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Marian Icons in Rome and Italy

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Marian Icons in Rome and Italy Pino Blasone Our Lady, the “Pensive One” Marian Icons in Rome and Italy 1 – Maria lactans, Priscilla’s Catacomb, Rome In the Bright Dark of Catacombs In The Clash of Gods: A Reinterpretation of Early Christian Art (Princeton University Press, 1993, p. 141), referring to early Christians the art historian Thomas F. Mathews wrote: “the images were their way of thinking out loud on the problem of Christ. Indeed, the images are the thinking process itself”. At least, the birth of a new iconography reflected and participated to a theological development, especially on a popular side. Nor was this process of thinking through images only theological, or aimed to didactic and ritual 1 purposes. It involved the worldview and the feeling of life itself. It was part of a spiritual revolution, concerning those expectations or aspirations the ancient society and culture was able to answer or satisfy no longer, the ground of material conditions not excluded at all. There is no reason to not extend such judgements to the mother of the Christ, indeed. Quite obviously in the Gospels, mainly in Luke’s Gospel, she expresses herself far less than Jesus. All the more this circumstance renders her a mystery, not only in the holy sense of the word. What little she says or does regards material necessities as well as spiritual pursuits, in some an autonomous way (for instance, in the Magnificat). It sounds so meaningful, as to make her worthy of being called the “pensive one”, still by a modern poet as Rainer M. Rilke in his poem Annunciation: Words of the Angel. And the Madonna of the Magnificat by Botticelli will be not only a reading, but also a writing one. Since learned or “full of grace”, we have not to do with a simple or illiterate woman, so frequent at her time. 2 – Maria orans, Coemeterium Maius on the Via Nomentana, Rome No wonder, early iconic representations of her are interpretations at the same time. In Christian cemeteries as the Roman catacombs, wall pictures were more decorative or illustrative than mediums of cult. Mostly, they fall within religious art anyway. Nay, they 2 are examples of how devotional art can be also a thoughtful one. Somewhat faded and very damaged, in the Catacomb of Priscilla the oldest known image of Mary dates to the late 2nd century. She is portrayed seated, apparently while nursing an infant Jesus. In such a sense, it should be the precedent of so many “Madonnas of Milk” or Byzantine icons of the type Galaktotrophousa, reminding the human side of the son as well as the nature of his mother. In Rome similar pictures are quite late, indeed. The central Virgo lactans in the front mosaic of the Basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere is datable to the 12th-13th century. She is enthroned amidst other virgins, on both sides coming to present her and her baby. The Madonna delle Grazie, now in the Church of S.ta Maria delle Grazie at the Trionfale quarter (to be not confused with a homonymous one at Tivoli near Rome, an image of the type “Advocate”), is a Byzantine icon which a tradition wants carried from Jerusalem in 1587, by a hermit whose name was Albentius. In 1618 it was built a first church, no longer existing, to shelter the image that will become very popular. After a censorship promoted by the Counter-Reformation, generally this kind of representations had got and will be rare again. In the Catacomb of Priscilla, Mary looks down at her son, with a veil over her head. He turns his head to gaze at the viewer. On the left a third standing figure, probably the biblical prophet Isaiah or rather Balaam, faces us pointing up to a star. In both cases, we deal with a prophecy interpreted as foreboding the birth of Jesus by Mary. If we accept the latter hypothesis, had better refer to a legend reported by an apocryphal source, the Arabic Infancy Gospel. There, the Magi bearing gifts to the Child are identified as Zoroastrian priests. Zoroaster was the first prophet and founder of their religion. Identified as the biblical Balaam, he had taught his people how to recognize the Saviour at the right moment. 