“Mary on the cross with Christ, Poland”
She’s not “on the cross”. She’s holding her Son BEFORE the Cross.
“Mary on the cross with Christ, Santa Maria Maggiore, Rome”
Mary’s not on the cross (note she would have to be nailed to it or tied to it for that to be the case). She is merely portrayed with the cross as a stand for her statue.
“This statue depicts Rome’s dogma that Mary is the co-redemptress with Christ and that she intercedes for men from Heaven and aids in their salvation.”
No, it does NOT show that Mary is co-redemptrix.
I realize that many Protestants are simply ignorant about religious art - because they have been raised to hate beauty, but there is no reason to be stupid on top of ignorant.
No less a Protestant authority on art than the Protestant Ralph Adams Cram once wrote:
“From the outbreak of the Protestant revolution, the old kinship between beauty and religion was deprecated and often forgotten. Not only was there, amongst the reformers and their adherents, a definite hatred of beauty and a determination to destroy it when found; there was also a conscientious elimination of everything of the sort from the formularies, services, and structures that applied to their new religion. This unprecedented break between religion and beauty had a good deal to do with that waning interest in religion itself. Protestantism, with its derivative materialistic rationalism, divested religion of its essential elements of mystery and wonder, and worship of its equally essential elements of beauty. Under this powerful combination of destructive influences, it is not to be wondered at that, of the once faithful, many have fallen away. Man is, by instinct, not only a lover of beauty, he is also by nature a ‘ritualist,’ that is to say, he does, when left alone, desire form and ceremony, if significant. If this instinctive craving for ceremonial is denied to man in religion, where it preeminently belongs, he takes it on for himself in secular fields; elaborates ritual in secret societies, in the fashion of his dress, in the details of social custom. He also, in desperation, invents new religions and curious sects working up for them strange rituals . . . extravagant and vulgar devices that are now the sardonic delight of the ungodly. ... If once more beauty can be restored to the offices of religion, many who are now self-excommunicated from their Church will thankfully find their way back to the House they have abandoned. The whole Catholic Faith is shot through and through with this vital and essential quality of beauty. It is this beauty implicit in the Christian revelation and its operative system that was explicit in the material and visible Churches and their art. We must contend against the strongest imaginable combination of prejudices and superstitions. These are of two sorts. There is first, the heritage of ignorance and fear from the dark ages of the sixteenth century. I am speaking of non-Catholic Christianity. Ignorance of authentic history, instigated by protagonists of propaganda; fear of beauty, because all that we now have in Christian art was engendered and formulated by and through Catholicism; fear that the acceptance of beauty means that awful thing—’surrender to superstition.’ It is fear that lies at the root of the matter, as it does in so many other fields of mental activity.” (Radio Replies, vol. 2: 1052)
You've tried this canard before. Mr. Cram is NOT a "Protestant" authority about anything theologically "Protestant". According to his biography, he was a prolific and influential American architect of collegiate and ecclesiastical buildings, often in the Gothic Revival style. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Adams_Cram). It was when he left for Rome at the age of 23 to study classical architecture, that during an 1887 Christmas Eve mass in Rome, he had a dramatic conversion experience. For the rest of his life, he practiced as a fervent Anglo-Catholic who identified as High Church Anglican.
His OPINION about "art" doesn't mean they are facts. To condemn ALL non-Catholic Christians over what could have been an overreaction to icon and idol worship rampant with Catholicism during and shortly after the Reformation hardly means ALL beauty of Divine and human artistry was abandoned. That's nothing more than propaganda. Cram asserted that if what he called beauty could be restored to the "offices of religion" it would automatically drive everyone back to Roman Catholicism only showed what a shallow and erroneous gospel he believed in the first place. Faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior is not dependent upon the works of men's hands - it is the work of the Holy Spirit to illuminate the truth to those whose hearts are seeking Him.