Madonna And Child Quotes

images of the Madonna and the Christ Child carved in ivory and exported to Europe.

Worldwide, gods tend to look like their human worshippers, e.g., in this case, black-skinned. Interestingly, all around the Mediterranean the Christian Madonna and Child appear in very old images and statuary as black, like their Egyptian predecessors: Examples may be found in the Cathedral at Moulins, the Chapel of the Virgin at Loretto, the Church of St. Stephen at Genoa, that of St. Francisco at Pisa and in many other places. There is "scarcely an old church in Italy where some remains of the black virgin and black child are not to be met with." In this regard, "the black god Chrishna was but a symbol of the Sun, and...the black virgin mother was nothing more than the virgin of the constellations, painted black..."146

The apartment was entirely, was only, for her: a wall of books, both read and unread, all of them dear to her not only in themselves, their tender spines, but in the moments or periods they evoked. She had kept some books since college that she had acquired for courses and never read—Fredric Jameson, for example, and Kant’s Critique of Judgment—but which suggested to her that she was, or might be, a person of seriousness, a thinker in some seeping, ubiquitous way; and she had kept, too, a handful of children’s books taken fro her now-dismantled girlhood room, like Charlotte’s Web and the Harriet the Spy novels, that conjured for her an earlier, passionately earnest self, the sober child who read constantly in the back of her parents’ Buick, oblivious to her brother punching her knee, oblivious to her parents’ squabbling, oblivious to the traffic and landscapes pressing upon her from outside the window. She had, in addition to her books, a modest shelf of tapes and CDs that served a similar, though narrower, function…she was aware that her collection was comprised largely of mainstream choices that reflected—whether popular or classical—not so much an individual spirit as the generic tastes of her times: Madonna, the Eurythmics, Tracy Chapman from her adolescence; Cecilia Bartoli, Anne-Sophie Mutter, Mitsuko Uchida; more recently Moby and the posthumously celebrated folk-singing woman from Washington, DC, who had died of a melanoma in her early thirties, and whose tragic tale attracted Danielle more than her familiar songs. Her self, then, was represented in her books; her times in her records; and the rest of the room she thought of as a pure, blank slate.

And although it was in a hospital that she lay and I sat next to her—it is always that eternal poetry of Christmas night with the infant in the stable, as the old Dutch painters conceived it and MIllet and Breton—a light in the darkness, the brightness in the middle of a dark night. And so I hung a large etching after Rembrandt over it, the two women by the cradle, one of them reading from the Bible by candlelight, while the great shadows cast a deep chiaroscuro over the whole room.

Some books had shiny pages that showed paintings of landscapes unlike anything Matty had ever seen, or of people costumed in odd ways, or of battles, and there were many quiet painted scenes of a woman holding a newborn child.

His personal fulfillment did not lead him to evolve a cheerful Madonna; on the contrary this Madonna was sad; she had already, through his sculptures, known the Descent. The tranquility of his early bas-relief, when Mary still had her decision to make, could never be recaptured. This young mother was committed; she knew the end of her boy’s life. That was why she was reluctant to let him go, this beautiful, husky,healthy boy, his hand clasped for protection in hers. That was why she sheltered him with the side of her cloak. The child, sensitive to his mother’s mood, had a touch of melancholy about the eyes. He was strong, he had courage, he would step forth from the safe harbor of his mother’s lap, but just now he gripped her hand with the fingers of one hand, and with the other held securely to her side. Or was it his own mother he was thinking about, sad because she must leave her son alone in the world? Himself, who clung to her?

Slowly the highlights emerged: sunlight on the Madonna’s face, on the curls, left cheek and shoulder of the child. On the foredrapery covering the Madonna’s leg, on the back of John as he straddled the balustrade, on the inside of the balustrade itself to accent its importance in the structure. All the rest, the blockseat, stairs, walls were in quiet shadow. Now, he thought, one saw and felt the crisis, the intense emotional thinking reflected on Mary’s face as she felt the tug of Jesus at her breast and the weight of the cross in her hand.

This is the hospital's idea of nondenominational." She points around the chapel. There is a crucifix mounted on the wall, a flag of a cross draped over the lectern, and a few paintings of the Madonna and Child hanging in the back."We have a token Star of David," she says, gesturing to the six-pointed star on the wall. "But what about the Muslims? No prayer rugs or symbol to show which way is east towards Mecca? And what about the Buddhists? Couldn't they spring for a gong? I mean there are probably more Buddhists than Jews in Portland anyway.

