Head of an Apostle

c. 1210

French; Paris

This elongated head—with its piercing, almond-shaped eyes and prominent mouth with parted lips—projects a commanding presence in limestone, despite its absent body. The unidentified subject likely represents an apostle from the biblical New Testament: Such full-length and larger-than-life-size depictions of Jesus’s followers often decorated columns or door jambs in Gothic cathedrals. The stylistic qualities of this head correspond to the architectural decoration produced for the west facade of Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris around 1200. The symmetry of the head, the locks carved into cascading waves, the leanness of the cheeks, and the physical grandeur lacking emotional content, all resemble sculptures on that part of the building.

The missing nose attests to the head’s storied history. It was allegedly excavated in the mid-1800s during the modernization of Paris; revolutionaries might have deliberately damaged and buried it half a century earlier because of the cathedral’s long association with the monarchy. This provenance, however, remains unsubstantiated. Neutron activation analysis has shown that the limestone used for this object derives from the same quarry as other figures from Notre-Dame, as well as the cathedral at Sens, about seventy-five miles from Paris. This sculpture awaits further technical, stylistic, and provenance research to verify its origins.

Status: On View, Gallery 236
Department: Painting and Sculpture of Europe

Artist: French
Title: Head of an Apostle
Place: France (Artist's nationality:)
Date Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.: 1200–1220
Medium: Limestone
Dimensions: H.: 43 cm (17 in.)
Credit Line: Kate S. Buckingham Endowment
Reference Number: 1944.413
IIIF Manifest The International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) represents a set of open standards that enables rich access to digital media from libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural institutions around the world. Learn more.: https://api.artic.edu/api/v1/artworks/50909/manifest.json

Art Digest, “Boston Museum Opens Magnificent Exhibition of Medieval Art,” The Art Digest 14, 10 (February 15, 1940), p. 6, frontispiece.
Art Institute of Chicago, “Great Medieval Art for Chicago,” The Art Institute of Chicago: The Year 1944 (1945), p. 4.
Art News, “New Life to the Middle Ages: Chicago’s Recent Purchases,” Art News 44, 1 (1945), pp. 20, 22 (ill.).
Meyric R. Rogers and Oswald Goetz, Handbook to the Lucy Maud Buckingham Medieval Collection (Chicago, 1945), p. 62, no. 6, pls. 10, 11, frontispiece.
Meyric R. Rogers, “The Rehabilitation of the Lucy Maud Buckingham Medieval Collection,” Bulletin of the Art Institute of Chicago 39, 3 (March 1945), p. 36, frontispiece.
Antiques, “Additions to the Buckingham Medieval Collection,” Antiques 47, 4 (April 1945), p. 236.
American Correspondent, “Medieval Sculpture in the Buckingham Collection,” The Connoisseur 120, 505 (September 1947), pp. 53–54, no. 7.
Art Institute of Chicago, An Illustrated Guide to the Collections of the Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago, 1948), pp. 14–15 (ill.).
Art Institute of Chicago, An Illustrated Guide to the Collections of the Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago, 1950), p. 18 (ill.).
Charles Fabens Kelley, “Chicago: Record Years,” Art News 51, 4 (June - August 1952), p. 107 (ill.).
Art Institute of Chicago, “A New Setting for the Medieval Collection,” Art Institute of Chicago Quarterly 53, 1 (February 1959), p. 8, ill. opp. p. 8.
William D. Wixom, “Art Treasures from Medieval France - at Cleveland,” The Connoisseur 164, 659 (January 1967), pp. 58, 62.
Eleanor S. Greenhill, “The Provenance of a Gothic Head,” Art Bulletin 49, 2 (June 1967), pp. 101–09, figs. 1–7.
Francis Salet, “Chronique, Une tête gothique du musée de Chicago,” Bulletin Monumental 126, 2 (1968), pp. 190–92.
Reiner Haussherr, review of Willibald Sauerländer, Von Sens bis Straßburger Querhausskulpturen in Kunstchronik 21 (1968), p. 304.
Léon Pressouyre, “Sculptures retrouvées de la Cathédrale de Sens,” Bulletin Monumental 127, 2 (1969), pp. 117–18, fig. 21.
Walter Cahn, “Exhibition Reviews: The Year 1200,” Art Quarterly 33, 3 (1970), p. 300.
John Maxon, The Art Institute of Chicago (London, 1970), pp. 221–22.
Louis Grodecki, “L’an 1200,” L’Oeil 185 (May 1970), pp. 8, 54.
Willibald Sauerländer, “Exhibition Review: The Year 1200, A Centennial Exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” Art Bulletin 53, 4 (December 1971), pp. 507–08.
Willibald Sauerländer, Gothic Sculpture in France, 1140–1270, translated by J. Sondheimer (New York, 1972), p. 453, fig. 74.
Peter Cornelius Claussen, “Antike und Gotische Skulptur in Frankreich um 1200,” Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch 35 (1973), p. 93, fig. 9.
Alan G. Artner, “A Score of Treasures,” Chicago Tribune (April 4, 1979), sec. 9, p. 10.
Charles T. Little, “Searching for Provenances of Medieval Stone Sculptures: Possibilities and Limitations,” Gesta 33 (1994), pp. 29-31, fig. 3.
T. A. Heslop, “Late twelfth-century writing about art, and aesthetic relativity” in Medieval art: recent perspectives. A memorial tribute to C.R. Dodwell, ed. Gale R. Owen-Crocker and Timothy Graham (Manchester and New York, 1998), pp. 131. 139, fig. 72.
Dorothy Gillerman, ed., Gothic Sculpture in America, Publications of the International Center of Medieval Art 4, 2 (Turnhout, 2001), pp. 9–11, no. 7, ill.
Irene Plein, Die frühgotische Skulptur an der Westfassade der Kathedrale von Sens (Münster, 2005), p. 263-4, 358, no. 42, fig. 362.
Georgia Wright and Lore L. Holmes, “The Limestone Project: A Scientific Detective Story” in Set in Stone. The Face in Medieval Sculpture, exhib. cat. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2006, pp. 47-49.
William D. Wixom, review of Set in Stone, Metropolitan Museum of Art in Burlington Magazine 148 (2006), p. 876, fig. 87.
Linda Seidel, “The Buckingham Head: An Incidental Portrait of its Accidental Patron” in To Inspire and Instruct: A History of Medieval Art in Midwestern Museums (Newcastle, 2008), pp. 72-86, 207, fig. 5.1.
Jennifer M. Feltman, “The Limestone Sculpture Provenance Project and the Study of Gothic Architectural Sculpture in America,” in American Gothic: Reflections on Gothic Architectural Scholarship in America, 1925–2025, ed. Robert Bork (Leiden, 2025) 289, fig. 14.4.
James Rondeau, ed., Highlights of the Art Institute of Chicago (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2026), 46, 257, no. 25 (ill.)

Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, Arts of the Middle Ages, 17 February – 24 March 1940, cat. 175.
Cleveland Museum of Art, Treasures from Medieval France, 15 November 1966 - 29 January 1967, cat. IV, 1.
New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, “The Year 1200,” 12 February – 10 May 1970, cat. 15.
Moscow, State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Decorative-Applied Art from Late Antiquity to the Late Gothic Style, 14 May - 14 July 1990, and the Hermitage Museum, Leningrad, 14 August - 14 October 1990, cat. 37.
The Art Institute of Chicago, Devotion and Splendor: Medieval Art at the Art Institute of Chicago, September 25, 2004-January 3, 2005, cat. 18.
New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Set in Stone: The Face in Medieval Sculpture, 26 September, 2006-February 18, 2007, cat. 14 [entry by Georgia Wright]
Magdeburg, Kulturhistorisches Museum, Aufbruch in die Gotik. Der Magdeburger Dom und die späte Stauferzeit, 31 August - 6 December 2009, no. II.7, (entry by Klaus Niehr).

Probably from the Coronation portal or the Last Judgment portal of the west facade of Notre-Dame Cathedral [according to Gillerman, 2001, p. 9-11, and Metropolitan Museum, 2006, pp. 46-48 and 52-54]. Said to have been found during excavation of Boulevard Haussmann at the crossing of Boulevard Malesherbes, Paris, 1852 [according to an undated description by Jacob Hirsch in curatorial file]. Jacob Hirsch, New York, by February 1940 [lent by him to Boston 1940, no. 175]; sold by Hirsch to the Art Institute, 1944, for $35,000.

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Date Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.

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IIIF Manifest The International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) represents a set of open standards that enables rich access to digital media from libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural institutions around the world.

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