Madonna and Child

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Jörg Breu the Younger's painting of the Madonna and Child

Madonna and Child by Filippo Lippi

The Madonna and Child is one of the central icons of Christianity, representing the Madonna or Mary, mother of Jesus and her son. After some initial resistance and controversy, the formula "Mother of God" (Theotokos) was adopted officially by the Christian Church at the Council of Ephesus, 431. The earliest representation of the Madonna and Child may be the wall painting in the Catacomb of Priscilla, Rome, in which the seated Madonna suckles the Child, who turns his head to gaze at the spectator.^[1]

The earliest consistent representations of Mother and Child were developed in the Eastern Empire, where despite an iconoclastic strain in culture that rejected physical representations as "idols", respect for venerated images was expressed in the repetition of a narrow range of highly conventionalized types, the repeated images familiar as icons (Greek "image"). On a visit to Constantinople in 536, Pope Agapetus was accused of being opposed to the veneration of the theotokos and to the portrayal of her image in churches.^[2] Eastern examples show the Madonna enthroned, even wearing the closed Byzantine pearl-encrusted crown with pendants, with the Christ Child on her lap.^[3]

In the West, hieratic Byzantine models were closely followed in the Early Middle Ages, but with the increased importance of the cult of the Virgin in the 12th and 13th centuries a wide variety of types developed to satisfy a flood of more intensely personal forms of piety. In the usual Gothic and Renaissance formulas the Virgin Mary sits with the Infant Jesus on her lap, or enfolded in her arms. In earlier representations the Virgin is enthroned, and the Child may be fully aware, raising his hand to offer blessing. In a 15th century Italian variation, a baby John the Baptist looks on.

Late Gothic sculptures of the Virgin and Child may show a standing virgin with the child in her arms. Iconography varies between public images and private images supplied on a smaller scale and meant for personal devotion in the chamber: the Virgin suckling the Child (such as the Madonna Litta) is an image largely confined to private devotional icons.

Madonna and Child by Duccio, painting around the year 1300
The Virgin and Child with St. Anne by Leonardo da Vinci
The Benois Madonna by Leonardo da Vinci

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[edit] Notes

^ Victor Lasareff, "Studies in the Iconography of the Virgin" The Art Bulletin 20.1 (March 1938, pp. 26-65) p 27f.
^ m. Mundell, "Monophysite church decoration" Iconoclasm (Birmingham) 1977, p 72.
^ As in the fresco fragments of the lower Basilica di San Clemente, Rome: see John L. Osborne, "Early Medieval Painting in San Clemente, Rome: The Madonna and Child in the Niche" Gesta 20.2 (1981), pp. 299-310.