Additional Information

ART History Of The Madonna And Child

The oldest known Madonna and Child image dates from the beginning of the third century A.D., and is found in a fresco in the Catacomb of Priscilla in Rome. It was not until 431 that depictions of the Madonna and Child began to proliferate. In that year, Pope Celestine I reaffirmed that the Virgin Mary, while fully human, could be honored as the Theotokos (God-bearer, or Mother of God).

Following this, faithful Christians began to create or commission images of Mary and the child Jesus to serve as objects of devotion. In 787, the Second Council of Nicea decreed that images of Christ, his mother, and the saints were to be venerated, and the Madonna and Child became one of the most popular subjects within European visual art. As of 1949, one in every 20 pictures in London’s National Gallery was titled Virgin and Child.

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. Eastern examples show the Madonna enthroned, even wearing the closed Byzantine pearl-encrusted crown with pendants, with the Christ Child on her lap.

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.

Over the centuries, artists have attached a set of symbolic meanings to clothing and objects in these works. Mary is traditionally depicted wearing a red tunic, representing love and religious aspiration, and a blue mantle that represents constancy and purity. She is often shown radiating a halo or a mandorla (a halo surrounding the entire figure). The Christ Child is sometimes shown with an object such as a bird (the soul), an apple (conscience), grapes (Eucharistic wine), a dove (the Holy Spirit), seeds of grain (Eucharistic bread), cherries (fruit of paradise), a pomegranate (Resurrection), or a lamb (Christ’s sacrifice). The Madonna and Child motif known as the Sacra Conversazione, in which a retinue of heavenly and earthly companions accompanies the pair, became an important artistic theme during the Italian Renaissance.