Pino Blasone

Mary’s Gaze

in the History of Art

1 – Virgin and Child with Ss. Theodore and

George, detail; St. Catherine’s Monastery, Sinai

A Byzantine Art of the Gaze

Reliably, the rendering of Mary’s gaze was a kind problem for painters, since the
beginnings of Christian art itself. Already in the frescos of the catacombs, we have varied

pictorial typologies, as a Virgo lactans (“Suckling Virgin”, late 2nd century) in the

Catacomb of Priscilla and a Virgo orans (“Praying Virgin”, 4th century) in the Coemeterium
Maius, either at Rome. A later iconography is that of the Madonna with Child enthroned or
in majesty, portrayed as “Queen of Heaven” and flanked by saints or angels. A Greek, and

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Byzantine, definition for this typology would be Kyriotissa (“Mistress”). Early examples are
a fresco in the Roman Catacomb of Commodilla, dating approximately to the first half of

the 6th century, and a coeval icon in St. Catherine’s Monastery at Mount Sinai, in Egypt.
These two artworks are less damaged and better refined than their precedents. Also
because of the frontal position of the representation, the rendering of Mary’s gaze shows up
as a focal element in the whole composition. Whereas in the former case the Madonna is
looking out of the picture, at the painter or the spectator, in the latter she looks toward her
left, as if detached from our mundane earth. Indeed it is a diversion, for there we meet with
the gaze of a young St. George, seemingly deputed to intercept devotees’ prayers and to
bear them to the Queen of Heaven and Son. On the one hand, especially in Mary’s mien it is
still transparent some a realistic legacy of the Greco-Roman portrait painting tradition, such
as re-emerged from Pompeii or from Fayyum archaeological excavations in modern times.

2 – Virgin and Child, detail; Museum of

Bogdan and Varvara Khanenko, Kiev

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 On the other hand, the composition resembles the picture of a Byzantine imperial
court, even more than a heavenly vision. In fact, in the same type of representation, soon we
will see not only nimbed but also crowned Madonnas. Another consequence is that Mary’s
gaze results somewhat stern or cool, despite the liquid beauty of her wide eyes or a hieratic
value of the context. If we like to detect a sweeter, more familiar expression, we had rather
to watch a Virgin and Child now in the Museum of Bogdan and Varvara Khanenko, at Kiev.

Dating from the 6th century, this icon too is an encaustic painting, still keeping some a
Hellenistic grace. Although damaged and badly restored, in it we can perceive an intensity
of the gaze of both mother and baby. Turned toward their right, we cannot know where they
look at. Likely, the wood panel was cropped from a larger scene in the past. The guess that
it was an Adoration of the Mages could also explain a nice gesture of Jesus’ small hand.
No doubt, that of Maria Regina (“Mary the Queen”) between the Saints Praxedes and
Pudentiana, in the Basilica of S.ta Prassede at Rome, is a fully Byzantine fresco. Her fair
head is unveiled, haloed and crowned. She gazes directly at us or, better to say, through and
beyond us, so much her glance looks vacant and hieratic. Instead of her eyes or lips, the
gestures of her hands well communicate. With the right hand open, she is blessing; the other
points at her own womb. The meaning is immediate to realize. This bejewelled, standing
and full length portrayed Madonna is gravid. She is pregnant of the “Son of God”. Her gaze
is directed as far as human eyes cannot discern, or our minds are unable to believe. Put in a
so allusive manner, such a representation is almost an unique in the history of religious art.

