What is this?
“The Virgin and Child” is a tempera on wood panel painting that depicts the Virgin Mary with baby Jesus. This painting is a cult image of Mary and Jesus. A cult image may be defined as a devotional image that is human-made and worshipped for the deity that it represents. New cult images of Mary that contain chrysography “emerge from a genuine interchange of religious beliefs and artistic ideas among the Byzantine, the crusader, and the central Italian artists and their patrons” (Nelson 281). Specifically, this image is a highly symmetrical representation of the Virgin and Child. The rigid lines along with the geometric shapes remind us of the structure of icons and religious artworks from Byzantium. Essentially, this image evokes the importance of icon veneration and replicates an icon’s function to serve as a vessel between Earth and Heaven.
To clarify, this painting is a cult image but it is not an authentic icon. Icons are sacred images that represent the Virgin, Jesus, and saints that have been authorized by the Christian church. This image depicts one of the most universal symbols in Christianity, which is Mary holding baby Jesus close to her breast.
This symbol is understood to originally come from St. Luke and “became known as the icon of the Virgin and Child “Hodegetria” in Byzantium” This configuration of Mary and Jesus’ bodies was adapted and transformed into a new cult image of the Virgin by the Crusades and certain central Italian painters” (Nelson 280). Likewise, these new cult images of Mary symbolically linked the Virgin with the Child. Again, these Italian panel paintings reinforced the power of the original “Virgin Hodegetria” by St. Luke. Finally, the configuration of Mary holding Jesus against her chest demonstrates that Mary is both the human mother of Jesus on Earth as well as the eternal Queen of Heaven.
