Mina and the Madonna
by Alice Cone
The sun shines high in the bright sky, seeping between yellow buildings and onto a street that zigzags more than it winds, flooding the stone steps of this sixteenth-century palazzo designed by Raphael and slicing a shadow over the shops and cafes across Via San Gallo. As in Mina Loy’s poem “The Costa San Giorgio,” “the angle of the sun / Cuts the whole lot in half,” and after I crab-walk down the two steps to the stone sidewalk (my arthritic knees stiff after sitting on the sofa with a computer on my lap all morning), my walking alters the contours of visible blue and the sky seems to “shift among roofs,” as in Loy’s poem.
Then I sense someone walking toward me, and I look down from the sky to see my landlord—the son, actually, of the octogenarian count from whom I’m renting my apartment. After Buongiorno, I ask after his wife.
Always interested in the details of pregnancy and birth, as a soon-to-be grandmother, I am particularly attuned to parturition this summer in Florence, where images of mother and child abound and where my own pregnant daughter had planned to visit—before she thought better of traveling, while gravid, during Covid. I peek into strollers bumping along and try to gauge the stage of pregnancies when I see “bumps” tucked beneath empire waists or expanding narrow sheaths, inflating halter tops. I watch mothers bicycle with children perched on seats behind them, examine the eyes of the Madonnas encased inside street corner grottoes.
A block away, across the avenue, a tall stone niche cut into the flattened corner of the building displays a painting of a mother with a big gold halo around her head holding a similarly haloed infant. I wonder what I would think if I did not know the story of the virgin named Mary and the baby named Jesus. The mother is cradling the child on her lap, in the crook of her left arm, and the two are gazing into each other’s eyes, as mothers and infants do, but she holds herself tightly, upright on her throne, neck tilted at an awkward angle. Both mother and child grasp the beads hung around the mother’s neck as if instructed to hold that pose, so they seem a bit stilted, not quite genuine.
As an American woman born in the middle of the twentieth century and reared in a relatively liberal Protestant denomination, I am fascinated by the abundance of Madonna images exhibited here. Of course I am happy to see womanhood honored and motherhood revered, but I must admit to feeling discomfited by the focus on Mary’s virginity—which sets the Mother of God apart from other flesh-and-blood mothers and, in my view, makes her less relatable. While the poet in me still loves the idea of the Annunciation, of flesh and spirit coming together in perfect union, of being fertilized by God’s thought, I don’t want to lose sight of the point—that the Word was made flesh. That we, too, are sacred but corporal beings. That pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood are the most fundamental of fleshly experiences.
All I really remember hearing about the mysterious “Virginmary” in Sunday School is that she “kept all these things, pondering them in her heart.” Even as a child, I was moved by this phrase—which I heard, of course, at Christmas time. While shepherds were keeping watch over their flocks by night, they were visited by angels, who told them to go to Bethlehem and find a baby lying in a manger. The angels had told the shepherds that this child was a Savior, that he was Christ the Lord, and the shepherds repeated this pronouncement to Mary—who kept the message close to her heart, where she could consider it carefully. Of course I had no inkling of what it might have felt like to find the sweating engine of my body pushing a squirming infant out from between my legs onto a bed of hay as the effluence of cows, horses, earth, and manure rose up to the rafters, or of the care I might have taken in wrapping swaths of cloth around the newborn to keep him warm and secure before I lay him in a feeding trough so I could attend to my own bodily functions. Neither could I have imagined what it would have been like to be told by uninvited strangers that this howling baby, who had grown inside me, would grow up to be the Messiah. But I did have a sense of what it was like to keep quiet, wondering about things beyond my understanding.
Isn’t that what many of us do—and what mothers do, especially? We carry the news, whatever it is, inside. Your child is a girl. Your child is a boy. Your child is the Messiah. Your child is the size of a raspberry. The embryo is developing normally, but the tail has not disappeared. Your child has a rare genetic mutation and won’t live long outside the womb. If you carry the child to term, you might die. Dumbfounded, we carry the news the way we carry the ones who have become flesh, one way or another. Because we made love with our husband on our wedding night. Because we drank a little too much wine one weekend, when a fellow art student stopped by our apartment. Because the Holy Spirit overshadowed us or a stranger on the bike trail did. We find ourselves attached to these embryos in ways that others cannot imagine. The zygotes develop inside us, in hidden pockets. Their hearts are propelled by our hearts; our blood nourishes their blood. And so we contemplate. We consider how we might be able to take care of them, and how we might be able to sustain ourselves.
