Virtually unknown until recently, the "Kimbell Virgin and Child" (1486) is arguably the finest surviving example of the silver religious statuary so prized in pre-Reformation Germany, where patrons valued the art of the goldsmith even above painting and sculpture. Made for Wilhelm von Reichenau, a powerful Franconian bishop of Eichstatt, the statuette came onto the market when church property was secularized in the early nineteenth century and was long owned by the Rothschild family. Jeffrey Chipps Smith looks at the creation of the statuette in Augsburg, its place in the context of other works of art in Eichstatt, and the compelling story of Bishop Reichenau and his intense devotion to the Virgin Mary.