Madonna of Bruges

The Madonna of Bruges is a marble sculpture of the Virgin and Child by Michelangelo, a little over a metre high, now in the Church of Our Lady in Bruges. It belongs to the High Renaissance and to the years around the turn of the sixteenth century, though the precise date of carving is not fixed with certainty.

What strikes first is how little it behaves like the Madonnas that preceded it. Those works tended to show a pious Virgin smiling down on an infant held securely in her arms. Here the child stands almost unsupported between Mary’s knees, restrained only loosely by her left hand, and seems about to step away. Mary neither clings to him nor looks at him. She gazes down and aside. The emotional centre of the group is not embrace but a withheld glance and a movement that has not yet happened.

The composition is built as a stable pyramid, a arrangement familiar from Leonardo’s work of the late fifteenth century, yet the internal life of the figures runs against that stability. The boy’s body leans toward departure; the mother’s head turns from the contact that would lock the group together. If the sculpture was originally intended for an altarpiece, as is sometimes proposed, it would have been seen from slightly below and a little to one side, so that Mary’s downward look would meet the viewer while the child stepped toward the space in front of the altar. That reading remains a hypothesis rather than a documented fact, but it fits the angles of the heads and the way the group opens to the right.

The drapery links the work to the Pietà completed not long before. Mary’s robe falls in the same long, fluid channels; her face has the same elongated oval. Michelangelo is working again with a seated woman whose clothing must carry much of the sculpture’s mass and gravity while the upper bodies remain free enough to act. In the Pietà the dead son lies across her lap. Here the living son is already half free of it. The two groups answer one another without repeating the same story.

In 1504 the sculpture was bought by Giovanni and Alessandro Moscheroni — the Mouscron brothers — wealthy cloth merchants of Bruges, then one of Europe’s great commercial cities. They paid one hundred ducats. It was the first sculpture by Michelangelo to leave Italy during his lifetime. From that purchase the work has belonged to Bruges, and specifically to the Church of Our Lady, with two violent interruptions.

In 1794, after French Revolutionary forces took the Austrian Netherlands, the citizens of Bruges were ordered to send it, with other valued works, to Paris. It came back after Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815. The second removal was darker and more abrupt. In 1944, as German forces retreated, the sculpture was taken from Belgium wrapped in mattresses inside a Red Cross truck, then stored in the salt mine at Altaussee in Austria. It was found there the following year and returned again. For a time it passed through the Munich Central Collecting Point before coming home to the church where it still stands.

The group remains religious art in the strict sense: a Virgin and Child carved for Christian devotion. What it withholds is the easy reassurance that subject usually supplied. The child is already on his feet. The mother already knows more than she will say.