The Enormous Influence of The Virgin Mother in Art
This article comes from an issue called ‘All About Mother’, guest edited by Simon Costin. It is the second paper issue published by . Cent magazine. Simon Costin is a well-known English artist and set designer who has worked with internationally renowned fashion brands such as Alexander McQueen and Givenchy, as well as on photoshoots for magazines such as Vogue. Here, art historian Sarah Jane Boss explores how the Image of the Virgin Mary has changed over time in the art world, from innocent to powerful. Read more here in The Enormous Influence of The Virgin Mother in Art. Image on the left-hand side The Virgin and Child, Style of Albrecht Dürer, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Virgin Mary in Art
The differences between the medieval and modern representations of the Mother Mary are quite clear, so strong in fact, that we could even question whether they show the identical figure from the biblical stories.
Religious Symbols
The medieval version of the ‘Virgin in Majesty’ is a powerful and important figure, while the modern version is more likely a modest and gentle young girl. To support this idea, she talks about several artworks and places. For example, statues like Our Lady of Le Puy-en-Velay and Our Lady of Good Hope, which both show a strong and powerful Virgin Mary, almost like a queen who inspires respect. In contrast, more recent images, like Our Lady of Lourdes and Our Lady of Fatima, show a softer and less powerful figure.
Mary, Mother of Jesus
The Virgin Mary is probably the most iconic figure of a mother in art, having been represented in paintings and sculptures the world over for more than a millennium. For the All About Mother issue, .Cent invited various figures, both creative and academic, to contribute their thoughts on motherhood and iconography, with contributions ranging from Mary, Mother of God, through to Princess Diana, a modern icon of a mother.
Mother of God
From Terrifying mother to humble maiden: The Mother of God in devotional representations by Dr Sarah Jane Boss
Christianity symbol
A Methodist friend of mine spent a year working in Italy. On Sundays, he went with his Italian friends to Mass in the Catholic Church, where there were statues of saints before which people would light candles and say prayers. These statues, of course, included images of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the most popular and highly venerated of all Christian saints. My Methodist friend said that, although he himself would not have prayed before an image of this kind, he found nothing offensive in the Catholic devotion that he saw around him, merely accepting it as a different form of Christianity.
Virgin Mary statues
Now, these modern Mary statues show her predominantly as a mild young woman standing at prayer, similar to the image of Our Lady of Lourdes. But on returning to London from Italy, my friend happened to visit the Victoria and Albert Museum, and upon entering, he found himself in the Medieval Treasury, where he was surrounded by ancient statues of the Virgin in Majesty. These images show Mary as a majestic woman, enthroned and often crowned, with a regal-looking son upon her lap. My friend’s immediate reaction to this was one of shock at images which seemed to him to be idols, rather than aids to Christian devotion: ‘This is why we had a Reformation!’, he thought.
La Salette Sanctuary
A similar reaction was provoked in the Anglican theologian B.F. Westcott, when, in 1865, he travelled to France. He wrote about the statues of the Virgin Mary, which he found at the recently established shrine of La Salette, near Grenoble:
‘The figures of the Virgin, which are the object or symbols of devotion, are perfect in taste and beauty. They claim to represent simply an historic fact.’
B.F. Westcott
Worshipping
Westcott contrasted these images favourably with some of the famous Medieval statues which he had also seen in France: ‘There is nothing like the black image of Le Puy, or Dijon … which creates an involuntary sense of repulsion or even disgust as if we were in the presence of some fetish-worship?’
The Virgin Queen
Our Lady of Le Puy-en-Velay, in south-eastern central France, and Our Lady of Good Hope, at Dijon, are Virgins in Majesty – powerfully striking images of a queen who looks right through you and commands the viewer’s attention and respect.
The medieval figure of the Virgin in Majesty and the modern figure of the demure young woman are so different from one another that one would not immediately know that they were supposed to be the same figure from the same biblical story. The Virgin in Majesty is a mother: she has a son upon her lap, whilst the modern young woman stands alone. The Majesty figure has the trappings of political power, whilst an image such as Our Lady of Lourdes or Our Lady of Fatima has the physical appearance of someone with no particular authority. And, as we have seen, the effect of the image upon the viewer is startlingly different in each case. Yet both types of image have been immensely popular at different periods of history.