3 3 – Enthroned Madonna and Child, Commodilla’s Catacomb, Rome Thus, the pointed at star ought to be the famous comet driving Persian Magi where Jesus was born. Actually, a scene of the three Magi before the Madonna with Child is depicted in the same catacomb, as well as the scene of an angel announcing Jesus’ conception to the Virgin. Annunciation and search for the way will become coordinates of a civilization in progress. With or without Child, in all these cases Mary is faced or flanked by other characters of the sacred narration. In another image of the middle of the 4th century we see only Mary and the Child, presumably sitting on her knees, both of them looking at us. She raises her hands in a conventional praying attitude, with her arms open and extended. What does mean, evidently, she prays God for us. This painting in the Coemeterium Maius at Rome attests that a Madonna devotion had begun. Likely, it will influence a type of Byzantine Marian icons, in Greek named Platytera: “wider”, or more spacious. The space she embraces is ours own, and maybe much more, as suggests the appellative Platytera tōn ouranōn, “more spacious than the heavens”. In the 11th century at Byzantium, that typology 4 will evolve into “Our Lady of the Sign”, so called for a stylized Child repeating her gesture or blessing with a hand, mostly within a round halo upon the chest of the standing Virgin. A partial variant is a 13th century mosaic in St. Zeno’s Chapel, inside the Basilica of St. Praxedes, Rome. There only Jesus opens his arms, seated on Mary’s knees. His left hand holds a written scroll: Ego sum lux, “I am the light (of the world)” (John’s Gospel, 8:12). 4 – Theotokos or Mater Dei (detail), S.ta Maria in Trastevere, Rome As to early Christians, we may guess an iconographic typology like the Platytera could express their longing for broader spaces, both in a literal and ideal sense. The Virgin will be figured in orant pose, surrounded by martyrs, in a mosaic of St. Venantius’ Chapel at the Lateran Baptistery (640-642). She had to appear as an orant also in the lost mosaics of old St. Peter’s Basilica at Vatican, particularly in the oratory and funerary chapel dedicated to Mary by John VII, a Greek who was pope from 705 to 707. Today the extant figure of this crowned Madonna can be watched in the church of the Convent of St. Mark at Florence, the same which will be frescoed much later by an inspired Marian painter as Fra Angelico. 5 With respect to the type Galaktotrophousa, it might have well reflected social requests related to elementary necessities, not absent in the early Christianity. Above all it was a familiar scene, which made the new creed close to common people, peculiarly to women. Among the followers of this tradition in the history of art, we like to signalize two 14th century painters specialized on the subject: Francescuccio Ghissi, with his Madonnas “dell’Umiltà” (to be found in the Vatican; Fermo; Sangiorgio), and Barnaba da Modena (Virgin and Child panels at the Musée du Louvre, Paris, or at the Diocesan Museum, Genoa). The most eminent will be Leonardo da Vinci, or his apprentice Giovanni A. Boltraffio, with the Litta Madonna (circa 1490; Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg). This oil looks so beautiful, that master’s lesson matters more than any controversial authorship. 5 – Madonna and Child fragment, S.ta Maria Antiqua, Rome 6 Out from the Depths of Catacombs By time the veneration to the “Mother of God” grew near to become a worship, not without worries by the orthodoxy, about the risk of a female perception of divinity not less than an adoration of images in themselves. At last, her status of Theotokos or Deipara was sanctioned by the Churches at the Council of Ephesus in 431, although there was no general consent about the modalities of the mystery of incarnation. Meanwhile, Christians had got free to profess their faith in open air. Little by little, they dismissed the catacombs as burial grounds. Still for a while, the sanctified crypts remained frequented devotional places. In the Roman Catacomb of Commodilla, a fresco of the Madonna and Child dates approximately from the first half of the 6th century. They are nimbed, depicted in a majestic frontal position, among two saints and a woman patron, placed in a lower decentred position and looking at the other characters rather than out of the picture. The mother is sitting on a jewelled throne, with the son in her lap. Her right hand is softly put on Jesus, what already preludes a typical gesture of the Byzantine Hodegetria, pointing at him as “the Way” of life to redemption. If not yet a full apotheosis, the scene is projected into a hieratic dimension. Anyhow, previous representations in the catacombs had been somewhat more dynamic. The prophet indicating a guiding star, the Magi coming to pay homage to a child Jesus, the angel come to announce a virgin Mary, a lamb bearer walking out from the past to symbolize the Christ in an evangelical way: all these images denote the incoming of a messianic feeling of time, if not yet a progressive sense of history. Now again, for political even more than religious grounds, a more static perception of all that distinguishes the beginning Byzantine from early Christian art.
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