More than once, a child I was carrying emerged before gestation was complete. One dangled between my spread legs, above the red toilet water, four inches long—ears at the sides of the delicate skull; eyes, nose, and mouth in place on the narrow face; all the proper appendages attached to the spindly torso; the right numbers of fingers and toes curled from tiny hands and feet. Yet he had no eyelashes, no nails, only the slightest bulge between his legs. His countenance seemed both alien and human, peaceful and wistful. The fetus appeared otherworldly, appeared as a brief demonstration of miraculous and fleeting incarnation. His left hand was raised, as if he were waving—hello and goodbye—eyes wide open and still.
I felt heavy, drenched in sweat, hair tangled, stomach cramping, bleeding, my own body gone wrong. My husband cut the cord between us and tucked the fetus into a plastic tub. He drove our four-year-old to his mother’s and me to the hospital, where the receptionist asked what made me think I’d had a miscarriage. Two years later, another zygote latched onto my uterine wall. As I strained with all my might to push the finished baby out, the world turned inside out; all objects and figures became ghostly white and the background black, as in a film negative. Now, thirty-three years down the line, this daughter of mine is harboring a fetus inside her own womb! In just a few more months, a fully formed infant will tear my child wide open, and she will become a mother, herself—exposed to all the joys, and all the sorrows, of this world. This knowledge I hold deep inside me, and I ponder it in my heart.
I spoke with my host’s pregnant daughter-in-law briefly, a week and a half ago, the day after my arrival. I had come down from the attic in the old pulley elevator, walked along the grand hallway and up a few stairs to the landing, where a reproduction of Raphael’s Portrait of Pope Leo X hangs; I had turned left to descend more stairs and cross the grand salon, skirting the little boy statue in his dry stone fountain to go through two sets of double doors to the courtyard entryway. Inhaling the scent of jasmine floating from the formal gardens and proceeding forward to the single-story wing of the palazzo, I was looking for the office. I found two women talking (incomprehensibly, as far as I was concerned)—one a beautiful, statuesque woman in heels and a short fitted dress whose voluptuous “bump,” curving outward from a slender frame, seemed to be a wonder of proportion and design on par with Brunelleschi’s dome. To me, it also seemed miraculous that pregnant women no longer feel bound to wear the tent-like dresses of my mother’s day or the peasant smocks of my own—that pregnancy (evidence of sexual activity!) is not concealed but emphasized. Gracious and graceful, this woman led me back to the main wing of the palazzo and pointed me toward the elevator: the office was in the attic, next to my flat.
Before my host had asked me to bring my passport to the office in the morning, he had said that he and his wife had “98 percent of ten grandchildren,” so I assumed this “bump” to account for the undeveloped 2 percent. Sure enough, when the son helped me to wrangle a skylight last week, he said that his wife was having a baby. And now I learn that the baby has been born, a boy with a compound first name whose family has inhabited the palace for over 500 years, and mother and child are doing well. I offer congratulations, perhaps adding that in three more months, I will become a grandmother myself. Then I lower my sunglasses and pick up my pace, on my way to meet my class.
I am here to teach a course, Beginning Again in Italy: Women’s Journeys and Our Own, at the Florence campus of my American university. In designing the class, I had thought to exploit the romantic notion of fleeing to Italy to find oneself, thinking of images in popular culture created by memoirs and movies like Under the Tuscan Sun and Eat, Pray, Love, although I borrowed Rachel Cusk’s language from The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy for my publicity materials. As Cusk explains it, in novels people are “forever disappearing off to Italy at a moment’s notice, to wait out unpropitious seasons of life in warm and cultured surroundings.” She says that Italy seems to be “a cure for everything: love, disappointment, stupidity, strange vaporous maladies of the lungs . . . disenchantment . . . claustrophobia . . . boredom . . . and a hunger that seem[s] to gnaw at the very ligaments of [one’s] soul.” So now we, too, have disappeared here, with my goals for the class being twofold: to examine accounts of English-speaking female writers who have gone to Italy to reset their lives, considering ways being a woman affected both their desire (or need) to begin again and their subsequent experiences; and to write close renderings of things we, ourselves, observe and experience in Florence.
