3-085-353 - Heritage Art/Heritage Images

The Coronation of the Virgin, reverse: Christ Carrying the Cross (fragment of an altar wing), c1350-1360. This panel fragment presumably came from a convent of the Poor Clares in Nuremberg. It is typical testimony to late fourteenth-century female mysticism. The front features ‘The Coronation of the Virgin’. The banderoles quote the ‘Song of Solomon’ and characterise Mary as Christ’s bride, a symbol of the church and a loving soul-a quality with which particularly women could identify. The back shows the extant upper section of a cross-bearing Christ as a kind of instruction in vicarious suffering. The panel was part of a tabernacle altarpiece whose wings flanked a central sculpture.