#madonna lactans

[koredzas]

Defendente Ferreri - Nursing Madonna. 1530

[mourama]

“A Virgem do Leite” (‘Nursing Madonna’) by Frei carlos, c.1520-30

[nsfwbible]

Virgin in Front of a Fire Screen

The painting, made around 1440 and attributed to a follower of Robert Campin, defied standards for virgin-and-child iconography: Milk drips from the virgin’s blue-veined breast, which she presents to the viewer instead of her son.

“Such unabashed emphasis on Mary’s nipple is unknown in Italian representations of the same topic,” historian Jutta Sperling notes. “Both before and after their ‘naturalistic’ metamorphosis in the late fifteenth century, Italian versions of the iconography usually portray the Christ Child in the act of suckling rather than the Virgin in the act of baring her breast to the viewer. By contrast, later Flemish artists ... would replicate Campin’s follower’s focus on her nipple and the peculiar address that results from it.”

The Christ child’s genitals are clearly visible under the Virgin’s left hand, perhaps meant to remind viewers that this son of God is human after all.

Shown here is a detail from a public domain photograph of the painting accessed at Wikimedia Commons.

[apenitentialprayer]

At the same time, however, visual images of the nursing Virgin might have evoked in viewers a strong sense of the nourishing power of women at a time of personal anxiety and cultural crisis […] Images of the nursing Virgin signify power to conceive, to nourish, shelter, and sustain human life, a power that may well have been understood by fourteenth century people as “the body’s best show of power” […] - a power derived from her body but ultimately a social as well as physical power. […] There is, however, little evidence that women identified with the Virgin’s power. […] We have no direct evidence as to how women understood and reacted to these images.

Margaret R. Miles (“The Virgin's One Bare Breast: Nudity, Gender, and Religious Meaning in Tuscan Early Renaissance Culture”)

[luxobnubilata]

Attributed to Marco d' Oggiono (1470–1549),  Madonna and Child in a landscape

[nsfwbible]

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.

[koredzas]

Carlo da Camerino - Our Lady of Humility with the Temptation of Eve. 1400

[apenitentialprayer]

The first setting for early Renaissance Tuscan visual images of the Virgin with one exposed breast is that of the social situation in which these images became popular […] Even before the onset of pandemic plague in the mid-fourteenth century, severe food crises were frequent […] chronic malnutrition and anxiety over food supply constituted one of the most striking features of Florentine society at the time of the greatest popularity of paintings of the nursing Virgin. In this context of personal and communal instability, it is not difficult to see why symbolic expressions of nourishment and dependence became attractive to people. Visual images of the infant Christ, held and suckled by his mother, reflected the viewer’s sense of dependence and need for support and nourishment.

Margaret R. Miles (“The Virgin's One Bare Breast: Nudity, Gender, and Religious Meaning in Tuscan Early Renaissance Culture”)