EXCEPTIONAL carved and gilded wooden SUBJECT representing a - Lot 100

EXCEPTIONAL carved and gilded wooden SUBJECT representing a Saint Barbara. Malines, early 16th century. H.30 L.12. Literature: "Five hundred years after the time of their production, "Malines dolls" are still fascinating in many ways. In the first half of the 16th century, they were produced in large numbers, exported and appreciated in many parts of Europe. Condemned by her father to marry a man she had not chosen, Saint Barbara, princess of Bithynia, refused the union in order to devote herself to Christ. Furious, the king locked her up in a tower where she was secretly baptized. On learning of her conversion to Christianity, her father brought her before the Roman authorities, who condemned her to torture and death. True to iconographic tradition, our statuette shows Barbe standing beside the turret in which her father condemned her to solitary confinement, with an open book in her left hand and perhaps the martyr's palm in her right. The saint is dressed in a surcoat with a fitted bodice concealed beneath a sumptuous gown with full, puffed sleeves, held at the waist by a belt and a rich apron with bells. The stylized, youthful face of Saint Barbara, with its regular features, is enhanced by small, half-closed eyes with marked orbits and carefully chiseled eyelids. Her cheekbones protrude slightly, and her mouth is small and defined. This round face, crowned by a rounded forehead and punctuated by a pointed chin, gives our saint the gentle, charming air so typical of statuettes from Mechelen. This roundness is accentuated by the beaded headdress, a true Malines specificity on the scale of Brabant, wrapped and trimmed with a string of pearls.