We have been in Italy almost two weeks now; it is June 8, 2022, the third day of the second week of a month-long session. I wonder: Have we been cured of our claustrophobia and our boredom yet—after having spent two years at home, hiding out during a worldwide pandemic? Or, because the pandemic isn’t actually over, are we in danger of contracting new maladies of the lungs, even here? After we have gathered in the lobby of our university’s palazzo and collected our whisperers, we are hurrying across town—first across the Piazza del Duomo, then across the Piazza della Repubblica, squeezing between hordes of wound-up, possibly contagious tourists in khakis and t-shirts who are excited to be out in the world again; we are following Italian women in sleek dresses and high heels down a broad and busy street whose stores display haute couture behind plate glass windows; we are heading to the Galleria Palatina in the Palazzo Pitti, looking for art that has stirred other travelers, art that might provoke us, too. As we approach the packed Ponte Vecchio, we feel overwhelmed by the radiant white heat of the sun and the pressing of the crowds, by the weight of this city’s history and its culture. I think of Rachel Cusk’s description of tourists in Florence who “look half calcified in the bleaching light,” who “in their individuation . . . seem to be helplessly disintegrating, breaking down into smaller and smaller units.” I remember her description of the sightseers whose lines loop four-deep outside the Uffizi. “What do they want?” she asks. Then she muses: “The yearning for beauty has not surrendered entirely to the desire to be comfortable, that much is clear. An overgrown humanity trying to fit into the narrow, beautiful past, like a person in corpulent middle age trying to squeeze into a slender garment from their youth.” Is that true? I wonder. Have we come here to fit into the past, or are we each hoping for a personal Renaissance? Have we come here to begin again?
After we have woven and wound our way through tourists studying the stalls full of jewelry on the bridge, we emerge across the river. In Oltrarno, we crowd onto the sidewalk of Via de’ Guicciardini, passing Piazza Santa Felicita. Tucked behind it, to the right, is the entrance to the Costa San Giorgio, where British-born, avant-garde poet and painter Mina Loy lived between 1908 and 1916.
Last week, after visiting Casa Guidi, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s house across the way from the Pitti Palace, we hauled ourselves up the cobblestone corridor where Loy had lived, between yellow, ivory, and ecru-colored walls that had changed little in the intervening century (the window trim or shutters replaced, perhaps, or bars added to ground floor windows); we found shelter between parked cars or on a narrow sidewalk, against a wall, whenever we heard a motor or the faint hum of an electric car approaching from behind. The sun beat upon us from the searing blue sky—which appeared the way Loy describes it in her 1914 poem “The Costa San Giorgio”—and sweat seeped through our clothes, dripping down our noses. It was only the third day of class, and all we had really learned about Loy was that she had become pregnant by the painter Stephen Haweis when they were art students in Paris and her paintings were just beginning to be exhibited; that the two had married five months before the baby was born but that the child, Oda, had died of meningitis when she was just a year old, in 1905; and that Loy had thereafter descended into a period of unspeakable grief and depression. We also knew that two months after Loy had become pregnant again—this time by the doctor who was treating her neurasthenia—she and Haweis moved to Florence. Loy’s husband, from whom she had been estranged, had refused to divorce her but agreed to claim the child if they moved to this refuge of artistic British expatriates. Living first in the Arcetri hills, the couple then rented an apartment on Costa San Giorgio and eventually bought the house at #54—which we found to be unmarked and unremarkable, its wooden door set back from the grey stone façade.
In class yesterday, keeping all this in mind, we read Loy’s 1914 poem “Parturition,” whose title echoes a genre of Renaissance paintings—Madonna of Parturition, or Madonna del Parto—developed here in Tuscany in the fourteenth century. Such paintings depict a queenly, pregnant Mary standing alone, usually in a gathered, flowing gown she has filled out nicely, often with one hand on her swollen belly and another holding a book that is meant to symbolize the Word of God made flesh. The word parturition, however, actually means childbirth, and the act of childbirth is what Loy’s poem describes. Roger Conover, in The Lost Lunar Baedeker (his 1996 edition of Loy’s work), claims that this avant-garde poem may be the first to portray childbirth from the laboring mother’s point of view.