But in the Petit Palais, which Daphne had not visited in thirty years, Roland had what she liked to call ‘a moment’. He retired early from the paintings and waited in the main hall. After she had joined him and they were walking away he let rip. He said that if he ever had to look at one more Madonna and Child, Crucifixion, Assumption, Annunciation and all the rest he would ‘throw up’. Historically, he announced, Christianity had been the cold dead hand on the European imagination. What a gift, that its tyranny had expired. What looked like piety was enforced conformity within a totalitarian mind-state. To question or defy it in the sixteenth century would have been to take your life in your hands. Like protesting against Socialist Realism in Stalin’s Soviet Union. It was not only science that Christianity had obstructed for fifty generations, it was nearly all of culture, nearly all of free expression and enquiry. It buried the open-minded philosophies of classical antiquity for an age, it sent thousands of brilliant minds down irrelevant rabbit holes of pettifogging theology. It had spread its so-called Word by horrific violence and it maintained itself by torture, persecution and death. Gentle Jesus, ha! Within the totality of human experience of the world there was an infinity of subject matter and yet all over Europe the big museums were stuffed with the same lurid trash. Worse than pop music. It was the Eurovision Song Contest in oils and gilt frames. Even as he spoke he was amazed by the strength of his feelings and the pleasure of release. He was talking – exploding – about something else. What a relief it was, he said as he began to cool down, to see a representation of a bourgeois interior, of a loaf of bread on a board beside a knife, of a couple skating on a frozen canal hand in hand, trying to seize a moment of fun ‘while the fucking priest wasn’t looking. Thank God for the Dutch!

Once in an art gallery, I came upon a painting of the Madonna holding her toddler in one arm and an open book in her opposite hand. Her eyes are turned toward her child as if she has just been torn from her reading. Heavily lidded, they exude a look of sweet adoring, but they also carry a wistful expression, the sigh of interruption, the veiled craving for her book pages. It was like observing a conflict at the hub of my existence. Baby or book. Children or writing. Motherhood or career. I bought the painting and hung it prominently in the living room. In secret, I sympathized with the self-actualizing side of the Madonna, feeling her perturbation at the child’s demands.

In men, there is the familiar distinction between the Madonna on a pedestal and the lowlife whore, in the sense that they elevate the love object to unknown—and, above all, unattainable—heights. These are the super-conventional husbands who respect their wives. They often respect them so much that they become psychologically impotent. The shadow of the for-bidden mother covers the beloved in this cloak of respect, so that any sexual approach becomes impossible. However, this impotence wholly melts away, together with the respect, when such a man goes to a whore, either in his imagination or in reality. The pendulum swings the other way, because in this case the woman, in the figure of the whore, is humiliated just as much as the wife-mother is extolled. The dimension of lust appears here, inevitably accompanied by feelings of guilt. It is in this context that we come across the typical male fantasy, well known to every prostitute, of 'saving' a woman. A large number of her clients want to 'save' her from her ruin. They want to restore to her the status of being an object of love. In other words, they want her to become a wife-mother, which brings them back to respect, and completes the circle. Interestingly, in either case, whether he saves her or humiliates her, the power lies with the man. This in itself is a rewrite of the original mother-child scenario. His position has shifted from passive to active.

Once the purging has taken place, the woman often dreams of a black goddess who becomes her bridge between spirit and body. As one aspect of Sophia, such an image can open her to the mystery of life being enacted in her own body. Her "mysterious and exotic darkness" inspires a particular depth of wonderment and love. For a woman without a positive mother, this "dark" side of the Virgin can bring freedom, the security of freedom, because she is a natural home for the rejected child. The child born from the rejected side of the mother can bring her own rebel to rest in the outcast state of Mary. In loving the abandoned child within herself, a woman becomes pregnant with herself. The child her mother did not nourish, she will now nourish, not as the pure white biblical Virgin who knew no Joseph, but as the dark Montserrat Virgin who presides over "marriage and sex, pregnancy and childbirth." The Black Madonna is nature impregnated by spirit, accepting the human body as the chalice of the spirit. She is the redemption of matter, the intersection of sexuality and spirituality. Connecting to this archetypal image may result in dreams of a huge serpent, mysterious, cold­blooded, inaccessible to human feeling. Seen as an appendage of the negative mother, it is the phallus stolen from the father and used to guard inviolate purity. Yet this same snake, when seen in relation to the moon, symbolizes the dark, impersonal side of femininity and at the same time its capacity to renew itself. The daughter who can come out from under the skin of the negative mother will not perpetuate her but redeem her. The Black Madonna is the patron saint of abandoned daughters who rejoice in their outcast state and can use it to renew the world.

