Buona Festa della Mamma! Happy Mother’s Day from the Italian Art Society. Images of the Virgin Mary and Christ Child are among the most common in Italian Art of the Middle Ages through the Baroque periods. Starting in the Renaissance, elite women began to be portrayed with their children and allegories of motherhood derived from classical antiquity became more common as well.
Posted by Anne Leader
Giotto di Bondone, No. 17 Scenes from the Life of Christ: 1. Nativity: Birth of Christ (detail), 1304-06, fresco, Cappella Scrovegni (Arena Chapel), Padua
Raphael, Study of Heads, Mother and Child, 1509-11, silverpoint, British Museum, London
Fra Angelico, Virgin and Child with Sts Dominic and Catherine of Alexandria, c. 1435, tempera with gilding on wood, Pinacoteca, Vatican
Angolo Bronzino, Eleonora of Toledo with her son Giovanni de’ Medici, 1544-45, oil on wood, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence
Duccio di Boninsegna, Maestà (detail), 1308-11, tempera on wood, Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Siena
Jacopo Pontormo, Maria Salviati with Giulia de’ Medici, c. 1537, oil on panel, Walters Art Museum, Baltimore
Pietro Cavallini, Apsidal arch: 1. Nativity of the Virgin, 1296-1300, mosaic, Santa Maria in Trastevere, Rome
Domenico Ghirlandaio, Birth of Mary, 1486-90, fresco, Cappella Tornabuoni, Santa Maria Novella, Florence
Jacopo della Quercia, Acca Larentia, 1414-19, marble, Palazzo Pubblico, Siena
Michelangelo Buonarroti, Madonna and Child, 1501-05, marble, O.L. Vrouwekerk, Bruges