Madonna (art)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Thirteenth century Madonna with Child in the Italo-Byzantine style.

Madonna is a medieval Italian term for a noble or otherwise important woman, and has long been used commonly in reference to images of the Virgin Mary, the mother of Jesus. The word has also been adopted by the English and other European languages. "Madonna", translates as "My Lady". While stressing the personal, if reverent relationship between the Virgin and the devout Christian who addresses her in prayer, it is comparable to the French, "Notre Dame", or "Our Lady". These names signal both the increased importance of the Cult of the Virgin and the prominence of art in service to Marian devotion during the late medieval period. During the thirteenth century, especially, with the increasing influence of chivalry and aristocratic culture on poetry, song and the visual arts, the Madonna is represented as the Queen of Heaven, often enthroned. Strictly speaking, the term "Madonna" should be used exclusively for Italian works of sacred art, but this is often not followed. Images where she is depicted with the Christ Child, her infant son, are technically of the Madonna and child, but are often loosely referred to as just a "Madonna".

1 Introduction
2 Representations
3 Renaissance
4 Gallery
5 Paintings and Art
6 See also
7 External links

[edit] Introduction

Our Mother of Perpetual Help, probably an early Cretan work, 13th or 14th century. A very popular Catholic image, which was certainly in Rome by 1499.

Very few early images of the Virgin Mary survive, though the depiction of the Madonna has roots in ancient pictorial and sculptural traditions that informed the earliest Christian communities throughout Europe, Northern Africa and the Middle East. Important to Italian tradition are Byzantine icons, especially those created in Constantinople (Istanbul), the capital of the longest, enduring medieval civilization whose icons participated in civic life and were celebrated for their miraculous properties. Byzantium (324-1453) saw itself as the true Rome, if Greek-speaking, Christian empire with colonies of Italians living among its citizens, participating in Crusades at the borders of its land, and ultimately, plundering its churches, palaces and monasteries of many of its treasures. Later in the Middle Ages, the Cretan school was the main source of icons for the West, and the artists there could adapt their style to Western iconography when required.

While theft is one way that Byzantine images made their way West to Italy, the relationship between Byzantine icons and Italian images of the Madonna is far more rich and complicated. Byzantine art played a long, critical role in Western Europe, especially when Byzantine territories included parts of Eastern Europe, Greece and much of Italy itself. Byzantine manuscripts, ivories, gold, silver and luxurious textiles were distributed throughout the West. In Byzantium, Mary's usual title was the Theotokos or Mother of God, rather than the Virgin Mary and it was believed that salvation was delivered to the faithful at the moment of God's incarnation. That theological concept takes pictorial form in the image of Mary holding her infant son.

However, what is most relevant to the Byzantine heritage of the Madonna is twofold. First, the earliest surviving independent images of the Virgin Mary are found in Rome, the center of Christianity in the medieval West. One is a valued possession of Santa Maria in Trastevere, one of the many Roman churches dedicated to the Virgin Mary. Another, a splintered, repainted ghost of its former self, is venerated at the Pantheon, that great architectural wonder of the Ancient Roman Empire, that was rededicated to Mary as an expression of the Church's triumph. Both evoke Byzantine tradition in terms of their medium, that is, the technique and materials of the paintings, in that they were originally painted in tempera (egg yolk and ground pigments) on wooden panels. In this respect, they share the Ancient Roman heritage of Byzantine icons. Second, they share iconography, or subject matter. Each image stresses the maternal role that Mary plays, representing her in relationship to her infant son. It is difficult to gauge the dates of the cluster of these earlier images, however, they seem to be primarily works of the seventh and eighth centuries.

[edit] Representations

It was not until the revival of monumental panel painting in Italy during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, that the image of the Madonna gains prominence outside of Rome, especially throughout Tuscany. While members of the mendicant orders of the Franciscan and Domnican Orders are some of the first to commission panels representing this subject matter, such works quickly became popular in monasteries, parish churches, and homes. Some images of the Madonna were paid for by lay organizations called confraternities, who met to sing praises of the Virgin in chapels found within the newly reconstructed, spacious churches that were sometimes dedicated to her. Paying for such a work might also be seen as a form of devotion. Its expense registers in the use of thin sheets of real gold leaf in all parts of the panel that are not covered with paint, a visual analogue not only to the costly sheaths that medieval goldsmiths used to decorate altars, but also a means of surrounding the image of the Madonna with illumination from oil lamps and candles. Even more precious is the bright blue mantle colored with lapis lazuli, a stone imported from Afghanistan.

This is the case of one of the most famous, innovative and monumental works that Duccio executed for the Laudesi at Santa Maria Novella in Florence. Often the scale of the work indicates a great deal about its original function. Often referred to as the Rucellia Madonna (c. 1285), the panel painting towers over the spectator, offering a visual focus for members of the Laudesi confraternity to gather before it as they sang praises to the image. Duccio made an even grander image of the Madonna enthroned for the high altar of the cathedral of Siena, his home town. Known as the Maesta(1308-11), the image represents the pair as the center of a densely populated court in the central part of a complexly carpentered work that lifts the court upon a predella (pedestal of altarpiece) of narrative scenes and standing figures of prophets and saints. In turn, a modestly scaled image of the Madonna as a half-length figure holding her son in a memorably intimate depiction, is to be found in the National Gallery of London. This is cleary made for the private devotion of a Christian wealthy enough to hire one of the most important Italian artists of his day. The privileged owner need not go to Church to say his prayers or plead for salvation; all he or she had to do was open the shutters of the tabernacle in an act of private revelation.