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 3 – Mary as Queen of Heaven, fresco detail;
Basilica of S.ta Prassede, Rome

By time, Byzantine art will develop further and more popular types of representation.
With Greek definitions, the best known typologies are the Hodegetria (“She who shows the
way”), the Eleousa or Glykophilousa (“She who sweetly loves”), the Hagiosoritissa or
Deomene (“She who pleads – with God – for us”). In simpler words, guide, love and
intercession, are the main attributes of the Blessed Virgin, or those better involving faithful
people. To each of these qualities, it corresponds an iconic representation and a peculiar sort
of glance. For instance, the Hodegetria will look directly at the viewer, while holding her
bimbo with one hand and indicating him with the other, for he himself is the right way. Not
by chance, Hodegetria’s gaze will grow one of the most expressive and impressive at once.
After Ravenna in northern Italy, for a long while the town of Matera, in the south,
became a Byzantine religious and cultural centre, also thanks to the immigration and

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contributions of Greek monks. Remarkable samples of Hodegetrias – or Hodigitrias,
according to a modern pronunciation – can be found all over southern and central Italy,
dating from the Middle Ages. Yet, if one wants to seek a very expressive and impressive
looking Hodegetria, something suggests that he should reach Matera. Actually there, in the

city cathedral, it is still venerated the so called “Madonna della Bruna”: nothing but a 12 th
century fresco of a typical Hodegetria, showing her blessing Child. Nonetheless, her gaze is
so keen, as to concur to justify the popular devotion. The stylized design is so accurate, as to
even anticipate the transition from the “Greek manner” to a Proto-Renaissance artistic style.

4 – Madonna of the Bruna, fresco detail;

S.ta Maria della Bruna Cathedral, Matera

In spite of the iconoclastic crises at Byzantium/Constantinople and in Greece itself,

notoriously the Byzantine art spread – although differently evolving – not only in Italy but
throughout eastern Europe too, along with Orthodox Christianity. No wonder, in Moscow’s
Tretyakov Gallery we can find one of the most venerated Glykophilousa icons. It is the
Vladimir Mother of God, given by the Church of Constantinople to the Russian Church in
about 1131. The Glykophilousa type is characterized by the mutual attitude of mother and

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son, portrayed cheek against cheek. Not necessarily Mary’s glance is directed out of the
picture; she can look at her holy Child. Despite several over-paintings during the centuries,
instead “Vladimirskaya”’s tender gaze still looks at us, not without a sad shadow in her
eyes. That is, her love is overflowing from the image, not without some a motherly worry.
This is something more than a simple concern. It is the premonition of a destiny of
sufferance and sacrifice – the price of the Redemption – impending on her creature, as well
as on historical mankind. Such a premonition grows a full consciousness in the Deomene,
which is the image of an aged Mary, when the drama of the Passion is concluded. Usually,
this “Lady of Sorrows” and “Virgin Advocate” at once is represented alone, while gesturing
with both hands toward an invisible divine presence, beyond the range of the representation.
Her compassionate gaze is directed out, toward the suppliants before the picture, as in order
to collect and promote their prayers. This kind of icon was widely diffused in the medieval
Rome, such as the celebrated St. Mary of the Altar of Heaven, in the homonymous abbey.

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 5 – Vladimir Mother of God, icon
detail; Tretyakov Gallery, Moskow

Anyhow, probably the most ancient and beautiful Deomene is the Madonna of San
Sisto or S.ta Maria in Tempulo, also dubbed “Madonna with Golden Hands” owing to its
gilded hands. Today it is housed in the nunnery of S.ta Maria del Rosario, at Monte Mario.
A tradition wants that the icon was carried from Constantinople to Rome, when the
Byzantine emperor Leo III interdicted the veneration of religious images in 730. What does
mean that it could be far older, even if the first official information about dates back to 930.
Surely, it is an early Byzantine artwork, marking the passage from the late antiquity to a full
Middle Ages. The deep melancholic eyes of this banished Madonna seem to reflect the
trouble of the epochal transition, warning against the danger of any iconoclastic fanaticism.

