The carving depicts the Virgin crowned and seated upon a throne with three lozenge-shaped openings in the back; turned to her left, she holds the Christ Child on her left knee, and the stem of a lily flower in her right hand. Christ appears as if moving forward, placing his weight upon a piece of projecting drapery in his mother’s lap, and holding an apple in his hands. The Virgin places her left foot upon the face of a monster, half-covered by her dress; her right foot also projects out from under her dress. The back has three long window-like openings carved into the throne, pointed at the top and ending in an inverted V-shape.

The group is carved from half a tusk, cut longitudinally, and is roughly faceted at the base into a not very precise half-octagon; the underside of the base has a deep drilled hole, the surface is deeply scored, and there is a beveled section in center of the bottom edge, and a label with the handwritten number “P7292.”

There are very faint remains of selective polychromy, for example, bands of decoration on the throne, or brown pigment on the Christ Child’s hair, possibly refreshed. The statuette was conserved by Marcel Gibrat in 1975, after it had been damaged in an accident in 1974; the head of the Christ Child, his hands, and the Virgin’s crown were reattached, and three flowers of the crown and Christ’s fingers were rebuilt in ivory. The end of the lily held by the Virgin is lost.

Statue groups of the Virgin and Child in ivory were made in some numbers during the medieval period; they would have been expensive objects, since they used a large quantity from a tusk. The Straus statuette is made from half a tusk, cut longitudinally so that it is flat at the back. It is likely therefore to have originally stood against some form of backdrop, perhaps an altar, being held in place with a dowel fixed in the deep hole in the base as well, probably as some form of adhesive. Extensive scratching of the underside of the base, done to allow a greater grip for adhesive, is commonly found on ivories that had to be fastened to a surface.

The three slightly crudely carved lancet-like shapes on the back of the throne would seem to be unnecessary, if the sculpture was made to be seen only from the front. Perhaps they were added later, once it had been dismantled from its original setting. However, another unusual feature of the back of the base of this statuette is the beveled section at the bottom. Such inserts are found quite often on English alabaster panels, presumably done to make picking up and moving the heavy stone panel easier, but weight would of course not be an issue in the case of a small ivory statuette.

The sculpture is an example of a small group of somewhat elongated figures of the seated Virgin and Child, which Raymond Koechlin characterized as “statuettes de la Vierge au buste allongé,” and which he dated to around the middle of the fourteenth century.¹ Koechlin suggested that this deliberate elongation, which conveys something of the sense of the slim verticality of an ivory task, was a mannerist attempt on the part of the ivory carvers to imbue their figures with a greater elegance.

The principal works in this elongated format are a series of large figures of the seated Virgin Child; they include one of the great masterpieces of medieval ivory carving, the magnificent Virgin and Child in Villeneuve-les-Avignon,² along with others in the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore,³ the British Museum, London,⁴ the Victoria & Albert Museum, London,⁵ and the Thyssen Bornemisza collection.⁶ In the largest of these figures, such as those in Villeneuve-les-Avignon and in the British Museum (fig. 63.1), the bowing of the figure of the Virgin to follow the curve of the tusk is exceptionally pronounced.

This curving and elongation of figures became fashionable in the first decades of the fourteenth century, and is found not only in ivory carvings, but also in manuscript illuminations from the period. Another stylistic feature of this group of ivories is the deliberate contrast between the plain cloak of the Virgin and the sharp V-shaped angles of her dress. Other smaller sculptures in this group, all depicting the Virgin and Child seated, include four examples in the Musée du Louvre, Paris (fig. 63.2),⁷ and another formerly in the Spitzer collection.⁸ The Houston Virgin and Child is especially close to one of the Louvre groups, dated by Danielle Gaborit-Chopin to c. 1300–30,⁹ which is flat at the back and, unlike the Houston group, uncarved at the back.

The Houston Virgin and Child has generally been dated a little later, to around the middle of the fourteenth century, since Richard Randall argued, in his 1994 survey of Gothic ivory carvings in North American collections, that the formality of the pose of this Virgin and Child suggested that it was not French, but was more probably made in Northern Italy, following French models. Randall’s attribution was subsequently accepted by the museum, and the Virgin and Child has been labeled as such until now.

However, there in fact seem to be no serious grounds for considering the Houston Virgin and Child, which fits well into the group of Parisian ivories discussed above, anything other than French. There are hardly any documented Italian ivory Virgin and Child compositions from the fourteenth century, the most important by far being the signed standing group of the Virgin and Child in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo in Pisa, commissioned from Giovanni Pisano (c. 1250–after 1314) around 1299.¹⁰ A very few sculptures of the seated Virgin and Child are thought to be Italian: a relief of around 1300 in the Vatican Museums;¹¹ a fragmentary panel in the Musée du Louvre, Paris, catalogued as Neapolitan work of c. 1325–50; a fourteenth-century Tuscan group of the Virgin suckling the child (Virgo lactans), carved in the round but flattened like the Houston ivory, in the Castello Sforzesco in Milan.¹² There is a standing Virgin and Child in the Thomson collection at the Art Gallery of Ontario, catalogued as Central Italian, c. 1325–50.¹³ These sculptures share a certain hieratic quality, and in most of them the figures are rather heavy and stiff; none have anything much in common with the Houston Virgin and Child.

Although the Virgin and Child from the Straus Collection is overall a quite static and formal composition, the carver discreetly gave himself freer rein with one small part, the little monster who lurks beneath the dress of Mary and glances up indignantly as the Virgin keeps him firmly under control beneath her foot. It is not uncommon in ivory groups to find the Virgin defeating a monster in this manner, the iconography being taken from an earlier tradition in which Christ was shown triumphing in over wild beasts. The iconography refers to verse 13 in Psalm 90 in the Latin Vulgate Bible: “Thou shalt walk upon the asp and the basilisk: and thou shalt trample under foot the lion and the dragon.”¹⁴ Usually the creature under the Virgin’s feet is depicted as a small winged dragon, equating to the basilisk, a mythical serpent-like creature that was reputed to be able to kill through a mere glance. Basilisks may for example be seen under the feet of the seated Virgin and Child in the large group in the British Museum, or in another group in the Victoria & Albert Museum.¹⁵ The strange creature in the Houston group, with its large fat body and tiny head, its flipper-like furry legs terminating in hooves, appears to be the fantastical invention of the carver, without it seems any close parallels in ivory.

—Jeremy Warren