Blockbusters, 2.
The Virgin, never without her child.
Adrien Jeanrenaud
What the Virgin and Child may hide
According to the French historian and anthropologist Alphonse Dupront, the Virgin and Child is statistically without a doubt "the most widespread image in the Christian world."[1] However, the Virgin and Child is only one representation of the Virgin among others. What about the Births of the Virgin, the Holy Family, the Death of the Virgin and other representations of the mother of Jesus Christ? At what point is a Sacred Conversation or a nursing Virgin no longer a Virgin and Child? What power lies in these images of the Virgin and Child? What does their profusion reveal? What do their circulations tell us?
It is commonly accepted that originally, these images of the Virgin and Child have no biblical basis, since the theme of the mother and child pre-existed the Christian religion.[2]. In fact, in addition to their religious character, these images also touch on female gender identity, motherhood, often on the question of childhood, and sometimes on nudity. Their profusion is not insignificant: the multiplicity of Virgins with Child in the first 20th century says something about us, about our past, about our present society too. But how can we link these images to such vast themes?
To locate the images that have circulated is also to be interested in those that have not circulated,
those which are absent from the books, the reviews and the illustrated magazines on which we work. The profusion of images of the Virgin and Child can also be explained by the absence of other figures. It is probable, still according to Alphonse Dupront,[3] that the images that do not circulate are too elaborate, too much linked to a specific cult, as much as those that circulate would reflect a coherence and the sharing of a vision in the projection of our fantasies.
Thus the images of the Virgin and Child would have a more collective scope,
expressing an individual and common cult, a collective affection -of the religious, social or simply psychological field- if not domestic.
By tracing the circulation of images of the Virgin and Child in the illustrated press of the first 20th century, by revealing their place of appearance, by identifying the context in which these images were disseminated and by analyzing their composition, the following lines open up a few avenues for shedding light on some of the shadows of these images, and for understanding the power of these Virgin and Child in permanent mobility.
The Virgin and Child: a European model?
Let us not forget the religious and cultic character of the images of the Virgin and Child. This is perhaps what explains the geographical distribution of their representations in the early 20th century.
The overwhelming majority of the Madonna and Child images in our corpus come from France, Italy and Germany -in fourth place, but already far away, we find Poland. This can be attributed to our sources. Indeed, art magazines, periodicals and illustrated newspapers are relatively few for Southern and Northern Europe; however, our sources are also non-European, and the Madonna and Child does not appear in American, African and Asian sources.
It does not seem entirely incongruous that a theme abundantly illustrated in Christian religious painting would circulate more in France, Germany, and Italy.
In the historiography of art, these countries often appear as privileged places of creation and diffusion of art. Thus, the diffusion of the Madonna and Child at the beginning of the 20th century brings this historiography up to date.
Within these countries, the dynamics of diffusion are varied. In Italy, a sort of polarity takes shape between Rome and Turin, while Milan and Florence are well represented in our sources too. In Germany it is a multitude of cities which diffuse these images, whereas in France everything is centered on Paris.
More than a dynamic properly linked to the works, it is a logic of edition that we must question. This publishing logic has repercussions on the distribution and circulation of the Virgin and Child, making this figure the reflection of a culture, or even a cult, centralized in France, bipolar in Italy and peripheral in Germany.
When we approach the images, their context and composition, certain stylistic characteristics differ according to cultural areas.
In France, all kinds of Madonna and Child are visible, from the end of the Middle Ages to more current representations; despite more contemporary representations in art magazines such as Art et Décoration or La Renaissance, the great majority of Madonna and Child are rather "classical", used to illustrate articles in magazines such as La Gazette des Beaux-arts or La Revue de l'art ancien et moderne. In Paris, these images circulated only in art magazines, to the detriment of religious magazines or the general press; and their rather "classical" nature persisted over time. However, the "modern" representations also have their place in parallel. The image of the Virgin is progressively updated, with illustrations of more recent works.
In Germany, although the distribution between periodicals is not very telling, the compositions seem quite similar: a tight framing, a clear mother-child relationship, a refined message. From this scattered logic between the multiple cities diffusing these images, appears a homogeneous taste. In the absence of a unity of place, a sort of cultural unity in the representation of the Virgin and Child links the German-speaking territories. Pursuit of a national ideology? Reflection of a Germanic unconscious? A historical approach in the illustrations, rather than a religious one? Nothing is certain, except for a certain taste for intimacy that this type of image bears witness to.
In Italy, the compositions seem less refined. The draperies, the decorations, the characters are mixed. Visibly, a partition is made between Virgins with Child more soft, in scenes where the artist worked the relation between the characters, -scenes published rather in Rome (Archivio storico dell'arte), while in Turin (in the review L' arte: rivista di storia dell'arte medievale e moderna) the scenes are more worked. In Rome the representations give off a softness and intimacy between the characters -different from Germany- while in Turin they offer more details to get lost in, and a more complex and narrative interaction between the characters. It is as if, proportionately, two types of Madonna and Child were emerging, on the one hand an intimate relationship, on the other a more open attitude to the outside world.
From these finally heterogeneous contexts and compositions, the Madonna and Child are often characteristic of a city, or even of a country or a magazine -the two being often linked.
