page_title: Durán Madonna
section_title: Illusionary devices
hierarchical_section_title: Durán Madonna / Illusionary devices
context_page_description: Durán Madonna is an oil on oak panel painting completed sometime between 1435 and 1438 by the Netherlandish painter Rogier van der Weyden. The painting derives from Jan van Eyck's Ince Hall Madonna and was much imitated subsequently. Now in the Prado, Madrid, it depicts a seated and serene Virgin Mary dressed in a long, flowing red robe lined with gold-coloured thread. She cradles the child Jesus who sits on her lap, playfully leafing backwards through a holy book or manuscript on which both figures' gazes rest. But unlike van Eyck's earlier treatment, van der Weyden not only positions his Virgin and Child in a Gothic apse or niche as he had his two earlier madonnas, but also places them on a projecting plinth, thus further emphasising their sculptural impression.
  Christ appears much older than in most contemporary paintings of this kind. He is far from an infant, and is very realistically and physically rendered. He is shown as a small child, with none of the softness of usual 15th-century depictions of the Virgin and Child. The painting is characterised by the sculptural look that van der Weyden often favoured, and for its similarity in colourisation to his c.
context_section_description: Van der Weyden often depicted lifelike and voluminous figures set in shallow sculptural spaces, in which they seemed cramped and larger than scale. The space filled by the figures is undefined and ambiguously located. Mary and the child are supported by a projecting corbel, the three-dimensionality of which gives the disorienting impression that the figures are part of a relief in a much larger work of art. This gives the work a dizzying and dislocated perspective; its own unique sense of space and placement.
  The painting is an early example of van der Weyden's habit of rendering his figures with the appearance of polychrome sculptures, an effect here accentuated by the neutral background. Van der Weyden's tendency to blur the line between sculpture and paint in an illusionistic manner can be see most effectively in his  Descent from the Cross. Art historian Robert Nosow notes the architectural aspect of the gothic frame, and the manner in which the lines of the Virgin and child make them seem as if statues come to life. Art historian Shirley Neilsen Blum writes that the faux sculptural elements, "force[s] the viewer to continually confront the seemingly real presence of two media, sculpture and painting ... Rogier defies logic and therefore enhances the magical quality of the image. Divinity is stressed because it has transcended media definition."
caption: Left wing of van der Weyden's Froimont Diptych, after 1460. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Caen.
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