The Black Madonnas: Romanesque majesties, revolutionary pyres and the mystery of the colour

“I am black, but I am beautiful”

In the crypt of Notre-Dame-du-Port in Clermont or of Saint-Victor in Marseille, above the altar at Rocamadour, at the far end of the church at Marsat, a small wooden statue sits enthroned, stiff and frontal, the Child seated on her knees as on a seat, and her face is black: a Black Madonna. Édouard Saillens, who drew up the first serious inventory of them in 1945, counted two hundred and five in France, many of them copies of lost statues. Sophie Cassagnes-Brouquet counts more than sixty in Auvergne and the Velay, some twenty in Provence, a dozen in Roussillon, and almost none in Brittany. With a few exceptions, they are Romanesque Virgins in Majesty, or copies of them.