Woman holding a jar (Mary Magdalene?)
ca. 1170-80
wood
height: 92 cm
Inv. 56.826
This statue, carved in Romanesque style in a twelfth-century workshop active in Cologne, is the oldest conserved in the Christian Museum. It portrays one of the women who visited Christ’s tomb, perhaps Mary Magdalene herself. The mourning woman holds a jar with the ointment used for embalming bodies. In medieval art, this characteristic object became Mary Magdalene’s attribute. The other figures that made up the group of statues to which the work belonged are lost. The original polychrome paint-layer of the statue was destroyed and the face, the hands, the jar, and a significant part of the dress blackened in a fire that broke out in the museum in 1905. Despite the damage suffered, the deep sorrow of mourning expressed in the soft, finely contoured figure is well perceivable. János Simor, the founder of the museum purchased this invaluable statue in 1884 from the canon and art collector Alexander Schnütgen, who also created a significant museum in the archiepiscopal city of Cologne on the banks of the Rhine.
I.K.
