Madonna and Child

A traditional subject in Western art is Saint Luke, the patron saint of artists, painting the Madonna and Child---the Virgin Mary and the infant Jesus. A noted example is the 15th-century masterpiece by the Flemish artist Rogier van der Weyden, St. Luke Drawing the Virgin and Child, now housed in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. According to legend Saint Luke was the first to paint a portrait of the Virgin Mary, and, ever since, images of the Madonna and Child have been a staple of Christian art. Surviving representations in the Roman catacombs can be dated to as early as the 3d century.

Tradition has it that Saint Luke's original portrait was brought to Constantinople from Jerusalem by Constantine's mother, Saint Helen. In one version of the story, the original was destroyed after the city's fall to the Turks in 1453, while other traditions identify the portrait from Saint Luke's hand as, alternately, a painting in St. Mark's Cathedral in Venice or an image in the church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome. Farther to the north the so-called Our Lady of Vladimir, Russia's holiest object, now in Moscow's State Tretyakov Gallery, has been revered for centuries as an original by Saint Luke. Our Lady of Czestochowa, or the Black Madonna, has shared the same adulation in Poland.

Modern scholarship has placed the creation of all these works well past the time of the 1st-century evangelist, but they are all rooted in Byzantine traditions of depicting the Madonna and Child. In stark contrast to later Western practices, which emphasized the artist's freedom of expression and interpretation, the Eastern Christian artists were bound by strict rules, thus creating familiar, stylized images that remained consistent in type and iconography for centuries. Icons, as these objects of veneration are called, function as sacred objects and are thus revered, similarly to relics, for their mystical powers quite apart from their value as works of art. After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, Russia became a primary center for the production of icons.

In the late Middle Ages, Italian painting was firmly rooted in Byzantine traditions as well, and many of the great masterpieces of early Italian art, such as Cimabue's Maesta (Madonna and Child in Majesty Surrounded by Angels) (c. 1270; Musée du Louvre, Paris), show a clear debt to established forms. In the following centuries, however, emerging humanism completely changed both the purpose of depicting the Madonna and Child and the way the image was envisioned in Western art.

No artist is more closely associated with the Madonna and Child than Raphael, the great master of the Italian High Renaissance. The very term Madonna and Child, with its Italian derivation (ma donna means "my lady"), brings to mind the particularly Italian form of the image, with Raphael as its prototypical creator.

The Alba Madonna, now located in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., is one of Raphael's many treatments of the subject. In the painting the Virgin Mary, seated on the ground in an idyllic landscape, holds the Christ Child, who reaches for a cross from the hand of the baby John the Baptist, as if in anticipation of his future role. The small group forms a perfectly balanced pyramidal mass within the tondo; its serenity and harmony define the High Renaissance ideal of beauty. The religious story and the message are clearly stated, but, unlike in Byzantine images of the Madonna and Child, Raphael's "vocabulary" is that of the world in which the artist lived. Mary, with her flowing robes and elegant gesture, is maternal in her protective, gentle, and loving attitude toward the child. The child projects a divine nature in his quiet nobility, yet is also quintessentially human, his nude body and dependence on his mother showing clearly that he has much in common with his earthly peers. The viewer relates to the scene in human terms, rather than as one would relate to a stylized, mystical, and sacred icon.

Although religious imagery has long since been displaced as the dominant subject matter in contemporary art, depictions of the Madonna and Child continue to be produced and to break new aesthetic ground in our own times. Among 20th-century artists known for Christian images is the French painter Georges Rouault, who produced numerous versions of the Madonna and Child. More recently The Holy Virgin Mary, a 1996 painting by Chris Ofili, a British-born artist of Nigerian heritage (and a practicing Roman Catholic), became the center of controversy when exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 1999. The painting, depicting a black Mary (albeit without child), incorporated nontraditional multimedia components (including elephant dung and pornographic images), pitting the museum against New York City's mayor and much of the Roman Catholic establishment in a noisy debate.