ABSTRACT
Mary, the ‘Mother of God’, has had a central place in the doctrinal and devotional tradition of Christianity and has been a rich resource for the artistic imagination almost from the beginning of the Christian era. Mary’s consent to becoming the mother of a divine being was recorded in the Gospels,1 and in the middle of the second century a fresco of the virgin and child was painted on the wall of the Catacomb of Priscilla in Rome. By the fifth century, Mary’s title and role as God-bearer (Theotokos) were theologically established and the Mother of God began to figure prominently in both Western (Roman) and Eastern (Orthodox) iconography. During the Middle Ages, Mary was gradually elevated to a status above the rest of sinful humanity and celebrated (in words later penned by William Wordsworth) as ‘tainted nature’s solitary boast’—the only human being preserved from original sin. In the view of some devotees, Mary seemed to have attained a status equal to that of her divine son. Throughout medieval Europe, more churches and chapels were dedicated to her than to Christ and all the other saints combined. Today, Mary continues to play a central role in Christian devotion, and it is almost certainly true that she has been represented in works of art more than any other female in history, divine or human. Yet the wealth of Marian images that resulted from this exuberant and unrestrained exercise of the Christian imagination could hardly have been anticipated from the earliest biblical texts, where we first learn of a woman from Nazareth who conceived and gave birth to a child recognized as the Jewish Messiah. The absence of any description of her appearance or character and the lack of factual details regarding her life set free the Christian theological and artistic imagination.2
