Madonna and Child

About

The Madonna and Child, Mary holding the infant Jesus, is one of the most repeated images in Christian art. An early survival, a 3rd-century wall painting in the Catacomb of Priscilla in Rome, shows her nursing the child beside a prophet. Byzantine icon painters fixed types: the Hodegetria, where Mary points to her son as the way, and the Eleousa, or Virgin of Tenderness, cheek pressed to cheek, as in the Virgin of Vladimir (early 12th century).

Italian painters softened the formula. Giovanni Bellini set many half-length Madonnas before Venetian landscapes, and Carlo Crivelli added flies and cucumbers that seem to sit on the picture surface. The della Robbia workshop and followers such as Benedetto Buglioni made glazed terracotta versions in white and blue. Raphael's Sistine Madonna (c. 1512) draws back curtains on the pair, and Henry Moore carved a calm stone group for a Northampton church in 1943–44.