By the time the poem was written, Loy had given birth three times. The daughter who was conceived by her doctor was born in 1907, her son by Haweis in 1909. In my view, the poem not only describes the experience accurately but portrays beautifully the paradox at the heart of Christianity: the paradox of God incarnate, that of the Word made flesh, that alluded to in the Parturition paintings of the Renaissance. But Loy does so without relying on the idea of a virgin being visited by the Holy Ghost, and without any sugarcoating of the intensely physical, fundamental act of childbirth. In fact, the child’s conception, in this case, is referred to as “brute,” wrought by an irresponsible man who has run “up-stairs to a woman’s apartment” singing a nonsense song about “all the girls,” and in the opening lines, the laboring woman says, “I am the centre / Of a circle of pain.”
Note that this circle “exceed[s] its boundaries in every direction,” and that the same dynamic occurs in reverse when the laboring speaker’s “cosmos of agony” contracts to “the pin-point nucleus of being.” This is what the height of labor feels like: when the largest muscle in the human body expands, it seems to encompass the universe, and when it contracts, it seems to be the still point of the turning world. In other words, as a woman in transition, I have felt connected to both the many and the One, to all my fellow creatures and to the Creator, who has appeared to be seated within me, and while being in this moment is excruciating, it is also ecstatic, and it is transcendent: God is made flesh. The Holy Ghost has not come upon me like a wind; rather, in leaving “warmth” and “moisture” against my thigh, a male human (like the “fashionable portrait painter”) has “precipitat[ed] into me / The contents of the universe.”
And now, during parturition, what is without is within, and what is within is without, and although the pain is mighty, “the resisting force / Pain calls up in me” is just as strong. At the height of transition, when the cervix is fully dilated,
There is a climax in sensibility
When pain surpassing itself
Becomes Exotic
And the ego succeeds in unifying the positive and negative
poles of sensation
Uniting the opposing and resisting forces
In lascivious revelation
So here is the final paradox: even though it is my ego—the singular self—that has unified the opposing forces, following pain to the threshold, to the sublime moment when the child is ready to emerge, I, the singular mother, am
Identical
With infinite Maternity
Indivisible
Acutely
I am absorbed
Into
The was—is—ever—shall—be
Of cosmic reproductivity
The language here echoes that used in the early-nineteenth-century hymn “Holy, Holy, Holy! Lord God Almighty!”—which refers to God as that “which wert, and art, and evermore shall be.” Thus Loy seems to imply that “cosmic reproductivity,” or the life force, found also in cats and blue-bottle flies and “a dead white feathered moth / laying eggs,” is God becoming flesh, making and made.
I admire the way this poem tells at the same time it shows, philosophizing while allowing the reader to see and to feel sensations. The fragments mimic the way thoughts arise during pain, with the spacing and lack of punctuation intimating nonlinear time, or the sense of being suspended outside of time. I love the wordplay, the assonance and alliteration, and the antonyms that allude to synthesis.
In class, we have learned that while the poet was influenced by the Italian Futurists, with whom she’d begun to associate—men who shunned standard syntax and punctuation, as well as history and social conventions, but promoted violence and disparaged women—Loy went her own way, making use of collage and attending to sound, and soon enough, she began to mock the Futurists. At the end of this poem, Loy says, “I once heard in a church / —Man and woman God made them— / Thank God.” I cannot determine if she is mocking the church here or if she is being sincere.
All I know is that while awaiting parto in Florence, Loy was surrounded by images of a holy mother who was said to be a virgin. Next to Loy’s home was the church of Santi Girolamo and Francesco alla Costa; above the door at #50, a small shrine houses a Madonna and Child, with a bas relief depiction of the pair decorating the wall of the adjacent building. Standing slightly further ahead, where the street opens up to join the Costa dei Magnoli, is the ancient church of San Giorgio alla Costa and its convent. So although we did not see, glinting against the cobblestones, any fragments of the china virgins that the disconsolate housewives in “The Costa San Giorgio” obsessively dusted and then threw “OUT / Onto the middle of the street,” we have some sense of why the poem’s speaker asks Mary to “preserve our mistresses from seeing us as we see ourselves.”
Eventually, we will learn that when her firstborn died, Loy stayed up all night painting. According to a description provided by American expatriate and salon hostess Mabel Dodge (whose own story of pregnancy, grief, scandal, exile, and convenient marriage we also have begun to explore), Loy’s Wooden Madonna, now lost, portrayed the Virgin Mary as a “foolish-looking mother holding her baby, whose two small fingers are raised in an impotent blessing over an anguished mother who, on her knees, curses them both with great, upraised, clenched fists, and her own baby sprawling dead with little arms and legs outstretched lifeless, like faded flower petals.” Finding no comfort in the prototypical Madonna, who seemed wooden to her, Loy was granted no relief from her grief, and she fell into the long depression that led to relations with her doctor.
