own Taft Museum of Art, and one of the most important of its type in the world, is being shown on a massive international, online project of French Gothic ivories. From Artdaily:
The Gothic Ivories Project website makes available the first 700 objects from a database that already numbers more than 3,000 ivories. A detailed entry has been written for each piece and the vast majority are illustrated by high resolution colour images, with multiple views. The final number of objects looks set to triple Koechlin’s figure.
“The project has been made possible by the collaboration of numerous institutions”, comments the Project’s director, Professor John Lowden, “but it is not only the major museums that will benefit from this resource. Many Gothic ivories are still in private collections, and the website will enable owners to identify what they have.” Project manager Dr Catherine Yvard adds: “The support we received from institutions around the world has been astonishing: all major collections have joined us and smaller collections have also been enthusiastic.
We are equally interested in including objects in private collections, so as to be as comprehensive as possible. The website will be accessible to all and is designed to welcome collectors and curators as well as students and scholars. As so many Gothic ivories were divided up for sale in the nineteenth century, there is a very real chance of being able to identify what have been thought to be missing parts of a whole. The website makes possible searches by many aspects of content, provenance, function and so on.”
To see the Cincinnati Virgin and Child, click here.
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