Lorenzo Monaco, Florence, c.1410

Duccio and his contemporaries inherited early pictorial conventions that were maintained, in part, to tie their own works to the authority of tradition. Despite all of the innovations of painters of the Madonna during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Mary can usually be recognized by virtue of her attire. Customarily when she is represented as a youthful mother of her newborn child, she wears a deeply saturated blue mantle over a red garment. This mantle typically covers her head, where sometimes, one might see a linen, or later, transparent silk veil. She holds the Christ Child, or Baby Jesus, who shares her halo as well as her regal bearing. Often her gaze is directed out at the viewer, serving as an intercessor, or conduit for prayers that flow from the Christian, to Her, and only then, to Her Son. However, late medieval Italian artists also followed the trends of Byzantine icon painting, developing their own methods of depicting the Madonna. Sometimes, the Madonna's complex bond with her tiny child takes the form of a close, intimate moment of tenderness steeped in sorrow where she only has eyes for Him.

While the focus of this entry currently stresses the depiction of the Madonna in panel painting, it should be noted that her image also appears in mural decoration, whether mosaics or fresco painting on the exteriors and interior of sacred buildings. She is found high above the apse, or east end of the church where the liturgy is celebrated in the West. She is also found in sculpted form, whether small ivories for private devotion, or large sculptural reliefs and free-standing sculpture. As a participant in sacred drama, her image inspires one of the most important fresco cycles in all of Italian painting: Giotto's narrative cycle in the Arena Chapel, next to the Scrovegni family's palace in Padua. This program dates to the first decade of the fourteenth century.

Italian artists of the fifteenth century onward are endebted to traditions established in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in their representation of the Madonna.

[edit] Renaissance

Leonardo da Vinci, The Sketch of the Head of Madonna, approx. 1484 AD.

While the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were a time when Italian painters expanded their repertoire to include historical events, independent portraits and mythological subject matter, Christianity retained a strong hold on their careers. Most works of art from this era are sacred. While the range of religious subject matter included subjects from the Old Testament and images of saints whose cults date after the codification of the Bible, the Madonna remained a dominant subject in the iconography of the Renaissance.

Some the most famous Italian painters to turn to this subject are da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael, Giorgione, Giovanni Bellini and Titian, in the 16th century. They developed on the foundations of fifteenth century Marian images by Fra Angelico, Fra Filippo Lippi, Mantegna and Piero della Francesca in particular, among countless others. The subject was equally popular in Early Netherlandish painting and that of the rest of Northern Europe.

The subject retaining the greatest power on all of these men remained the maternal bond, even though the doctrine of The Assumption led to a greater number of paintings that represented Mary without her son. As a commemorative image, the Pietà became an important subject, newly freed from its former role in narrative cycles, in part, an outgrowth of popular devotional statues in Northern Europe. Traditionally, Mary is depicted expressing compassion, grief and love, usually in highly charged, emotional works of art even though the most famous, early work by Michelangelo stifles signs of mourning. The tenderness an ordinary mother might feel towards her beloved child is captured, evoking the moment when she first held her infant son Christ. The spectator, after all, is meant to sympathize, to share in the despair of the mother who holds the body of her crucified son.

[edit] Gallery

An ivory cover of the Codex Aureus of Lorsch, Germany, c. 800	Svanhild Evangeliary, an Illuminated manuscript from Essen, 1058-1085.	Presbyter Martinus: Madonna as Seat of Wisdom, Italy, 1199.	Black Madonna, Barcelona.
Agnolo Gaddi, Coronation of the Virgin, c. 1380	Madonna of Chancellor Rolin, Jan van Eyck, Burgundy, c. 1435	An unusual French Coronation by Enguerrand Quarton, 1454.	Botticelli
Madonna from Holy Week procession in Seville

[edit] Paintings and Art

There are a large number of articles on individual works of various sorts in Category:Depictions of the Virgin Mary and its Sub-category. The term "Madonna" is sometimes often to representations of Mary that were not created by Italians. A small selection of examples include:

Golden Madonna of Essen (the earliest large-scale sculptural example in Western Europe; made for an Ottonian abbess and a precedent for the polychrome wooden processional sculptures of Romanesque France, a type known as Throne of Wisdom.)
Madonna and Child (also known as the Stroclet Madonna or Stroganoff Madonna), a painting by Duccio di Buoninsegna, from around the year 1300.
The Black Madonna of Częstochowa (Czarna Madonna or Matka Boska Częstochowska in Polish) icon, which was, according to legend, painted by St. Luke the Evangelist on a cypress table top from the house of the Holy Family.
Madonna and Child with Flowers, otherwise known as the Benois Madonna, possibly one of two works begun by the artist, as documented in October 1478.
Madonna of the Steps, a relief by Michelangelo.
The Madonna of Port Lligat, the name of two paintings by Salvador Dalí created in 1949 and 1950.
The Fallen Madonna was a fictitious painting from the series Allo! Allo!