Madonna and Child

“ Through all his pictures of the Virgin and child we can see that the Madonna as the Christ-bearer is the ideal he always has in view. He falls short of it, not through any lack of earnestness, but because his type of womanhood is incapable of expressing such lofty idealism. His virgins are modelled upon the simple Andalusian maidens, sweet, timid, dark-eyed creatures. Their faces glow with gentle affection as they look wistfully out of the picture, or raise their eyes to heaven, as if dimly discerning the heights which they have never reached. ”

“ The Madonna and Child surrounded with cherubim (198) is a beautiful picture, painted in the broad manner of Mantegna’s maturity.
Carlo Crivelli fills the rest of the room with a wealth of colour and beauty. Madonna and Child with SS. Peter and Dominic (201) is so exquisite a picture, so lovely in colour and design, that one feels the last word has been said in an art that combines the highest decoration with a true and childlike religious feeling. ”

“ In a curious picture of the enthroned Madonna and Child (Berlin Gal.) , by Gentil Fabriano, a tree rises on each side of the throne, on which little red seraphim are perched like birds, singing and playing on musical instruments. In later times, they play and sing for the solace of the divine Infant, not merely adoring, but ministering: but these angels ministrant belong to another class of pictures. Adoration, not service, was required by the divine Child and his mother, when they were represented simply in their divine character, and placed far beyond earthly wants and earthly associations. ”

“ The curtain flew back and—there she stood, the Madonna with the Child in her arms, so beautiful, so instinct with life and warmth, as only nature has ever painted and art imitated from nature. There she stood with that richly tinted olive complexion, with those transparent, softly reddened cheeks, with those full crimson lips, with those large black eyes at once full of mildness and fire, and with that broad and noble brow full of depth of thought and yet full of repose. ”

“ He is a little shy about being presented to the Madonna, and for the present has got behind the pillar, blushing, but opening his black eyes wide; he is just summoning courage to peep round, and see if she looks kind. A still younger child, about six years old, is really frightened, and has run back to his mother, catching hold of her dress at the waist. She throws her right arm round him and over him, with exquisite instinctive action, not moving her eyes from the Madonna’s face. ”

“ These subjects are mentioned in the order of philosophical climax, and as we go from the first to the second, and from the second to the third, we advance farther and farther into the experience of motherhood. At the same time there is an increase in the dignity of the Madonna and in her importance as an individual. In the Mater Amabilis she is subordinate to her child, absorbed in him, so to speak; his infantine charms often overmatch her own beauty. When she rises to the responsibilities of her high calling, she is, for the time being, of equal interest and importance. ”

“ Lastly, the Madonna and the Child, who turn to the donor, are in attitudes which, however graceful, are not perhaps sufficiently tranquil for the majesty of the queen of heaven. The expression of the Madonna's countenance is extremely sweet, but with more of the character of a mere woman than of a glorified being. ”

“ It is far more than a mother and child, for one sees in the [43] Madonna a look suggesting that she sees vaguely the darkness of Calvary and the glory of the resurrection. This is no ordinary child, either, that she holds, for He sees beyond this world into eternity and that His is no common destiny;—at least, one feels these things as we gaze at the lovely apparition on its background of clouds and innumerable angel heads. St. Sixtus on one side would know more of this mystery, while St. Barbara on the other is dazzled by the vision and turns aside her lovely face. ”

“ The little child appreciates it as readily as the old man, and both, alike, are drawn to it by an irresistible attraction. Thus, century after [xiv] century, the artist has poured out his soul in this all-prevailing theme of mother love until we have an accumulation of Madonna pictures so great that no one would dare to estimate their number. It would seem that every conceivable type was long since exhausted; but the end is not yet. So long as we have mothers, art will continue to produce Madonnas. ”

“ There is yet another treatment of the Madonna and Child, in which the Virgin no longer retains the lofty goddess-like exaltation given to her in the old time. She is brought nearer to our sympathies. She is not seated in a chair of state with the accompaniments of earthly power; she is not enthroned on clouds, nor glorified and star-crowned in heaven; she is no longer so exclusively the VERGINE DEA, nor the VIRGO DEI GENITRIX; but she is still the ALMA MATER REDEMPTORIS, the young, and lovely, and most pure mother of a divine Christ. She is not sustained in mid-air by angels ”

“ A jingling organ plays a little melody in triple time; and from the sacristy comes forth the priest. With much reverence, and with a show of preparation, he and the acolytes around him mount the altar steps, and pull a string which draws the curtain. Behind the curtain we behold Madonna and her child—a faint, old, ugly picture, blackened with the smoke and incense of five hundred years, a wonder-working image, cased in gold, and guarded from the common air by glass and draperies. Jewelled crowns are stuck upon the heads of the mother and the infant. ”

“ Copyists are kept busy, repeating the composition for eager purchasers, and it has made its way all over the world. The circle of graceful angels who, with the boy St. John, join the mother in adoring the Christ-child, is one of the chief attractions of the picture. It is a pretty conceit that one of these angels showers rose leaves upon the babe.
The pastoral Madonna is the sort of picture which can never be outgrown. The charm of nature is as perennial as is the beauty of motherhood, and the two are always in harmony. ”

“ These are not people come together by accident to part again accidentally; they are eternal, part of a vision disclosed to the pious spectator, a crowning of the Mass with its wax-lights and songs.
But the Venetian playing and singing angels are there for something more important still. Those excellent old painters understood quite well that in the midst of all this official, doge-like ceremony, it was hard, very hard lines for the poor little Christ Child, having to stand or lie for ever, for ever among those grown-up saints, on the knees of that majestic throning Madonna ”

