Black Madonnas of France: A Pilgrim’s Guide

Why some statues of the Virgin are dark, and which Black Virgins of France are medieval and which are later copies.

Francia Sacra · 5 min read

What a Black Madonna is

A Black Madonna, or Black Virgin, is a statue or painting of the Virgin and Child in which the faces and hands are dark. Between four and five hundred have been recorded in Europe, depending on how they are counted, with about 180 in France, most of them in the south. In 1945 the scholar Édouard Saillens counted 205 in France, most of them recent copies.

Each is venerated under its own local title, such as Our Lady of Le Puy or Our Lady of Rocamadour, and most stand in old pilgrimage churches. Many were damaged in the Wars of Religion or the Revolution, so a pilgrim should know which statue is medieval and which is a copy.

The Virgin in Majesty

Many French Black Virgins belong to a type of Romanesque sculpture called the Virgin in Majesty, or Sedes Sapientiae, the Throne of Wisdom. Mary sits upright on a throne and faces forward, with the Child on her knees. She is herself the throne of Christ, the Wisdom of God.

The Cloisters in New York shows a fine example from Auvergne, carved in walnut between 1150 and 1200 and about 27 inches high. A cavity in the Virgin’s left shoulder suggests that it once held a relic, and statues of this kind were set on altars or carried in procession.

The type is old in Auvergne. Around 946 Bishop Étienne II of Clermont commissioned from a goldsmith named Adelelmus a reliquary statue of the Virgin covered with plates of gold. It disappeared at the Revolution. The historian Sophie Brouquet places the Black Virgins of southern France within this Romanesque tradition of the Majesty.

Why the statues are dark

No single explanation covers them all. Some statues were carved in dark wood. Many darkened over the centuries from candle smoke, grime and the decay of lead-based pigments. Others were painted black long after they were made. The Virgin of Rocamadour had a pink face and hands when it was carved, and its black layers date from about the sixteenth century. At Chartres the black coat on the Virgin of the Pillar was added in the nineteenth century, and in Clermont cathedral a medieval Majesty, Notre-Dame-de-Bonne-Mort, was darkened and gilded in the nineteenth century to resemble a Black Virgin.

The verse most often cited for these images is the bride’s line in the Song of Songs, “I am black, but comely” (Song of Songs 1:5). The historian Monique Scheer has argued that a dark color came to signify great age and authenticity, so that a black Virgin looked like an ancient one.

Some writers, beginning with Faujas de Saint-Fond at Le Puy, have taken the Black Virgins for survivals of Isis or of Celtic mother goddesses. Brouquet rejects the Celtic theory on archaeological grounds and notes that such statues are very rare in Brittany and unknown in Ireland. Legends of origin are told as pious tradition: many statues are said to have been found by an animal or in a bramble bush, or to have been carved by Saint Luke.

Le Puy and Rocamadour

The most famous Black Virgin in France stood in the cathedral of Le Puy-en-Velay. According to tradition, Saint Louis gave the cathedral an ebony image of the Virgin in 1254. Revolutionaries burned it publicly on the place du Martouret in June 1794. The Black Virgin on the altar today is a copy. It is carried in procession on Marian feasts and wears one of some thirty cloaks given by the faithful, changed with the liturgical seasons. Le Puy is a stop on Via Gratiae and the starting point of Via Conchae.

Rocamadour is one of the few great Romanesque shrines to have kept its medieval statue. The Virgin is a reliquary carved in walnut in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century, partly covered with silver, and has been restored more than once, notably in 1949. She sits in the chapel of Notre-Dame, rebuilt at the end of the fifteenth century after a rock fall destroyed the old chapel in 1476. Above her hangs a small bell that, according to legend, rang by itself when Our Lady saved a sailor at sea. Pilgrims once climbed the 216 steps of the great stairway on their knees. An intact body found in the rock in 1166 was identified as that of Saint Amadour, whom the chronicler Robert of Torigni mentions in 1180 and whom a fifteenth-century legend identified with Zacchaeus of the Gospel. Rocamadour is also on the Via Gratiae.

Clermont and Orcival

In Clermont-Ferrand the twelfth-century Romanesque church of Notre-Dame-du-Port keeps its Black Virgin in the crypt, beside a well that marks an old spring. According to legend, the statue was found near the spring. Marble ex-votos dated from 1856 to 1998 cover the walls. A general procession through the city in her honor was first held on May 15, 1614, after a hard winter threatened the harvest, and the statue is still carried through the streets once a year. The church is listed by UNESCO among the Routes of Santiago de Compostela in France.

At Orcival the early-twelfth-century church keeps a Virgin in Majesty of about 1170, carved in walnut and covered with silver and gilded silver. She is called Our Lady of the Irons, for the chains on the south wall that recall prisoners freed through her intercession. Orcival used to be counted among the Black Virgins until a restoration cleaned the dark paint from the faces. On Ascension Thursday barefoot men carry her in procession. Clermont and Orcival are both on Via Romanica.

Chartres, Marseille and Paris

Chartres had two dark Virgins. In the crypt, Our Lady Underground (Notre-Dame de Sous-Terre) recalls a legend that the Druids honored there a virgin who would bear a child. The medieval statue was burned in 1793, and the present one, modeled on it, was inaugurated in 1857. In the upper church the sixteenth-century Virgin of the Pillar was long a Black Virgin. Her restoration in 2013 showed that the black coat was a nineteenth-century addition and brought back pale painted faces, a change that was criticized. Chartres is on Via Cathedralis and the Via Gratiae.

In Marseille the crypt of the abbey of Saint-Victor keeps Notre-Dame de Confession, a painted wooden Virgin about 40 inches high that the national heritage inventory dates to the thirteenth century. Each February 2, at Candlemas, a candlelit procession climbs from the Old Port to the abbey early in the morning. The Virgin, dressed in a green cloak, is shown to the crowd, and the archbishop blesses the city, the green candles and the boat-shaped biscuits called navettes. Marseille lies outside our ways.

The Black Virgin of Paris, Notre-Dame-de-Bonne-Délivrance, is a fourteenth-century statue in painted limestone about five feet tall. It stood in the church of Saint-Étienne-des-Grès on the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, where Saint Francis de Sales, then a student, prayed the Memorare before it in the winter of 1586 to 1587 and was freed from a crisis of despair. The church was demolished in 1792. A devout noblewoman, Madame de Carignan, saved the statue, was arrested during the Terror, and later gave it to the Sisters of Saint Thomas of Villanova. It is in their chapel at Neuilly-sur-Seine, just outside Paris, a shrine of the diocese of Nanterre. Feast days and processions at all these shrines are announced on their websites.

Our ways that go there

Holy places: Le Puy-en-Velay, Rocamadour, Clermont-Ferrand, Orcival, Chartres, Paris. Saints: Saint Francis de Sales, Saint Louis.