Master of the Krumau Madonna

Nobody knows the name of the sculptor who carved the Krumau Madonna, and almost everything said about him has to be read from the statue itself. Art historians call him the Master of the Krumau Madonna, after the South Bohemian town known in Czech as Český Krumlov, and the statue remains the one work firmly given to him.

He worked around 1390 to 1400, most likely in or near Prague, where the royal court of Bohemia had drawn artists from across Europe. His Madonna is a leading example of the so-called Beautiful Madonnas, a type of gently swaying, richly draped Virgin that spread through Central Europe around 1400. In the 1920s and 1930s German scholars argued that one master had carved the whole group. That idea has not held, and the Beautiful Madonnas are now given to several workshops, with this sculptor as one hand among them.