ABSTRACT
This chapter explains a striking iconographic oddity, arguing that the emphasis on domestic nurturance relates to particular aspects of the patron's family, but that it also has civic and religious resonances. Combining the civic and domestic occasions of baptism and lying in, Ghirlandaio turned the pictorial and ceremonial convention of onlookers and visitors into an opportunity to portray significant female members of the Tornabuoni's social world. Midwives and wet nurses were sometimes these co-mothers, and it has not been noticed that Ghirlandaio has painted these figures in the armorial colors of gold and green, which were common to the heraldry of both the Tornabuoni and the Tornaquinci consorteria from which they sprang. The Birth of the Baptist has an equivalent figure of disruptive entry, contrasted with everyone else's stately demeanor. In such a view, the iconographic oddity of breastfeeding in the Birth of the Baptist is no more than a mundane, indecorous, and almost irreligious element.
