Portal:Saints/Selected picture/3
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Madonna and Child is one of the central icons of Christianity. 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 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").