“ It is sympathetic in feeling and refined in execution. The arrangement of dark foliage behind the Madonna, showing on one side the distant landscape and pale sky, is very happy. It is the best picture we know of this artist. Madonna and Child (277) by Gaudenzio Ferrari is very typical of his style, rather affected in attitude and hot in colour. Close by hangs a Holy Family (279) by Bramantino. The drawing of the Saviour (280) is not admitted by the best authorities to be a genuine work of Leonardo’s. ”

“ This is usually a long, narrow picture, showing a group of sacred personages, against a landscape setting, centering about the Madonna and child. The composition has none of the formality of the enthroned Madonna. An underlying unity of purpose and action binds all the figures together in natural and harmonious relations.
The acknowledged leader of this style of composition—the inventor indeed, according to many—was Palma Vecchio. It is curious that of a painter whose works are so widely admired, almost [108] nothing is known. ”

“ In this most touching picture the artist has expressed himself with a deep human feeling which he rarely shows afterwards. We feel almost awed in the presence of the Mother’s infinite love and sorrow, and the perfect peace and calm of the dead Christ amid the agony of hopeless grief. St. John cries aloud in his despair, and a pitiless dawn is breaking behind them. It is an early work and the treatment of the flesh and heavy draperies is broad and severe. In the picture hanging next, Madonna and Child in a beautiful landscape (215) , dated 1510, we see the change wrought by nearly fifty years. ”

“ The first shows an ideal mother fondly pressing her darling’s cheek against her own; the second is a vision of ideal womanhood hastening down the centuries to present the Word to the waiting world.
The Christ-child of the Tempi painting is a dimpled baby shyly nestling against his mother’s breast; the Sistine Child is a royal messenger lightly enthroned upon the Madonna’s arm. In one conception, Mother and Son are absorbed entirely in each other ”

“ It is seldom that the Madonna di Misericordia appears without the Child in her arms; her maternity is supposed to be one element in her sympathy with suffering humanity. I will add, however, to the examples already given, one very celebrated instance. ”

“ Agostino and saw the beautiful miracle-working Madonna. She is a lovely marble woman with a less lovely bambino. The mother is literally covered with gems; she has strings upon strings of pearls about her neck, her fingers are laden to the very tips with rings; the child is hung with scores of watches. Both heads are deformed with ugly crowns. The Madonna is by Jacopo Sansovino, a Florentine sculptor of the fifteenth century. She is much adored and quite adorable. She is very rich, has a good income of her own from the various legacies she has received. ”

“ The painter's later work evinces a growing maturity of thought. In the Holy Family of Francis I., how strong and tender is the mother's attitude, as [134] she stoops to lift her child from his cradle; in the Chair Madonna, how protecting is the capacious embrace with which she gathers him to herself in brooding love. No technical artistic education is necessary for the appreciation of such pictures. All who have known a mother's love look and understand, and look again and are satisfied.
Correggio touches the heart in much the same way ”

“ Salting’s Madonna. There is a homely strain indeed, which makes the subject simply Mother and Child; a conception which we find exactly paralleled in another charming work of his known as La Vergine Cucitrice, or The Sempstress Madonna, in the Corsini Gallery in Rome (see illustration) . But the homeliness of conception is in each case relieved by the exquisite setting; the landscape background and especially the decorative foliage being treated with a rare feeling for beautiful effects. ”

“ Art has found no higher expression than in its perpetuation 457of the portraiture of the Madonna and the Child. The great masters who thus immortalized the trust committed to them, found no more inspiring subject than the Motherhood and the Childhood whose sacredness appeals to all hearts through the never-ending, still-beginning succession of the ages. ”

“ It is impossible in a limited space to give an adequate idea of the beauty and charm with which the old masters have immortalized childhood—or perhaps it would be more accurate to say babyhood, since the great majority are representations of the Child with the Madonna, and, though varying in age from a few weeks upwards, the infant is seldom shown as older than a year or two at most. ”

“ That Virgin who, in all her portraits, is dressed in a churn-shaped gown and who holds a Child similarly habited, is the Madonna most efficacious in cases of dreadful accident and hopeless sickness, if we may trust the pictures which represent her interference. ”

“ The new art demands simplicity and centrality. The human figure dominates the compositions. The frame is filled densely with a complicated group. The figures themselves are ample and mature. The Madonna is no longer a girl, but a gracious woman of thirty years. The Christ Child is no longer an infant, but a well-grown lad, whose supple curves harmonize with those of grown folks. As to pose, the figures no longer are casually arranged or in some posture required by a specific action. They are cast in conventional poses which bring out the active beauty of the body. ”

“ Filippo Lippi.—Madonna in Adoration. Please click here for a modern color image
In the Madonna of the Uffizi, he broke away somewhat from tradition, and rendered quite a new version of the subject. The Virgin is seated with folded hands, adoring her child, who is held up before her by two boy angels. His type of childhood [177] is by no means pretty, though altogether natural. The Virgin cannot be called either intellectual or spiritual, but "where," as a noted critic has asked, "can we find a face more winsome and appealing?" ”

“ Every lane, every cottage, has its Madonna-shrine here; lumped in clay or daubed in raw colour, nothing can obliterate the sweet sentiment of these poor weeds of art, these tawdry little appeals to the better part of us. Madonna cries with a bared red heart; she supports a white Christ; suave she stoops to enfold a legion of children in her mantle. ”

“ It is now about fifteen centuries since the Madonna with her Babe was first introduced into art, and it is safe to say that, throughout all this time, the subject has been unrivalled in popularity. It requires no very profound philosophy to discover the reason for this. The Madonna is the universal type of motherhood, a subject which, in its very nature, appeals to all classes and conditions of people. No one is too ignorant to understand it, and none too wise to be superior to its charm. ”