The Virgin and Child

In the late Middle Ages, Christian spirituality increasingly focused on the salvation of individual souls. Devotional practice was no longer confined to the liturgy, but was supplemented with private prayer. Individuals acquired their own prayer books, and the growing aristocratic and bourgeois classes commissioned small devotional works, like the portable ivory shown here. The invention of printmaking led to the proliferation of sacred images, some inspired by earlier manuscript illuminations. Other objects, like the bronze plaque here, were in turn modeled after prints. [1946.56, 1957.217, 1962.282, BR65.10]