Virgin of the Offering construction site in the courtyard of Ulysse Attenni's studio, 2 rue Platon, 15th arrondissement, Paris: Antoine Bourdelle on the scaffolding

In the latter part of his career, Bourdelle devoted himself to large-scale commissions for public monuments. None of these came from the French State. At the start of the Great War, a couple of industrialists from Alsace expressed the wish to erect a monument to the Virgin if the copperworks and the village of Niederbruck were spared in battle. On 18 May 1920, their son Léon Vogt commissioned Bourdelle to sculpt “a Virgin in Chauvigny stone, six metres high from the feet to the top, in four superimposed blocks”. Bourdelle modelled an initial small study (64 cm), which he presented to the public in bronze or marble, before exhibiting the full-size plaster model at the Salon d'Automne in 1922. The pointing of the stone sculpture began in the studio of Ulysse Attenni (1874-1938), a marble sculptor who regularly assisted the master. Bourdelle put the finishing touches to the surface throughout the summer of 1922 before shipping the sculpted blocks in crates to the top of the rocky spur overlooking Niederbruck, where he completed the carving. With this colossal figure, inaugurated on 7 October 1923, Bourdelle reached his full potential. The limpidity and density of the construction are an inspired return to medieval art, to the sinuosity of Gothic statuary. Raising the Child as an offering, the Virgin “seems to partly sense the divine weight she is carrying. The matter is therefore this, thought, the stone carries the soul.” (Bourdelle, letter to the priest Father Tessèdre, 1926)

Jérôme Godeau