Bambino Lactans
Netherlandish artist Jan Gossaert made many paintings on the theme of the “madonna lactans,” or nursing madonna. This one, from around 1525, shows the baby Jesus with swollen breasts — as if he wanted to take over his mother’s role of lactating.
Modern scholars have suggested that Gossaert wanted to represent Christ’s motherly role of loving, feeding and saving humankind.
But the painting’s “peculiar erotic charge — enhanced by the abundance of folds produced by Mary’s garments and the tactile appeal of the infant’s podgy body — makes the modern viewer wonder, again, whether the image was fit for prayer and worship,” historian Jutta Sperling observes.
Sperling wonders if Gossaert’s “almost-lactating infant Jesus might have been a satirical response to and adaptation of Erasmus’s biting critique of the worship of the lactating Virgin and her milk relics.”
The image here is a detail from the original oil on oak panel in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.