Beccafumi, Domenico |

The Virgin Mary is believed to have been the daughter of Joachim and Anne. She may have been a Levite, or perhaps a descendant of the tribe of Judah. Mary was a resident of Nazareth, and in keeping with Jewish tradition at the time, probably was married off during early or mid-adolescence. According to Christian scripture, it was the Archangel Gabriel who decended to Mary to give her the news of her impending motherhood to the Messiah, Jeshua (Jesus.) Some scholars have argued that Mary may have had a sexual encounter prior to her marriage to Joseph and made the story up to keep from being subjected to the harsh punishment imposed on females for premarital sex in that era. If that’s so, the real miracle of the story of the virgin birth is that it not only kept her out of legal hot water but flourished, becoming the seed that blossomed into one of the world’s major religions. All of this, of course, presupposes that Mary actually existed. For this we have no hard evidence.

Artistic images of Mary with the infant Christ (generally divided into either Nativity scenes or Madonna and Child portraits), were one of the earliest and most profusely worked themes in the history of Western art, with the first known representations showing up in the early Medieval era and then becoming a veritable flood thereafter. What are less common are paintings and sculptures of Mary’s own birth and childhood. The examples we do have are, I think, often more interesting than their counterparts, perhaps because the artists felt less constrained by the degree of reverence accorded to Mary’s deified son and so toned down some of the formality one tends to find in many Nativity and Madonna and Child artworks. Whatever the case, these pieces often get overlooked in discussions or overviews of religious art and iconography.