Early Modernity as Our Lady

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 In one sense, we can dare affirm that the Byzantine one was eminently an art of the
gaze. The attempt to give a visage and a gaze to the dimension of the sacred was a priority,
even to the prejudice of any other aesthetic care. Particularly the Marian icons gave mostly
anonymous painters a relevant chance, both because Our Lady is a human being, and for she
is a privileged woman in the Christian traditions. Nevertheless, the Renaissance Florentine
painter and art historian Giorgio Vasari, in his Lives of the Artists (1551; lives of Cimabue,
Giotto, Nicola and Giovanni Pisano), in the name of a classicistic imitation of nature will
oppose the “modern style” to the “Greek manner”, “clumsy and out of proportion”. Nor was
such a criticism less severe in the writings on painting, by an artist as Leonardo da Vinci.

6 – Madonna of San Sisto, icon detail;

S.ta Maria del Rosario Chapel, Rome

Not a little of the Byzantine lesson permeated the Renaissance art and iconography,
indeed. If we observe a masterpiece as the Madonna Litta by Leonardo himself and
Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio (Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg; circa 1490), likely will
recognize the pattern of the ancient Virgo lactans or “Madonna of Milk”: that is, the

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Byzantine Galaktotrophousa. If we pass to consider the Tempi Madonna (Alte Pinakothek,
Munich; about 1508) or the Madonna of the Chair (Palazzo Pitti, Florence; 1514) by
Raphael Sanzio, could admire an evolution of the Glykophilousa. Whereas Madonna Litta’s
and Madonna Tempi’s gazes are absorbed in contemplating the Baby Christ, once more the
Madonna of the Chair looks at us, so directly and intensely that it is difficult to forget her
gaze for a long while. In Raphael’s production, we might compare it only with Hypatia’s
gaze, in The School of Athens fresco. Far better than renewing an old one, what Renaissance
artists were trying to do is transforming Mary’s image into an emblem of early modernity.
Along this process, Giovanni Bellini’s work is crucial, for he is both a Venetian artist
still directly influenced by late Byzantine art, and one of the most passionate painters of
Madonnas. Not by chance, Greek Madonna is titled one of them, currently in the Pinacoteca
di Brera at Milan (1460-64). There, the Byzantine customary golden background has been
replaced with a uniform dark curtain. It is the beginning of a pictorial usage, which later will
lead to the Caravaggism. The conventional colour of the sacred begins to be substituted with
one better in accordance with the depths of the psyche, as a more human background for a
subconscious archetype such as the Mother and Son. Hardly legible on the upper sides of
the central figure, the Greek usual abbreviations MP and ΘY stand for “Mother of God”.

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 7 – Raffaello Sanzio, Madonna of the Chair,
oil on wood detail; Palazzo Pitti, Florence

In this painting, the little Jesus grips an apple in a hand. Either mother and child are
looking down, toward the left corner of the picture. Their glance is somewhat stern and sad,
as if beholding from heaven the dramas of history on earth, and almost wondering if even
the sacrifice of Redemption had been vain for most people. At Bellini’s times, actually the
Protestant Reformation was at hand, with its moral and religious dispute on human free will.
Painter’s study and reinterpretation of the Byzantine Marian gaze attains its acme in the
Madonna and Child, nowadays in the National Gallery of Art at Washington (ca. 1480-85).
Here the background is wholly dark. Dark blue is Mary’s veil too. One of the best ever
depicted, her sharp and straight-on glance closely reminds that of so many Byzantine sisters.
Also the eyes and face of the Madonna with Child Blessing, another panel by Bellini
today in the Galleria dell’Accademia at Venice (1460-64), are terribly beautiful. There too,
the background is completely dark. Yet Mary’s and Jesus’ gazes present a peculiarity. They
neither look at each other nor in the same direction, but in divergent ones out of the picture,
turned respectively toward the left and the right side. That is as if they accomplish different
and complementary tasks: to listen to the prayers of the faithful and to give them a holy

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blessing, so many are their pains or uncertainties. With the exception of the Byzantine
Deomene, hitherto we have referred to Madonnas accompanied by the “Son of God” or by
saints and angels. Of course, also the Virgin of the Annunciation is frequently represented.

