Cambrai Madonna

The Cambrai Madonna, also called the Notre-Dame de Grâce, produced around 1340, is a small Italo-Byzantine, possibly Sienese,[1] replica of an Eleusa (Virgin of Tenderness) icon.

After the Ottoman Turks had conquered Constantinople, copies of the painting were commissioned in the Low Countries in support of Philip the Good's projected crusade, announced at the Feast of the Pheasant but never launched.

The initials "MR, DI, IHS, XRS" stand for the Latin Mater Dei, Jesu Christus, "Mother of God, Jesus Christ".

[7] The Italian origin of the work is shown in "the more subtle modeling of the faces, the volumetric aspect of the draperies with soft folds, the Latin inscriptions", and the style of the "elaborate punchwork of the haloes".

[11] In Cambrai, the work attracted thousands of pilgrims, including Philip the Good (1457), Charles the Bold (1460) and Louis XI of France, who left his kingdom to see it in 1468, 1477 and 1478.

Philip hoped that the Cambrai Madonna would serve as a significant icon, around which he could rally sufficient religious fervour to launch a crusade to retake the city.

Painters who explicitly adapted the Cambrai Madonna include Petrus Christus who was commissioned in 1454 to produce three separate copies,[1] Rogier van der Weyden,[13] Dieric Bouts[3] and Gerard David.

The Bishop of Cambrai from 1439 to 1479 was John of Burgundy, Philip the Good's illegitimate half-brother, and in June 1455 the cathedral chapter commissioned twelve copies from Hayne of Brussels for twenty pounds, of which one is believed to survive, now in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City.

Like the van der Weyden in Houston, this freely interprets the Cambrai original in a contemporary Netherlandish style; the Madonna's faces are of a Northern European type, and their bodies fuller.