Rare Corbel with Foliate Mask known as "Green Man" - France 14th century

Rare Corbel with Foliate Mask known as "Green Man"
France, 14th century
Limestone
16 x 35 x 12 cm
Architectural fragment in grey limestone, featuring a relief anthropomorphic mask known as a foliate head or "Green Man".

The face, fleshy and expressive, is distinguished by its powerfully modelled features: prominent brow ridges, deep-set eyes beneath a domed forehead, a broad nose and slightly parted lips, whose corners appear to extend into vegetal scrolls that spread across the entire surface. The foliage, rendered in low relief, forms an organic crown unfurling from the figure's head and merging with the rough stone that frames it, in keeping with the iconographic tradition of the Green Man, in which the human and the vegetal intertwine into an ambiguous hybrid figure.
The limestone block, rectangular in section, served as a load-bearing corbel — an element of architectural moulding designed to support a cornice, vault or arch — most likely within a civic building.

The Green Man motif — a human face emerging from foliage or disgorging vegetal sprays — can be found in Northern Europe from the 13th to the 15th century. A protean figure hovering between the apotropaic grotesque and a celebration of the natural world, it adorns capitals, keystones, misericords and corbels alike.
The schematic yet vigorous treatment of the face, together with the handling of the foliage in flat relief, is evocative of Northern France workshops of the 14th century.