Medieval Wood Carvings in Argentine Museums
Mary and the Child in the National Museum of Fine Arts
Abstract
This paper offers an insight into an early 14th. Century wooden sculpture of Virgin Mary and the Child crafted in the Nortwestern Spanish province of Alava and preserved in the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Argentina, by adressing both its recent history as well as its iconography, style and technique, towards a better and wider knowledge of the Medieval artistic patrimony in Argentine public museums. To this end, the author shall first search into the provenance of this work and its transference to the public collection that now houses it, and then look at some peculiar aspects of its iconography to place this sculpture into its precise artistic framework, which has been defined by Clara Fernandez-Ladreda as the "Basque-Navarre-Riojan" Gothic style.