maternal love, the most successful object of the religious imagination of romantic art. For the most part real and human, it is yet entirely spiritual, without the interest and exigency of desire, not sensuous and yet present: absolutely satisfied and blissful spiritual depth. It is a love without craving, but it is not friendship; for be friendship never so rich in emotion, it yet demands a content, something essential, as a mutual end and aim. Whereas, without any reciprocity of aim and interests, maternal love has an immediate support in the natural bond of connection. But in this instance the mother’s love is not at all restricted to the natural side. In the child which she conceived and then bore in travail, Mary has the complete knowledge and feeling of herself; and the same child, blood of her blood, stands all the same high above her, and nevertheless this higher being belongs to her and is the object in which she forgets and maintains herself. The natural depth of feeling in the mother’s love is altogether spiritualized; it has the Divine as its proper content, but this spirituality remains lowly and unaware, marvellously penetrated by natural oneness and human feeling. It is the blissful maternal love, the love of the one mother alone who was the first recipient of this joy. Of course this love too is not without grief, but the grief is only the sorrow of loss, lamentation for her suffering, dying, and dead son, and does not, as we shall see at a later stage,[9] result from injustice and torment from without, or from the infinite battle against sins, or from the agony and pain brought about by the self. Such deep feeling is here spiritual beauty, the Ideal, human identification of man with God, with the spirit and with truth: a pure forgetfulness and complete self-surrender which still in this forgetfulness is from the beginning one with that into which it is merged and now with blissful satisfaction has a sense of this oneness. In such a beautiful way maternal love, the picture as it were of the Spirit, enters romantic art in place of the Spirit itself because only in the form of feeling is the Spirit made prehensible by art, and the feeling of the unity between the individual and God is present in the most original, real, and living way only in the Madonna’s maternal love. This love must enter art necessarily if, in the portrayal of this sphere, the Ideal, the affirmative satisfied reconciliation is not to be lacking. There was therefore a time when the maternal love of the blessed Virgin belonged in general to the highest and holiest [part of religion] and was worshipped and represented as this supreme fact. But when the Spirit brings itself into consciousness of itself in its own element, separated from the whole natural grounding which feeling supplies, then too it is only the spiritual mediation, free from such a grounding, that can be regarded as the free route to the truth; and so, after all, in Protestantism, in contrast to mariolatry in art and in faith, the Holy Spirit and the inner mediation of the Spirit has become the higher truth.

At her back a Madonna, fashioned of jet limewood. The Madonna holds a mammoth baby in swaddling clothes. The Christ Child it says on the sign, his arms stretched out at either side, his hands big with blessing it says on the sign, but to Leah there seems no blessing in it. It looks more like accusation. The baby is cruciform; he is the shape of the thing that will destroy him. He reaches out for Leah. He reaches out to stop any escape, to the right or to the left.

Something untoward was happening to middle-class American women, an undercurrent of i change was seeping through heir ideas about duties and obligations as mothers, eroding their desire to conform to madonna-like models of unconditional devotion to the young child to adapt a more managerial concept of mother as coordinator and motivator of her child's activities and interests.

On the second floor was a music room built around an Aeolian electric pipe organ for Felix to play; a Red Room to house the Italian paintings, Raphael’s “Madonna and Child” among them; a huge conservatory with stained-glass windows; and the formal dining room. On the third floor Gilbert placed a joint sitting room for Frieda and Felix where they would both have desks on which to array family photographs and where they would place their Friday evening candles; a family breakfast room; Frieda’s boudoir

Starting at the end of the 18th century, the family began to be characterised – or idealised – by more intimate relationships, while the child was increasingly treated not dispassionately as simply a means of securing property and continuing the family name (as in the past) but as an individual worthy of affection. Now, children should be cosseted, nurtured and adored by their parents, who were encouraged to take a more hands-on role in their care. In short, paternity and maternity had become deeply fashionable among the bourgeoisie, that same class who were, coincidentally, the main consumers of art.9 The Salon walls were obligingly filled with genre paintings in which, in a convenient recasting of the traditional Madonna and child theme, happy mothers cuddled contented, rosy-cheeked infants.

o monachate. Marriage or the cloister, meaning women were either marriageable, and of value, or not. She’d wager there were more women in convents than fish in the sea. And far more nunneries than monasteries. So many women, and all of them forced to look up to Mary as their guiding star. And yet look at Mary’s life – a celebration of the fecund female; the Nativity, the Madonna and Child, and finally the Lamentation over her dead son, all experiences no nun could ever share. Nuns were to be denied all these states of womanly grace.

Isis especially was portrayed as black while holding her son Horus in her arms, just like our Madonna and Child. Demeter too suffered from the loss of her adored daughter, Persephone. This shows us that there was a primordial matriarchal religion that was substituted by the patriarchal religion in more recent times but which is still alive inside Catholicism with its syncretism and special legends that were derived from the pagan world.