But now, here we are, in line to enter the Palatine Gallery, and I am eager to view not only Raphael’s renderings of the Madonna and Child but his portrait of The Veiled Woman. As Cusk tells us, the model for this portrait is believed to have been the model for Raphael’s Sistine Madonna. According to Cusk, although the Sistine Mary holds the child “so generously,” when the model “is permitted her own reality,” Raphael “veils her, for her body is the drama of his subconscious . . . the veil . . . the psychic rift [separating] one image of her from another.” Is Cusk referring to the gap I have been considering, the gap I see between depictions of the Madonna and flesh-and-blood women? Maybe not, for Cusk goes on to ask: “Is she to wither in her casket of gold piping and amber-colored stones? Is she to remain alone, like the pearl in her hair? When she fingers her cloth-covered breast, what vision of love rises in her large, dark, heavy-lidded eyes?” Although the woman portrayed may appear to be desirous, Cusk’s description makes her seem more virginal than the Virgin. We will learn soon enough that this model, Margarita Luti, was Raphael’s mistress, and perhaps then we will stop and consider the oxymoron—that she appears to be demure (virginal, even) in this portrait, but “generous” and vibrant when she is depicted as the Holy Mother. Perhaps then we will understand that the veil represents the way Margarita’s true position in Raphael’s life has been kept hidden.
Now, however, we are entering the palace, and I am thinking about how images of the Virgin Mary have affected not only women’s images of themselves but men’s ideas about women, questioning what views of human maternity have been perpetuated by the Church and the commissioners of paintings for centuries.
Soon we are trailing through the palace apartments, radio transmitters hanging around our necks and receivers in our ears, some of our faces covered by KN95 masks. Here we feel overwhelmed by the vaulted ceilings with their decorative stucco and frescoes, by the abundance of richly colored paintings covering the gilded walls. Our guide today, the Dante scholar who is the champion of the study abroad program within our college, has been telling us about a 1403 text by Giovanni Dominici, Rules for the Management of Family Care, which exhorts parents to keep “paintings in the house, of holy boys, or young virgins, in which [their] child when still in swaddling clothes may delight as being like himself.” Dominici further encourages parents to display sculptures of the Madonna and Child, adding that little girls should likewise be exposed to images of the virgin martyrs that will “give them love of virginity with their mother’s milk.” The paradox seems obvious to each of us women (ranging in age from nineteen to seventy-two): the mothers of these little girls would not have become mothers themselves or produced any milk at all had they remained virgins. What we have not understood is that earlier cultures actually believed that literal physiological effects could be gained by looking upon images.
Quoting again from David Freedberg’s The Power of Images, our guide has told us the story of Persina, queen of Ethiopia, who, according to a third-century Greek romance by Heliodorus, gave birth to a white child and claimed it was “because while [her] husband had to do with [her, she] looked upon the picture of Andromeda naked . . . and so by mishap engendered presently a thing like to her.” Regardless of whether Queen Persina was doubted or trusted, similar beliefs survive in an early-seventeenth-century text on paintings and painters by Giulio Mancini, the Considerazioni sulla pittura, in which he instructs husbands and fathers to display well-wrought and lascivious paintings when they are alone with their wives, “because once seen they serve to arouse one and to make beautiful, healthy, and charming children . . . because each parent . . . imprints in their seed a similar constitution which has been seen in the object or figure,” adding that the paintings should otherwise be covered and “must nevertheless not be seen by children and old maids, nor by strangers and fastidious people.”
