sculpture

The Reliquary Bearer

George Minne

About this work

Object details

TitleThe Reliquary Bearer
Date1897
Mediummarble
Measurements67,5 × 20 × 38 cm, 23,9kg
Inventory number2049

More about this work

George Minne’s Symbolist sculpted oeuvre is marked by depictions of introverted human figures and a search for a deeper meaning to life. His kindred spirit Maurice Maeterlinck, a poet who came from Ghent like Minne, fittingly described the sculptor as ‘the great depictor of sorrow’. The kneeling, slender and apparently elongated youth, which had been one of Minne’s principal motifs since 1889, essentially depicts an emotional state. The sculptures can evoke feelings of vulnerability, humility, sadness, suffering, fear, melancholy, contemplation and narcissism. It was a motif that reached its zenith in Minne’s most famous sculpture: The fountain of kneeling youths of 1898. In The reliquary bearer the slender, self-effacing young man is supporting a relic resting on his left shoulder. His spiritual devotion to this sacred object is rendered convincingly, almost tangibly, by his humbly bowed head, stifled facial expression, and the stylised long fingers cradling the reliquary. There is also the interaction between the strength expressed by the almost straight thighs and lower legs and the submission suggested by the bent back and neck. This dynamic between strength and submission is reinforced by the pronounced contours of the sculpture. They put the ascetic figure into a sort of enclosed tension as an outward sign of inner feelings. The German art critic Julius Meier-Grafe wrote in 1901 that ‘something impersonal lies within Minne’s art, and thus something personal in a higher sense’. By stressing the soul of a statue rather than its truth to life, Minne’s symbolism was frequently associated at the beginning of the 20th century with the mystical emotionality of the Gothic and medieval religiosity. Characteristic sculptures by Minne from the fin de siècle, such as The fountain of kneeling youths and The reliquary bearer, are regarded as iconic early modern art, which is why Minne is seen by art historians as a transitional figure between the influential sculpture of Auguste Rodin and modern sculpture of the early 20th century. In addition, it is clear that Minne was not so much a harbinger of the Parisian avant-garde, in which Cubist sculptors primarily dissected forms. The emotional charges of Minne’s sculptures were, though, direct models for such expressive modern sculptors as Wilhelm Lehmbruck and Käthe Kollwitz. Consequently, at the beginning of the 20th century Minne’s work was chiefly marketed with success in Germany and Austria, with reference being made to the relationship with the Gothic and the connections with Jugendstil or the modern Ausdruckskunst. In Belgium, too, Minne the mystico-Symbolist exercised a major influence on successive generations of Expressionist artists from Sint-Martens-Latem, where he himself lived and worked from 1899. Constant Permeke, for instance, chose a statue of his friend as a memorial stone on his own grave.