With Ghirlandaio and Fillipino Luppi dead, and Botticelli in a permanent state of depression, Raphael found an affluent audience starved for works of the highest quality. Florentine mercantile society fell in love with his potrayals of the Madonna and Child and the Holy Family-and with him, personally, for his gentle character. The provincialism of his master Perugino had heretofore kept Raphael’s genius under wraps. Leonardo taught him the power of unified, lucid compositions based on geometry, particularly the triangle and the circle. During Michelangelo’s absence, Raphael’s company was sought by everyone, including Michelangelo’s valued friends Taddeo Taddei and Agnolo Doni. In fact, he was such a frequent guest at Taddei’s home, where he would have had plenty of opportunities to study Michelangelo’s tondo, that Raphael gave his patron two paintings as thanks for his many kindnesses, and painted the Madonna deil Cardellino as a wedding gift for his friend Lorenzo Nasi, Taddei’s cousin. In 1505, the Carrera year, Raphael painted the portraits of Doni and his wife, Maddalena. The out-of-towner whom Michelangelo had dismissed as a mere nuisance had grown up.

[Martha] saw it all so very clearly. That phrase, 'having a baby,' which was every girl's way of thinking of a first child, was nothing but a mask to conceal the truth. One saw a fluttering image of a madonna-like woman with a helpless infant in her arms; nothing could be more attractive. What one did not see, what everyone conspired to prevent one seeing, was the middle-aged woman who had done nothing but produce two or three commonplace and tedious citizens in a world that was already too full of them.

No social role embodies this more completely than the 21st century’s update of the Madonna and Child: a dyad that recurs with increasing frequency in the media, comprising a ‘trans child’ whose path is smoothed by an activist mother.

As far as abortion is concerned, natural abortion or so-called miscarriage will disappear with knowledge, and the woman’s sacred right to say whether she will bear a child or not will become hers alone, a recognized legal procedure. After all, it is her own personal decision. State and church have nothing to do with it. (Modern Madonna, 1973)

The accompanying woodcut is from Pompeii; but the following extract, from John Bell's criticism on the antiques in the Picture Gallery of Florence, will show that the boyish divinity had been represented elsewhere also in ancient times in the same manner. Speaking of a statue of Cupid, he says it is "a fair, full, fleshy, round boy, in fine and sportive action, tossing back a heart." Thus the boy-god came to be regarded as the "god of the heart," in other words, as Cupid, or the god of love. To identify this infant divinity, with his father "the mighty hunter" he was equipped with "bow and arrows;" and in the hands of the poets, for the amusement of the profane vulgar, this sportive boy-god was celebrated as taking aim with his gold-tipped shafts at the hearts of mankind. His real character, however, as the above statement shows, and as we have seen reason already to conclude, was far higher and of a very different kind. He was the woman's seed. Venus and her son Cupid, then, were none other than the Madonna and the child.

a study released early in 2018 showed that parents who encouraged their children to push their limits could be protecting them from developing childhood anxiety disorders.9 Such parenting behaviour included ‘safe risk-taking’, like giving a child a fright, engaging in rough-and-tumble play and letting them lose games. The research, which involved 312 families of preschoolers across Australia and the Netherlands, was conducted by Macquarie University’s Centre for Emotional Health, the University of Amsterdam and the University of Reading. Dr Mascaro says rough-and-tumble play is essential for children. ‘It’s really good for developing emotional and social competence. I think it’s potentially really important that dads of daughters aren’t doing that as much. It’s hard to know why that is. It could be that daughters just don’t like it,’ she says, ‘but it could also be because of gendered ideas about how we think we should behave with sons and daughters. I know I have two little boys and we have a whole room devoted to rough-and-tumble play. It is a huge part of our lives and it makes me sad to imagine that that’s not necessarily part of everyone’s life, because it’s such an important part of play.

Also known as The Dreyfus Madonna, the Madonna of the Pomegranate has been attributed to Verrocchio and Lorenzo di Credi, as well as Leonardo. The anatomy of the Christ Child is so poor as to discourage firm attribution by most critics, while some believe that it is a work of Leonardo’s youth. This attribution was made by Suida in 1929. Other art historians, such as Shearman and Morelli, attribute the work to Verrocchio.

She ended her talk, once again showing both the Bigelow Cassatt and the Raphael Granduca Madonna. “By transforming Helen, first into a mother and then into the Madonna model,” she concluded, “Cassatt captured the religious belief system of the Renaissance in an Impressionist context. Her work shows that the living bond between every mother and child is no less than Mary’s with the infant Jesus. Unconditional human love is holy.

Just as, looking at a Rorschach blot, you might see Madonna and I, a duck-billed platypus, the data we encounter in business, law, medicine, sports, the media, or your child’s third-grade report card can be read in many ways. Yet interpreting the role of chance in an event is not like intepreting a Rorschach blot; there are right ways and wrong ways to do it.

He was reminded once again of how much she looked like her mother as she glanced over her shoulder and smiled at him contentedly, with that Madonna-like face all new mothers have when nursing a child.