My art class took a field trip to the Yale
Art Gallery, and a friend and I were looking
around when we saw a 15th-century German Madonna and child statue. The Madonna was holding Jesus, and both were smiling happily. It looked normal enough…until we saw that the Madonna was standing on top of a relatively large bodiless head. The (male?) head was on its side and had its eyes closed; it was very dark-colored, but didn’t look African; and it was wrapped in something resembling a white shawl. Does anyone know what it was supposed to represent?
My WAG:
In the Genesis story of the Fall, God curses the serpent, the woman, and the man as He prepares to have them chucked out of the garden (Gn 3:14 - 19). In 3:15, God speaks of the enmity between “the woman” and her offspring against the serpent. In that passage, God describes the serpent’s head being crushed (or bruised) as the serpent injures the heel that crushes it. The pronouns in this passage are a bit strange and they get translated a lot of different ways. During the Middle Ages, the word image was re-worked/re-interpreted to mean that the woman was Mary and her offspring who would crush the serpent’s head was Jesus. This image shows up in many Madonna and Child paintings and statuary. A more common image than the one you saw has Mary standing on the globe of the Earth with the serpent twisting between her feet.
If the head you saw could be seen as that of Satan/Lucifer/the devil, then I suspect that is the image presented.
Tom~
Oh, my, the Yale Art Gallery. That joint is just chockablock with nightmare images!
Hope you took a minute to enjoy Van Gogh’s THE NIGHT CAFE. Did you notice that the gentleman with the green pallor, standing behind the billiard table, has NO LEGS showing beneath?
Uke
The newbie’s lookin’ for a headless body, Ike. You’re gonna scare him/her away already. 
Welcome to the show, beef bowl
Peace,
mangeorge
Teach your kids to bungee jump.
One them might have to cross a bridge someday.
**Beef Bowl, ** if you know the name of the artist, or a little more information about the artwork, we could maybe look it up on the web.
I went to the Gallery’s website (here it is) http://www.yale.edu/artgallery/contents_fr.html
but all it said under “Collections” was, “We will have all of our artwork posted here someday soon,” or words to that effect. 
But if you know the artist’s name, we can look it up.
“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast!” - the White Queen
Hmm. To tell you the truth I’ve never seen anything exactly like you describe from that place and time (I’m a PhD student in German/Netherlandish Renaissance art, so I’ve seen this stuff), but hey, the Germans are pretty funky at that time. Best bets-- the notion that it is the serpent is possible, although he usually doesn’t show up in that form, but more as a skinny lizard. Another possibility is that this is a conflation which we call the Virgin of the Apocalypse, in which she is shown with a crown and standing of the moon (but usually a crescent-- I’ve never seen a ‘man-in-the-moon’ type)-- this might be an odd version of that. Are you sure that it was the Virgin-- was there a label? I ask because another possibility that strikes me is that it could be the mystic marriage of St. Catherine, who could be holding the child (who might be putting a ring on her finger) while standing on top of a prone Emperor Maxentius (I realize that that is hard to visualize…) Otherwise, could you describe it more? scale of the head in comp. to the other figures, is it squished or round, etc?