We pass by these lascivious paintings unscathed and eventually proceed to the Saturn Room, whose rose-colored walls are covered with gold-framed paintings. Just inside the entrance, in the lowest row, the Madonna’s face, lit from within, emerges from a dark canvas as an emblem of supplication and sorrow. Downcast, her eyes do not meet our gaze. She appears to be demure, certainly. Self-effacing? Willing to go along with the plan but unwilling to look at us? Aware of being a pawn in Raphael’s game? Or his patron’s? Or the Lord God’s? No. That is not what we are asking. Not just yet, anyway. We are thinking, Oh, here’s one—here’s one of Raphael’s Madonnas, one of those we have been seeking. She has taken the usual pose, holding the child and looking down, faint gold haloes holding both of their heads in place. Her blood-red gown suggests the baby’s future sacrifice, while her true-blue mantle suggests the mother’s enduring chastity. We see it now—they are unmoving, keeping to the script, taking their parts in the drama. Yes, this Renaissance image, the Madonna of the Grand Duke, is more beautiful and more realistic than earlier images. The mother’s face, painted by Raphael more than 500 years ago (circa 1506–1507), is more human and yet more divinely perfect (the oval shape! the symmetry of the heavily lidded eyes above the perfect nose and perfect lips! the flushed cheeks!) than those medieval images depicted in street corner grottoes and apartment vestibules. However, the message is the same: this woman is pure; she has never been touched by a man, and yet she is compliant.
I ask our Italian-fluent guide about Raphael’s portrait of The Veiled Woman, and she asks the guard, but the painting is in London, out on loan. To the left of the exit, however, I am struck by another Raphael Madonna, and this Mary, the Madonna of the Chair, is looking right at me—or at least she appears to be. Her head is inclined toward the child, her cheek against his forehead, but instead of looking down demurely, she is looking outward. Is she looking at me, defiantly, daring me to come near her baby? Or is she looking slightly downward, after all, focused on something in the near distance as she rests within their sacred but everyday bond? Mary’s arms enfold her chubby, cherubic Jesus, who leans into her, his bent left arm nestled in the crook of her right arm. Her upper right arm is squeezed against the post of the chair in which they sit, their posture disclosing that these two remain united. The baby’s plump bottom rests within the folds of Mary’s blue skirt, in the space between his mother’s two strong legs, which are spread slightly at the knees to make room for him. Although her skirt is blue, Mary’s sleeve is orange. A fringed, embroidered green shawl is draped across her chest (the baby’s hand tucked underneath it), while a brown-striped beige scarf is wrapped around her head. We might assume this lovely, rosy-cheeked woman to be any young Renaissance mother were it not for the other child—whom we assume to be Jesus’s cousin John—leaning against her knee and gazing upon her with jealous adoration, his hands folded as if in prayer. Of course, there’s also a thin gold cross tucked inside the Baptist’s armpit, and faint gold haloes encircle his and Mary’s heads, but we do not notice these details yet. We are too entranced by the bright faces and bright colors emerging from the circular painting (a tondo) set within the ornate gold frame. Instead of being chastened by the thought of any suffering to come, we are cheered by Raphael’s portrait of love embodied.
In the classroom tomorrow, we will look again, online, at these two paintings—the Madonna of the Grand Duke and the Madonna of the Chair—and declare our preference for the latter, which was painted about seven years after the former (circa 1513–1514, when Raphael was designing the palazzo where I’m staying). We will note that the model for the Madonna of the Chair also appears to be the same woman who served as the model for the portrait of The Veiled Woman—who is presumed to have been not only the model for the Sistine Madonna but the woman Raphael loved, his mistress, Margarita Luti, the daughter of a baker from Siena. We will conclude that a living beloved makes for a better model—especially for the woman meant to serve as the model of love, the one meant to represent the Mother of God, to whom we would like to be able to turn for wisdom and protection, believing she could relate to our earthly joys and our earthly sorrows.
During the last week of class, we will read Loy’s early poem “The Prototype,” in which the speaker contrasts the perfect pink-and-white wax Christ Child on display in the Duomo on Christmas Eve with a baby “made of half warm flesh . . . covered with sores” carried into the cathedral by “a half-broken mother.” The poem calls for the extinguishing of the candles and the disposal of the wax baby and for the churches to be used as night-shelters. The speaker of the poem refers to herself as the “only follower in Christ’s foot-steps / among the crowd adoring a wax doll” and ends the poem this way: “Let them eat— / O let them love— / And let their babies be / pink & white.”
I believe that in the same way Loy is calling upon the church to open its eyes and take care of the actual suffering babies in their midst rather than focusing on an effigy of a prototypical perfect baby, she is calling on the church to attend to the real experiences of human mothers rather than focusing on the likeness of a prototypical virgin mother. Like many of us, Mina Loy continued to be interested in images of the Madonna, and while the concept of a deified virginal mother remained wooden to her, she came to identify with the suffering mother of the Pieta and to turn to her for solace.