It is difficult to speak of a unified European cult of the Virgin and Child. Thus, to take up Alphonse Dupront's distinction between theme and imaginary, the theme of the Virgin and Child circulates in Europe while its forms are updated in imaginary forms that are probably disparate.
When the Virgin feeds her Child
At the beginning of the 20th century, medical progress in the field of childbirth, and in particular the medical techniques of childbirth, improved; infant mortality decreased. Birth became a scientific matter; therefore a problem mainly taken care of by men. The model of the nursemaid was sometimes abandoned and maternal breastfeeding was presented as the most modern solution, based on Pasteur's techniques. These upheavals in the maternal world lead to changes in motherhood, in the links between a mother giving birth and her toddler -metamorphoses that the images, or the choice to publish certain images rather than others, possibly reflect.
The Virgin Breastfeeding seems to circulate independently of borders, cities and magazines.
In contrast to the geographical differences mentioned above, it is troubling that the treatment of the theme is relatively homogeneous in these images.
The mother spreads out over the entire surface of the canvas; the child, curled up in the lower part, most often stretches his head towards the breast. In this relationship of mothering, the relationship between the mother and her child seems direct, gentle, priviledged. As if the treatment of this variation of the theme of the Virgin and Child was more or less fixed, more or less coded in the European cities where it appears.
These images are perhaps the proof of a common visual rhetoric around maternity, of a common imaginary.
The diffusion of these images is reinforced in the 1920s.
In their context of appearance, in the magazines where these images are reproduced, a good part of the Virgin and Child do not take place in articles testifying to past, present or future exhibitions. These images are not of circumstance, hey are not always reproduced by the need to communicate on an event. The circumstantial aspect of their appearance can thus be put aside, in favor of a question of editorial choice. Most often, these images appear in essays, to illustrate a point. From then on, we can think that these images were put there deliberately; they are articulated to a precise subject and vision.
When we approach the text in the publications of the images of the first part of the twentieth century, motherhood is unfortunately not mentioned. Is it because of the omnipresence of men in the signature of the articles? This aspect certainly plays a role because most often it is the forms, the sensuality, the charm, the softness, the tenderness of the Virgin that are put forward, and all this is offered to us more than to her child.
However, a few articles describe the tender bond between the mother and her child, to the point of sometimes making the child the center of attention. These writings seem to be in the minority: one would think that for these authors, in the paintings of the Virgin and Child, the child is made invisible by the charms of his mother.
When the Virgin and Child consumes
The theme of the Virgin and Child does not have the prerogative of religious representations, it is not locked in the straitjacket of the cult nor confined to the art reviews. Because of the link of the subject with femininity, with the maternal character and with childhood mainly, there is a plethora of representations showing a woman with a child, a mother and her toddler.
This multiple figure, artists and advertisers have updated throughout the twentieth century.
Like this advertisement for Philip Morris published in Ebony magazine in March 1956. This magazine, founded in 1945 on the model of Life, was mainly aimed at an Afro-American readership. The content is political, militant, but also cultural and advertising.
In this advertisement, a mother and child occupy most of the page, in a relatively tight framing that offers an intimate, soft and privileged relationship between the mother and her infant. The codes of the Virgin and Child (not far from breastfeeding) are well there. But the theme of the Virgin and Child is here updated for consumerist purposes: it is to sell tobacco. To rely on the mother figure, deeply linked to her child, of an intimate relationship, to sell cigarettes: why not? The slogan below the image: "We too (Philip Morris) are proud of our newborn". It is sometimes said that giving birth is giving death. Thanks to this advertisement, there is no doubt about it.
But what is a white woman doing with her baby in a magazine aimed at African-American readers?
Was smoking considered a white superiority, at a time when segregation was still taking place? If we keep, above all, the link between this representation of a mother and her baby, with that of the Virgin and Child, does it also mean that for North American advertisers, the Virgin and Child was a Western theme, linked to a particular ethnicity? If we go back to our statement at the beginning, that the representations we call "Madonna and Child" pre-exist the Christian religion, should we conclude that this theme was deeply washed by the ethnicity that finally monopolized the definition of the religious dogma in a Eurocentric conception?
The Virgin and Child, "the most widespread image of the Christian world", has nevertheless been emancipated from its cultural, ethnic and religious straitjacket.
Is it finally a question of the timeless theme of a maternal figure linked to her little child? A way of putting the woman back at the center of a relationship that binds her to her child, a relationship that everything (science, men, technology, society) is trying to put in doubt at the beginning of the 20th century?
Or is it, on the contrary, the umpteenth detour of a feeling deeply anchored in the society of the twentieth century? That of a fringe of the criticism, mainly male, which, by focusing on the sensuality of the body of the Virgin, sexualizes the mother by evicting the Child? That of the publicity which, under the good-foundation of a neoliberalism without limits, does not visibly have any scruples to compare a newborn to a cigarette?
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[1] Alphonse Dupront, L’Image de religion dans l’Occident chrétien. D’une Iconologie historique, Gallimard, 2015.
[2] Horizons : magazine suisse de la recherche scientifique. Berne: Fonds national suisse de la recherche scientifique, décembre 2004, pp- 9-12.
[3] Alphonse Dupront, L’Image de religion dans l’Occident chrétien. D’une Iconologie historique, Gallimard, 2015.