culture

Virgin Mother. The Form of the Mystery
Piero della Francesca, Donatello, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Andy Warhol. Great artists who, with simplicity and a sense of drama, have perceived that “the figure of Our Lady establishes the Christian personality.”

by Giuseppe Frangi

What images can help us to preserve in our hearts these words from Fr Giussani? What images invoke them in their simple, powerful suggestiveness? The itinerary we propose here, through some masterpieces produced in the past, has this intent. Then, too, we shall discover how these words, in their realism, are also a key to reading these great works–a key to interpretation that dissolves the aura of vague mystery through which they are often viewed.

Everything within time
The first stop on our journey is in Monterchi, on the boundary between the regions of Umbria and Tuscany in Italy. Here, Piero della Francesca (who was born not far away) left his famous, somewhat enigmatic masterpiece. This is the Madonna del Parto, the pregnant Madonna made famous also by the attention Andrej Tarkovskij paid it at the beginning of his film Nostalghia. The subject is not unknown in the Tuscan tradition, which however had always favored the Byzantine iconographic tradition, whereby the artists showed an oval in the area of Mary’s womb, with the Baby Jesus inside it. Piero’s innovation, then, is an innovation in the direction of realism. Here, Mary appears in the midst of her pregnancy–indeed, very close to the end of it. Two angels draw back the large curtain of the tent enclosing her. This is the tent lined with goatskins (you can see the fur squares in the background) prophesied in Exodus as the home of the Ark of the new Covenant. Mary is, in effect, foederis arca, as the Litanies remind us. The Ark has the shape of her womb, which not even her dress can contain, as Piero shows us with a simple, touching expedient. The fact that the Ark-womb contains something exceedingly unexpected and precious is revealed by Mary’s simple, instinctive gesture as she seems to protect her child with her right hand. Her other hand is turned back at her side in the gesture typical of pregnant women, propping up, as it were, her back, burdened by the weight of the child inside her. Everything Piero presents to us is simple, real, and credible. Psychologically, he does not take us outside the realm of normality; he does not ignite the scene with an excited emphasis. Rather, everything is circumfused with a tense, thoughtful silence, as is the case throughout Piero’s art, with its thirst for the absolute. Everything happens simply, within time, because this is God’s method. And Mary has thrown her life wide open to this method.

Unusual intensity of affection
Several years before this masterpiece by Piero della Francesca, which we chose as our starting point because of its subject, Donatello carved this bas-relief now in the Alte Museum in Berlin, using the technique of shallow relief, called “stiacciato,” that enabled him to render so well the sense of drama that pervades it. He made it for a Florentine palace, the home of the Pazzi family; hence its name, the Madonna Pazzi. With the daring freedom that was always his trademark, Donatello imagines here a private and unusual scene. The Virgin and Child, captured in profile, seem to sink their heads into each other. There is an absolutely exceptional intensity of affection, with Our Lady leaning her face down in a somewhat forced, unnatural way, as though wanting to peer deep into the mystery of this Son of hers. With one hand she protects him and with the other she pulls him toward her. But this is not a mere, albeit unrestrained gesture of affection of a mother toward her child. This Child, the fruit of God’s freedom, represents her destiny. This Child is God’s Mystery communicated to man, beginning right here with His mother. But communication, in this case, does not have only a verbal meaning. It is an affective investment that overshadows all others; it is an irresistible attraction to an unexpected happiness. Mary experiences it, and at the same time, in a very human way, she yields for an instant to the fear of losing it.

Drama and tenderness
And yet, they will take her child away from her. Mary foretells the drama that will touch her even from the happy moment of her maternity. The Medici family commissioned the young Michelangelo to carve a Madonna, also in bas-relief, that is now in the Casa Buonarroti in Florence. It is impressive to see how the sensibility of an 18-year-old was able to dig so deeply into a mother’s anguish. The Madonna of the Stairs is an outstanding masterpiece, uniting in the figure of Mary the sense of drama and the instinct of tenderness. In profile, at the foot of some stairs, Mary clasps her Baby tightly to her. She has just finished nursing Him; her breast is still uncovered and her dress falls partly over Jesus’ head. He is seen from the back and has fallen asleep, as witnessed by His arm falling backwards in the deep abandon of sleep. In Christian iconography, the sleeping Child stands for the prophecy of the Lord’s Passion, and Mary seems to know this. Her gaze, so human and full of dignity, is lost in the void: she looks neither at her Son nor at us. She seems almost to withdraw from the happiness of the instant. She has the future in front of her (and the cherubs behind her are spreading a cloth similar to the Holy Shroud), and with the simple gesture of her hands seems to want to preserve her Son from the destiny that is His.
“ The supreme drama is that the Being should ask to be acknowledged by man,” says Fr Giussani.

A tension in the gaze
“ The figure of our Lady establishes the Christian personality,” Giussani writes.
This perception has always been powerfully evident to simple hearts. Caravaggio was the right artist to document this mysterious breach that Mary is able to open into the hearts of the simple. The church of Sant’Agostino in Rome contains one of his masterpieces, painted in the happiest years of his long Roman period, at the turn of the seventeenth century. It represents two Roman commoners kneeling in front of the door to a house. A beautiful woman is standing in the doorway, holding a toddler in her arms. This is the Madonna of Loreto. Tradition called for pilgrims who visited the Holy House to walk all the way around it on their knees. Caravaggio reserves for these two pilgrims the surprise of really seeing Mary on the threshold of her house. There is nothing of the miraculous, of the unreal, in what the great Lombard artist paints. It is all real, all completely within the normal course of things. As was his style, Caravaggio does not cheat, he does not disguise any part of reality. The feet of the two kneeling pilgrims of the common people in the foreground have thus become an emblem of the realism that burns the ground out from under illusional and academic painting. But this is not the most realistic element of the painting. The truest thing that Caravaggio paints is the tension springing forth from the gaze of the two pilgrims. We do not see their eyes, because they are turned in a three-quarters pose. Their hands are not outstretched with the emphatic gesture of someone seeing an apparition, but are simply clasped, as though in shyness. More than amazed, the two pilgrims seem to “hang” on the figure of Mary–to ask her to be their mother, too.

A Nativity scene in the palm of his hand
Caravaggio was, from the moralistic point of view, the most scandalous artist of his time; and not only that, he was violent, a bully, even a murderer. And yet it fell to him to represent the documentable truth of the Christian fact, as perhaps no one else has been capable in the history of art. Representations of Mary are practically absent from modern art. The religious tension is not absent, but the simple perception of that beginning of God’s presence in the world has simply been eclipsed. And yet, this very case of Caravaggio is an invitation not to attach labels and not to pronounce verdicts. Around the middle of the 1950s, an albino-haired artist who had just arrived in New York from the American hinterland was wandering about the metropolis in search of some commission that would enable him to survive. He was asked to prepare a Christmas card and he, who had some smattering of catechism in his background since he was the son of Byzantine Catholics originally from Slovenia, came up with a simple image: a big hand holding in its palm a small crèche with the scene of the Nativity, made completely of one color, gold, as though to give an idea of the preciousness of what it represented. This artist was perhaps the one you would least expect: Andy Warhol.
There is certainly an element of chance in this image, and it must be viewed as such, without the claim to build up alternative readings of this great interpreter of modern art. Let’s take it as it is, as the representation of God’s freedom–His hand–that, thanks to Mary, by making her the mother of His Son, sets foot in our history.