On the day following our last day of class, on June 24, 2022, Roe v. Wade will be struck down by the Supreme Court of the United States. Since I will have taken my phone off airplane mode that day, I will hear the dinging of the New York Times “breaking news” notification as I leave the Donatello exhibit at the Palazzo Strozzi. I will have just bought my daughter a coffee mug printed with a copy of the artist’s beautiful fifteenth-century terracotta relief sculpture the Pazzi Madonna, in which the Mother and Child peer into each other’s eyes with forehead pressed to forehead, nose pressed to nose. As I sit on the Strozzi’s outer ledge and read the headline, I will find myself crying out to the Mother of God, wondering again what iconic Madonna might sustain us now, as we strive to honor the life force while loving the earthly beings whose bodies’ power to bring forth life begs that they also have the capacity and the liberty to care for themselves, not to mention these unformed others, the “half warm flesh” of their own flesh.
A year later, as a doting and privileged grandmother fortunate enough to be teaching in Italy again, I will attend a very different exhibit at the Strozzi, an exhibit of contemporary art called Reaching for the Stars. I won’t think any of the portrayals of women included are meant to serve as role models, but I will find beauty in a marble statue of a Roma woman (Commerce Exterieur Mondial Sentimental, by Andra Usurta), and I will find the cloth sculpture Nice Tits, by Sarah Lucas—a hanging bouquet of disembodied, multi-sized cloth breasts—to be iconic. I will appreciate the messages conveyed by a portrait of a veiled Islamic woman who is pointing a gun at the viewer (Faceless, by Shirin Neshat); by the blown-up photograph of Eleanor Roosevelt that is framed with a list of her supposed flaws (Untitled (Not ugly enough), by Barbara Kruger); by the series of photographs of an artist as she reenacts stereotypical roles played by women in films (from untitled Film Stills series, by Cindy Sherman). But I won’t find a deified role model.
Displayed in Rome, at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, is Raphael’s The Portrait of a Young Woman, also known as La Fornarina, translated as The Baker’s Daughter. This, too, is believed to be a portrait of Margarita Luti. In this piece, she is naked from the waist up, posed in the style of classical sculptures of Venus, with her right hand cupping her left breast and swaths of sheer fabric draping the lower half of her body.
From The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, by Renaissance painter and architect Giorgio Vasari, we have been led to believe Raphael was quite amorous; that he was unable to work on his commission to decorate a villa unless his mistress was brought to live with him; that he continually postponed his promised marriage to a Vatican cardinal’s niece so he could continue to be with his mistress; that he died of a fever brought on by too much lovemaking; that on his deathbed, he ensured his mistress was given enough money to “live an honest life.” In the margins of the manuscript that would become the second edition of The Lives of the Painters, Vasari actually identifies the mistress as Margarita.
And so, over the centuries, artists, writers, and filmmakers have been inspired to imagine the lives of the pair. Myths have proliferated, with some seeing the woman as the love of Raphael’s life and others as a femme fatale. Most interesting to me is a theory offered by contemporary Italian art historian Maurizio Bernardelli Curuz, which surmises that Raphael and Margarita were secretly married.
Bernardelli Curuz says a marriage between a baker’s daughter and an artist as renowned as Raphael would have been scandalous. He points out that the brooch in the turban of La Fornarina (like the brooch in La Donna Velata) is a pearl, and that margherita is a Latin word for pearl. He reminds us that the band around the subject’s left forearm is signed Raphael Urbinis. More to the point, he says, X-rays taken in the early part of the twenty-first century show not only a ring on the third finger of the model’s left hand but a background of myrtle and quince, symbols of love, fertility, and faithfulness. Furthermore, in the late nineteenth century, papers were found indicating that the “widow Margherita, daughter of a Siena baker,” joined a monastery outside Rome four months after Raphael’s death. Since the painting was unfinished when Raphael died, Bernardelli Curuz suggests, the artist’s students painted over the ring and the foliage in an attempt to hide the evidence of his marriage, ensuring he be entombed in a place of prominence alongside his respectable fiancée, who appears to have died earlier in 1520.
In my mind, it seems entirely possible that Margarita was Raphael’s wife; for all I know, she was even the mother of his unacknowledged children. But it seems just as likely that she was “just his mistress.” Either way, what seems clear to me is that the woman was both loving and beloved—that, in any case, the emotion she expressed (through her countenance and her posture), which Raphael conveyed to us (through his craft and his own feelings), offers us a model of love, reminding us what love can look like, whether it be love for our children, love for our partners, or love for our God, whether it be “earthly love” or “spiritual love.”