8 – Giovanni Bellini, Greek Madonna, tempera

on board detail; Brera Pinacotheque, Milan

Is this a varying declination of the same archetype, such as the Hodegetria, the
Glykophilousa and the Deomene, or rather does it represent a different psychological
attitude? For its own messianic nature, certainly a representation like that results turned to
the future better than to the past. It looks more dynamic than static, more optimistic than
pessimistic, somewhat more immanent than transcendent. Even more than to give a visage
and a gaze to the sacred, it seems an effort to render a sacred sense to a progressive history.
However, at the beginnings of the Modern Age the Annunciation scenes begin to multiply
in figurative arts. In this case, the second character is Gabriel, the announcing archangel.

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 According to Luke’s Gospel, that angel is not only a messenger, but a link between
heaven and earth too. The space going to be opened between the divine and the human, the
supernatural and the natural, even the sacred and the profane dimension, is a dialectic one.
With a psychological interpretation, we may hazard to say, the scene to figure and to picture
is a meeting between the Self and the Soul. Usually and quite obviously, the announcing
angel and the Virgin Annunciate were portrayed facing one another, while looking at each
other. Sometimes, at first she tries to elude his gaze and disconcerting message. Such was
Mary’s attitude in one of the best known Annunciation paintings, by Simone Martini in the
Uffizi Gallery at Florence (1317-47), where the background is still a Byzantine golden one.

9 – Giovanni Bellini, Madonna and Child, oil on

wood detail; National Gallery of Art, Washington

In order to recall the entire situation and to focus on the subsequent moments, inside
the evangelical narration of the event, we had better read St. Luke’s account again: The
virgin’s name was Mary. And the angel came in unto her, and said, “Hail, thou that art
highly favoured, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women.” And when she saw
him, she was troubled at his saying, and cast in her mind what manner of salutation this

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should be. And the angel said unto her, “Fear not, Mary: for thou hast found favour with
God. And, behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his
name Jesus. He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest: and the Lord God
shall give unto him the throne of his father David: and he shall reign over the house of
Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end.”
Then said Mary unto the angel, “How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?” And
the angel answered and said unto her, “The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the
power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be
born of thee shall be called the Son of God.” And, behold, thy cousin Elisabeth, she hath
also conceived a son in her old age: and this is the sixth month with her, who was called
barren. For with God nothing shall be impossible. And Mary said, “Behold the handmaid of
the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word” (1:27-38, King James Version).

10 – Simone Martini, Annunciation, triptych

detail; galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

A Feminine Looking Essence

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 With a genial innovation, Antonello da Messina will catch that very moment before
the “virgin whose name was Mary” is going to reply to the angel, by pronouncing her
assent, descending from a free choice. In the Virgin Annunciate currently in the Palazzo
Abatellis at Palermo, rather than being a mere interrogative gesture, her hand stretched out
of the picture already denotes such an answer and assumption of responsibility, on behalf of
the whole mankind. Her “human, all too human” glance expresses the full consciousness of
a “sorrowful mystery”, even more than of a joyful one in the acceptance of her unique
destiny. Yet the iconographic novelty is not all here. Above all, as in an analogous painting
by Antonello in the Alte Pinakothek at Munich (1473), the angel’s figure has been cut off
from the picture. We can only imagine him out of it, approximately where we ourselves are.
Just as in Bellini’s contemporary Madonnas and Child, of which above, in either
Annunciate by the Sicilian painter we have a dark background, and some a nostalgic
Byzantine look. At the same time, an extraordinary modernity especially of the Palermo
version (c. 1476) makes it an absolute masterpiece. Maybe we are used to associate the birth
of modernity with the enigmatic glance of Mona Lisa by Leonardo, or with the panic one of
the Venus and of the Spring by Sandro Botticelli. Indeed, the pensive gazes of the religious
Palermo Annunciate by Antonello, and of the laic Hypathia in The School of Athens by
Raphael, are like two faces of one coin, which is an early modernity as well. Both of them
seem to inquire: “What kind of modernity?” Not always, we could give it a positive answer.

