The Virgin Mary in Painting...

At this hour, and at every hour of the day and of the night, thousands of eyes and hands are lifted to the Virgin. Every anguished sick man, every wretched, despairing pauper, every human being whom fortune has betrayed till he lost his faith in the living, every tormented mother, everyone who faces a danger or hopes for something hard of attainment; every dying man over whom the physician has shaken his hands clean, drawing near to the world to come; and everyone wounded in his body and in his soul — turns to the picture of Mary and murmurs between his lips: O mother of Jesus. That smile, in pain, and that hope, in despair, shine out from the walls of temples and museums and houses through an old gilded frame; that encouraging, hope-giving smile, hovering at the corners of the lips, breathes reassurance and awakens hope.

The image of the Virgin came to occupy in Christianity the place that Adonis had held in paganism: sumptuous temples were built for her, adorned with the most splendid statues and pictures, and the artists vied with one another in depicting Virgins, each according to his taste and his faith. They painted and carved her nativity, as they painted and carved her as a mother suckling her heavenly child, and as a woman bereaved, weeping for her God.

The pictures of the Virgin evolved with the evolution of Christian philosophy. Christianity at its birth, in the Roman age, the age of paganism, contented itself with modest icons, drawn with a childlike naïveté; the first picture of the Virgin is attributed to Saint Luke the Evangelist, and from it the painters took their model. But painting was then in its first infancy, and the painters knew nothing of the ordering of distances within the picture, and nothing of the science of anatomy — that is to say, they had not yet dared to look at man, at nature, and at things.

The idea of poverty, humility, and pain dominated Christianity at its beginnings, and this influence appears in all the pictures of that period. The Byzantine school is the most deeply rooted of the schools, and the Byzantine artists laid down rules for the sacred images which became a system that all painters followed. The Virgin of Byzantium — slender of body, dark and somber, grave of bearing, wearing a blue veil over a red tunic — is a woman pure and chaste; there is no trace of femininity or desire in her body or in the features of her face; she inspires reverence; she is the immaculate Virgin, the Mother of God.

The pictures of the Virgin did not evolve before the fourteenth century, when the artist made the acquaintance of nature, and a new Virgin was born. Giotto opened horizons to the painters, and they woke to the study of nature and of the human body, of values and of dimensions; and Fra Angelico, the angelic painter, spread over the face of Mary a veil of purity, serenity, and mysticism that raised her above the daughters of her sex and stripped her of all that is animal, until she seemed immaterial, or a vision descended from heaven.

Then the trinity of art looked out upon the world, and with them the masterpieces looked out, filling the palaces, thronging the temples, stopping people in the streets. Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael — men like the gods of legend, painting and carving, composing verse, writing on music and mathematics and philosophy, raising domes with a boldness the world had never known before them. Through their studies motherhood was revealed in its mysteries and its splendor, and new meanings appeared in the face of the Virgin; poverty was exchanged for riches, and the Virgin sat upon chairs of gold, and was clothed in purple and crimson studded with diamonds and rubies, for she is the queen of heaven and earth. The artists conferred upon her the charm of alluring womanly beauty, and she pressed her son to her breast with grace and elegance, with a confident, tranquil gesture not without majesty; and the fingertips of the artists touched the child Jesus with the touch of divinity, so that the meanings of the two faces answered one another, as though the Virgin, turning toward the faithful, were saying: my son is the Son of God.

The Virgins varied and evolved with the evolution of philosophy and the evolution of art. The Virgin of the Rocks, Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece, is his deep inner tragedy; it is a struggle between lights and darknesses: the light pours down from on high, and the faces and hands shine, and the shadows deepen; the figures are phantoms, and the picture is a deep mystery, and a silence in which one hears the rustling of unseen wings, carrying to the dwellers of heaven the wishes of the dwellers of earth. And little by little Leonardo's idea grows clear — the victory of light over darkness. We feel it seeping into the somber gloom, and we feel it fading away little by little, until

it becomes a frame for the faces and the hands, adding to them radiance and beauty; and life stands forth in its loftiest meanings, and thoughts in their depth, and forms in their splendor.

Then Raphael's Virgins came into the world, and in them was such softness and gentleness, such splendor of beauty, that people bowed down before them and worshipped them as things divine. This soft, slender youth — art flowed from his fingertips, shedding upon the faces of the Virgins a charm, a serenity, and a meekness, together with a richness of color, a mastery of composition, and a skill in the distribution of shadows and lights that illuminates the whole of the picture, creating for it a transparent, heavenly atmosphere and clothing it in a magical beauty, holding a poetry and a music before which poetry and music themselves fall short; and holding that thing by which masterpieces are distinguished — that thing which is not in the eyes, nor in the lips, nor in the hands, but in all these things together, in every part of the picture: in the drawing, in the composition, in the harmony of the forms and the concord of the lights and shadows, in a freshness whose source we do not know — it is in the artist's creed, in his soul, in his fingertips, in his nerves, in the depths of his being.

Raphael's Virgin is the Venus of Christianity; she is the fairest of the fair; she is the charm of motherhood, and the naïveté of holiness, and the perfume of pure femininity. In her is Raphael — all of Raphael — between his unbridled youth and the purity of Christianity, between the seductive beauty of the Fornarina and the nobility of the mother of Jesus.

An artist friend said to me that the bodies of the gods created by the Greek genius have the beauty of athletes' bodies, and a marvelous harmony among their limbs — and yet they are human bodies; but before Michelangelo's body of Christ in his mother's lap, I felt that I stood in the presence of a god. For Michelangelo was able to carve in the marble the silent pain and the deep inward grief, together with the tranquil bearing, submissive to a higher will — the will of the Creator. As for the Virgin of the Sistine Chapel, she is the mother of the Judge: a mother, fearful, troubled, at the sight of her God judging the world, rewarding and punishing.

And despite the deep fluctuations whose source lies in the artists' natures and their creeds, and despite their philosophical and historical influences, the image of the Virgin has remained, throughout this world-wide artistic movement that has filled the generations, a luminous mirror in which the genius of the peoples and their nature stand revealed. She is the artist's divine rapture, in all the schools and at all times, and in the loftiest and deepest of what he aspires to in his spiritual trance: he immortalizes all the poetry that is in motherhood, taking from the reality of life, from the dwellers of earth, the finest model of heavenly beauty.