Madonna of the Meadow, Giovanni Bellini, The National Gallery, London
From the 12th to the 15th centuries, although artistic styles were changing, if you had visited an important pilgrimage shrine dedicated to the Virgin Mary, you would most likely have seen a Virgin in Majesty as the principal devotional image. An image of this kind existed, for example, at Walsingham, the most important Marian shrine in England. If you go to a shrine founded during the seventeenth century, by contrast, you will almost certainly find that an image of the Virgin as a humble young woman is the central object of devotion.
How are we to account for such a dramatic change in the sensibilities of Western Europeans over the centuries? Well, there are many factors that one could call upon to explain such a change.
The Virgin Mary has always been associated, both explicitly and unconsciously, with the Church as an institution. So it tends to be the case that images of the Virgin reflect the Church’s status in society.
During the Middle Ages, the economic, cultural and political power of the Church was overwhelming, and the regal Virgin may well express something of that secular importance. In the modern period, on the other hand, the Catholic Church has increasingly lost that power, and the humble Virgin at prayer may indicate something of the Catholic Church’s decreasing importance as a social institution.
There are also differences in the doctrinal significance of the two types of image.
The medieval statue shows Mary as Mother of God, that is, as the one in whom the eternal Word of God took flesh and became human. Christ is both God and man, and Mary is the uniquely privileged woman who cooperated in this work and in whom it came to pass. The modern images, on the other hand, are symbolic representations of the Immaculate Conception, that is, the teaching that Mary was conceived in her mother’s womb without any trace of the original sin which is said to taint the rest of humanity ever since Adam and Eve sinned and fell from grace in the Garden of Eden. The iconography of the Immaculate Conception was fixed by painters in Seville during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and perhaps the most famous example of this iconography is Diego Velázquez’s Virgin of the Immaculate Conception at the National Gallery in London. It is supposed to show the Blessed Virgin conceived in the mind of God from before the foundations of the world. This general style entered popular art, and most modern popular devotional images of Mary are derived from it.
At a more secular level, we can note that the shift from Mary as mother to Mary as a young girl corresponds to changing attitudes to the institution of motherhood. For many centuries, mothers were figures of reverence and even fear. Many folk songs tell of the terrifying power which mothers can have over their sons and daughters. In recent centuries, on the other hand, physical processes of motherhood have become medicalised, with women in labour being shut away in hospitals so that they are under the control of ‘experts’, so that their friends and relatives do not see or hear what is involved in birthing. At the same time, motherhood is now often treated with sentimentality; witness the expression motherhood and apple pie. I suspect that the reaction against the Virgin in Majesty figures is in part an expression of fear at the image of a powerful mother, or, indeed, a powerful woman of any kind. The image of Mary as gentle, meek and mild offers no threat of evoking the repressed memories of childhood.
The Madonna of the Basket, Correggio, The National Gallery, London
My own theory, however, is that, underlying all these other considerations, Mary stands in the Christian consciousness for the natural world – for God’s creation, including the material world, and all that is wild. The Virgin in Majesty, therefore, signifies the natural world as the bearer of holiness. It is powerful and frightening, but also capable of bestowing immense blessings. The enthroned Virgin tells us of our own weakness in the face of elemental forces, and invites us to be humble before her. The young woman without a throne or child, on the other hand, has become popular in a culture which revels in power over nature. Mary, here is nature that is tame and subdued, nature under control.
But nature, of course, is never under control. We are in and of the natural world, and we never know what that natural world might throw up next. None expected the development of AIDS in the 1980s, for example. So the Virgin in Majesty is the figure which people in the twenty-first century need to return to, to be reminded of the sacred power of the world we inhabit, and to give the natural world the reverence due to a being who is the Bearer of God.
Sarah Jane Boss is one of the founders of the Centre for Marian Studies. She teaches the Mariology course at St Mary’s College, Oscott. She is also the author of numerous publications in Marian studies, including Empress and Handmaid (Cassell, 2000), Mary (Continuum, 2004) and, as editor and contributor, Mary: The Complete Resource (Continuum and OUP, 2007).
If you enjoyed reading The Enormous Influence of The Virgin Mother in Art, why not try The Mother, Love Hate and Everything in Between: Bottled
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