Posted on 06/30/2008 7:49:46 AM PDT by Alex Murphy
It might be enough to make Banksy drop his aerosol in the gutter in surprise or cause Lucien Freud to spill paint down his smock in shock.
But the Vatican yesterday said it wanted to see more paintings of a semi-nude Virgin Mary.
What Catholic leaders have in mind is more images of Mary breast-feeding baby Jesus.
The official newspaper of the Holy See has declared it is time to undo four centuries of church disapproval of traditional representations of Mary as an earthy, fleshy mother doting on her newborn son.
The latest edition of L’Osservatore Romano ran two articles by respected art critics who said that for nearly 1,500 years the Madonna was portrayed partly clothed and shamelessly nursing the Christ child.
One of them blamed Protestant prudes for changing the trends in religious art that then led to the Virgin being covered up and left critics wondering if the infant Jesus was bottle-fed instead.
Such currents were so strong that even the nudes in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel were covered up in fear of giving offence, and today the best places to see pictures of Mary nursing Jesus are not churches but major art galleries housing collections of Renaissance paintings.
But the hugely influential newspaper - which is often seen as having the support of the Pope - has now called for the “artistic and spiritual rehabilitation” of “loving and tender” images of Mary breast-feeding.
The intervention could inspire a revival in sacred art that would spell the end of 400 years of dressing up the Virgin to make her look “respectable”.
One article, written by Italian Church historian Lucetta Scaraffia, claimed a vast iconography of traditional Christian art had been "censored by the modern age" because images depicting Mary's naked breast for her child were deemed too "unseemly".
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
...one sees this with Fouquet (c. 1416--1480) in his painting The Red Virgin (1450?). The word red refers to the overall color used in part of the picture. The girl was shown with one breast exposed, and everybody who knew the situation knew that this was a picture of the king's mistress, Anges Sorel. Was this the Madonna about to feed her baby? No, the painting might be titled The Red Virgin, but the girl was the king's mistress; and when one looked at the painting one could see what the king's mistress's breast looked like. Prior to this time, Mary was considered very high and holy...Francis A. Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live?, 1976, pages 68,71.
There is nothing unholy about breasts.
They can show Mary breast-feeding without showing her ‘semi-nude’. I’m quite sure Mary was very modest and would not have allowed her bare breast to be seen while she was nursing. (Except perhaps by a close female family member, and maybe Joseph. These artists don’t fit either bill.)
Who cares? I am incredibly uninterested in who this 15th. century painter I never heard of used for a model.
Yup, don’t see what all the hubub is here. Christ was fully man and God, and showing Mary breastfeeding Him as an infact does help to keep that point in mind.
Oh for Pete’s sake! Breastfeeding does not make one semi-nude. There is absolutely no scandal in showing the Infant Lord nursing, it’s an essential part of motherhood. That’s why the Creator caused nursing to release the bonding hormone oxytocin. To help mother and child bond.
Because your research has shown that the same community standards of modest that you adhere to were in effect in Mary's culture, or because you are God yourself?
Just remember -- it's always the fault of the Protestants.
***http://www.art-breastfeeding.com/rel1/v5.htm***
Thank you. I agree with the Vatican and think that the reversal of the prudery would be very good.
I agree. Considering that exclusive breastfeeding of infants in the developing world saves lives. A better goal might be to have contemporary artists do images of the Virgin in “native” dress, breastfeeding Jesus. This would help encourage Catholic and perhaps other Christian faithful to breastfeed their own children.
I think this has more to do with showing Mary as a human mother and not as a perfect goddess. If Jesus is the son of God and the son of a Goddess, then he wasn't one of us. There is enormous pressure in the Church to elevate Mary to "Coredemtrix" and "Mother of the World". I think this shows that Benedict is aware of the threat.
Artists use models, and on more than one occasion, people knew the identity of the model. But that was hardly the point of the painting.
A puritanical fear of the body came into the Christian world with Protestantism, which had certain dualistic tendencies and, like other heresies such as Islam, a great aversion to women. Protestantism, like Islam, was also iconoclastic and believed that images had no part in religious worship. The result was a very peculiar attitude towards the human body in general and the female body in particular that spread into the general society and even ended up by coming back and infecting the Church in the 19th century.
“Milk Virgins” have been around since the first centuries of Christianity, and in fact, one of the earliest Christian representations from the Catacombs is essentially a “milk Virgin.”
This is very interesting. In St. Augustine, Florida, if my memory is correct, there is a very old shrine to Mary and it shows her nursing Jesus. The shrine is not that big, a small chapel. It honors the oldest city in the USA.
Yes, that’s Nuestra Senora de la Leche. People come to pray for help in conceiving and also for good deliveries. There has been a chapel there for centuries, but the first statue (probably brought from Madrid in the 16th or 17th centuries) was stolen by raiders from South Carolina in the early 18th century. It was replaced with another statue that was then taken to Cuba by the Spanish when the British took over St. Augustine for 20 years, and there also appears to have been a painting that was in the chapel and is now in Mexico. When the Spanish came back, the chapel was in disrepair and blocks of stone from it were used to build the current Cathedral. They then built another small chapel there; the current one (the earlier one was destroyed in a hurricane) dates to the early 20th century, and the statue in it is from France. Like everything else in St. Augustine, it has a complicated history!
The shrine used to be a huge pilgrimage site until after Vatican II and was also the founding place of the La Leche League, which promotes breastfeeding. Sadly, outside of the shrine nowadays, we have a memorial to all the aborted children since Roe vs Wade. Sad how times have changed!
Did the search for the website of Nuestra Senora de la Leche. Very interactive, and shows not only the shrine, but other parts of the shrine grounds as well. As you have said, it had a very interesting history.
Cool. Ever seen The School of Athens? Does that painting mean Plato and da Vinci are the same person?
the Vatican yesterday said it wanted to see more paintings of a semi-nude Virgin Mary. What Catholic leaders have in mind is more images of Mary breast-feeding baby Jesus.
LOL. How old are these boys at the Vatican?
I breastfed my son and NO ONE ever saw me. What does Scripture say about keeping yourself covered? Being an ultra-prudish Christian, I would never let a man see my breasts. Why should I be the one responsible for the weaker vessel? :)
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