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  • image SG133

The Virgin and Child with a Bishop-Saint (Saint Ambrose?), stained glass panel, German, Rhineland , late 17th or early 18th century

Clear glass with black and brown paint, yellow stain rim, orange stain, blue and red enamels

Height: 255mm
Width: 215mm

Museum number: SG133

On display: Monk's Parlour
All spaces are in No. 13 Lincoln's Inn Fields unless identified as in No. 12, Soane's first house. For tours https://www.soane.org/your-visit

Curatorial note

The Virgin Mary is dressed as the Queen of Heaven, wearing a crown and carrying a sceptre. She stands on a crescent moon, her left foot resting on the head of a serpent with an apple in its mouth. The infant Jesus sits on her right arm and rests his arm on her shoulder; he has a cross on his tunic. Beside the Virgin stands a bishop-saint with a mitre, holding in his left hand a pastoral staff which rests against an open book. With his right hand he points to the Virgin. They stand on a plain with distant mountains. The sky is delicately modelled with rays and clouds. Ambrose is generally shown in bishop’s robes with a mitre and crozier though his attributes, a swarm of bees or a scourge do not feature here. For commentary on the German source of this panel, see SG103. Popham noted ‘Rubens influence’.

In England there is a related pair of saints, St Peter and St Margaret, at the Church of the Holy Trinity, Berwick on Tweed, while two further related panels, St Francis and St Dominic and St Joseph and the Christ Child, are in the Chantry Chapel of Farleigh Hungerford Castle (Somerset). See also SG77, SG87, SG103, SG105 and SG135.

Literature

Suzanne Beeh-Lustenberger, Glasgemälde aus Frankfurter Sammlungen. Frankfurt: Verlag Waldemar Kramer, 1965 Inv. X 17073
Suzanne Beeh-Lustenberger, Glasmalerei um 800-1900 im Hessischen Landesmuseum in Darmstadt. Frankfurt: Hans Peters Verlag, 1973 Inv. Kg 31:19
Brigitte Lymant, Die Glasmalerei des Schnütgen Museums. Köln: Das Museum, 1982 M 352-354
William Cole, A Catalogue of Netherlandish and North European Roundels in Britain. Oxford: OUP for The British Academy, 1993 165, 654, 657
Catalogue of the Stained Glass in Sir John Soane's Museum, Special Issue of the Journal of Stained Glass 2004, p. 279


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