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 11 – Antonello da Messina, Virgin Annunciate,
oil on wood detail; Alte Pinakothek, Munich

In this chosen gallery of early modern female gazes, we might also include that of St.
Mary Magdalene by Pietro Perugino in the Palazzo Pitti at Florence (1490s), so intense and
melancholic it is, looking toward her left while she is half length portrayed against a dark
background. Moreover she is represented alone, as the Annunciates by Antonello. All these
images seem to reflect a condition of people’s souls, as well as of their minds, perplexed in
the middle of a new epochal transition. We may also wonder where the Palermo Annunciate
is really looking at, whether her glance – slightly off to the side – is directed to Gabriel or to
us, or else there where neither humans nor presumably even angels clearly see. That is one
not yet being, an uncanny zone of the conscience, where the future itself expects to be born.
“Virgins Annunciates” as well as “Advocates”, singularly depicted, were not lacking
in the past. Usually they were represented on the panels of a polyptych, presupposing the
representation respectively of an announcing angel or of the Christ, on symmetric and
corresponding ones. The loneliness of Antonello’s Annunciates is something more than an
iconographic novelty. They express some solitude and trouble sympathetic with the modern
soul, reliably a price of modernity itself. All that will show up in a later Virgin Annunciate,

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by the Caravaggist painter Bernardo Cavallino, now in the National Gallery of Victoria at
Melbourne (c.1645-50). In this less known masterpiece, no longer we can even intercept
Mary’s gaze, so much it is lost in a border dimension between “torment and ecstasy”. What
resembles a condition consistent with the modern artist, indeed, rather than with Our Lady.

12 – Antonello da Messina, Virgin Annunciate,

oil on wood detail; Palazzo Abatellis, Palermo

A possible relevant explanation is that, more the artists strive to give the sacred a
visage and a gaze, deeper they go into the representation of the human. By the way, this is in
accordance with the main stream of religious Christian art. Nonetheless, we should consider
the aniconic point of view too, at least when it does not turn into an indiscriminate
destructive iconoclasm, just only running a risk of generating a mostly decorative art. The
theory, that in no way the divine could be represented without an approximation or
deformation, sounds worthy of high respect. Unfortunately, a dogmatic and extensive
application of such an abstract principle is susceptible of precluding a better representation
of the human with its natural or historical context, which is the core of any progressive art.

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 Of course, all that was not only a question, due to religious interdictions. It was an
aesthetic one too, already in the ancient Greek philosophy, in part inherited and re-
elaborated by monotheistic religions. Then, an aniconic principle was the Platonic doctrine
of the “idols”, according to which art is guilty of producing only “copies of copies” of the
ultimate reality, that is the transcendent World of Ideas. On the contrary, the Aristotelian
criticism argued that the ideal form is immanent in the worldly matter and history. Thus, a
true artistic imitation or mimesis might help discern that sacred essence, inside our human
existences. The effects of such a process ought to be an intimate purification, or catharsis.

13 – Bernardo Cavallino, Virgin Annunciate,

detail; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

If the Aristotelian view still maintains some value, in the history of western art the
persistence in representing Madonnas has not only a religious conventional sense. Rather, it
is an attempt to render a female countenance to the sacred, within a civilization whose
concepts of divinity mainly assumed male theological forms. Not necessarily, the sacred and
the divine coincide. They can be different degrees, along an ascension from an immanent to
a transcendent perception of the being. Granted that Mary is a real woman, a feminine

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looking essence may well work as an introduction or intercession at least. And, sometimes,
art may be farther sensitive than official theology, of whichever confession it be. Anyway,
in her essays the scholar Bissera V. Pentcheva has made clear how the theory of mimesis,
otherwise revisited by the Renaissance culture, was already active inside the Byzantine art.
What is enough, as to conclude our survey with a Madonna and Child painted by a
woman, and housed in the Art Gallery of Wolverhampton. She is the Austrian artist
Marianne Stokes, influenced by the British Pre-Raphaelite school. Executed in Dalmatia in
1907-08, particularly this work shows a vague Byzantine iconic nostalgia, beginning from
the pictorial technique: tempera on board. A girlish Mary clad with a Dalmatian costume
and her plump bimbo return to gaze quietly at us. Yet a background detail is a blackberry
bush, branching out with all its thorns. Even more than a presage of Christ’s passion, that
looks like the wire used for trench entanglements, in the next First World War. While the
image of the “Highly Favoured” – or “Full of Grace” – will become a mass pilgrimage
stereotype, the century will manage to renew Jesus’ crown of thorns, as a barbed wire one…

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 14 – Marianne Stokes, Madonna and Child, detail;
Wolverhampton Art Gallery, Wolverhampton

There is a difference between the emulation of an exemplar, like not seldom in an

iconic religious tradition, where imitation may result even better than the real or presumed
original, and a stereotyped repetition. All the more reason, this seems true whit a subject as
Our Lady’s countenance, when that difference – and the main difficulty, in the rendering –
grows between essence and existence. Beyond all, such is the hidden connection to which
Mary’s gaze is tending, along with the effort of the visual representation. In this sense an
appellation as “Mediatrix”, often referred to her, well expresses the pertinent concept. In
fact, she works as a medium and mediator, inside the becoming of the being. To use Jungian
terms, her figure represents a projection of the eternal soul and a historical person at once.
Byzantine iconographers believed the original exemplars of Marian icons, they tried
to imitate, had been pictured by St. Luke. That is why those models are also called Lukan

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icons. Another tradition tells such alleged portraits were “acheropite”, miraculously not
painted by human hand. Later, St. Luke has been figured while portraying the Madonna,
with an angel inspiring or guiding his hand. The cut-off angel is back at his job, as if he
could not forget the glance of the Virgin. Yet these legends own a pious sense. Her image is
an interface between the human and the divine, and something else too. In an afterword to

his book The Spirit of Utopia, the 20th century philosopher Ernst Bloch adopted a popular
and impressive metaphor: there is a zone at the foot of a lighthouse, which even its light
cannot clear. Whereas we scan the horizon, likely it is there, where Mary’s gaze is turned to.

15 – Guercino, St. Luke Displaying a Hodegetria Icon:

Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; 1652-53

Copyright pinoblasone@yahoo.com 2009

Articles by the same author on like topics, at the Websites below:

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 http://www.scribd.com/doc/2531940/Space-and-Time-of-the-Annunciation
http://www.scribd.com/doc/2681466/The-Cat-and-the-Angel-of-the-Annunciation
http://www.scribd.com/doc/2913375/The-Hands-of-Mary-States-of-Mind-in-the-
Annunciate
http://www.scribd.com/doc/2988387/Hail-Mary-Nazarene-and-PreRaphaelite-
Annunciations
http://www.scribd.com/doc/3817130/Women-and-Angels-Female-Annunciations
http://www.scribd.com/doc/4597267/Byzantine-Annunciations-An-Iconography-of-
Iconography
http://www.scribd.com/doc/5837944/Marian-Icons-in-Rome-and-Italy
http://www.scribd.com/doc/8650381/The-Flight-into-Egypt-A-Transcontinental-Trip
http://www.scribd.com/doc/9568413/A-Long-Way-to-Emmaus-Almost-a-Samaritan-
Story
http://www.scribd.com/doc/11517241/The-Bodily-Christ
http://www.scribd.com/doc/12902607/Magdalenes-Iconography
http://www.scribd.com/doc/14136622/Mimesis-in-Ancient-Art
http://www.scribd.com/doc/16420824/Thinkers-in-a-Landscape
http://www.scribd.com/doc/2075273/Italy-through-a-Gothic-Glass

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