And so I question: do we really need to keep asking if Margarita was Raphael’s wife or if she was his mistress? Do we really need to keep separating women into virgins and whores, Madonnas and Magdalenes? Or can we unravel that division and go even further, dissolving the partition between the celestial Venus and the terrestrial Venus?
In a 2015 article, Guiliano Pisani suggests that La Fornarina—in her nakedness— symbolizes the celestial Venus, the type of beauty that inspires men to spiritual bliss. Although it took me some time to understand why he sees the naked image of Margarita as the symbol of spirituality, I finally realized it must be related to the fact that, symbolically speaking, the only consummation that can ever occur with such beauty is spiritual consummation. (Thus did Dante’s vision of Beatrice—his unacknowledged, unrequited, and unconsummated love—lead him to Paradise and union with God.) On the other hand, the terrestrial Venus represents the generative power of nature. Her goal is procreation, which requires physical consummation, so naturally, this Venus is identified with wives and mothers, and Pisani puts the more modest, lifelike donna velata in this category.
As I reconsider the Virgin Mother as a symbol that evolved from representations of a celestial Venus and a terrestrial Venus, melding them in some way—with the Annunciation a sign that spirit and flesh are one, that there is no split—I might see the Madonna myth as a step in the right direction. I understand that Carl Jung was greatly encouraged when Pope Pius XII declared in 1950 that Mary was taken bodily into heaven. In Jung’s mind, the Assumption assumes that not only is the feminine an aspect of God but that the earth itself is sacred.
May we all see it that way. May we stop splitting the celestial from the terrestrial, and may we stop splitting women into virgins and whores, Madonnas and Magdalenes. Better yet, may we stop projecting iconic images onto real women—may we see them not as vessels only or as mere carriers of the male’s anima, but as sovereign, sacred, and individual beings. Quoting from Loy’s “Parturition” again, I pray: may the “irresponsibility of the male” no longer “[leave] women her superior Inferiority” but “In the harmony of physiological potentiality / . . . Gaining self-control / . . . [May we] be consonant / In time.”
Then I sense someone walking toward me, and I look down from the sky to see my landlord—the son, actually, of the octogenarian count from whom I’m renting my apartment. After Buongiorno, I ask after his wife.
Always interested in the details of pregnancy and birth, as a soon-to-be grandmother, I am particularly attuned to parturition this summer in Florence, where images of mother and child abound and where my own pregnant daughter had planned to visit—before she thought better of traveling, while gravid, during Covid. I peek into strollers bumping along and try to gauge the stage of pregnancies when I see “bumps” tucked beneath empire waists or expanding narrow sheaths, inflating halter tops. I watch mothers bicycle with children perched on seats behind them, examine the eyes of the Madonnas encased inside street corner grottoes.
A block away, across the avenue, a tall stone niche cut into the flattened corner of the building displays a painting of a mother with a big gold halo around her head holding a similarly haloed infant. I wonder what I would think if I did not know the story of the virgin named Mary and the baby named Jesus. The mother is cradling the child on her lap, in the crook of her left arm, and the two are gazing into each other’s eyes, as mothers and infants do, but she holds herself tightly, upright on her throne, neck tilted at an awkward angle. Both mother and child grasp the beads hung around the mother’s neck as if instructed to hold that pose, so they seem a bit stilted, not quite genuine.
As an American woman born in the middle of the twentieth century and reared in a relatively liberal Protestant denomination, I am fascinated by the abundance of Madonna images exhibited here. Of course I am happy to see womanhood honored and motherhood revered, but I must admit to feeling discomfited by the focus on Mary’s virginity—which sets the Mother of God apart from other flesh-and-blood mothers and, in my view, makes her less relatable. While the poet in me still loves the idea of the Annunciation, of flesh and spirit coming together in perfect union, of being fertilized by God’s thought, I don’t want to lose sight of the point—that the Word was made flesh. That we, too, are sacred but corporal beings. That pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood are the most fundamental of fleshly experiences.
All I really remember hearing about the mysterious “Virginmary” in Sunday School is that she “kept all these things, pondering them in her heart.” Even as a child, I was moved by this phrase—which I heard, of course, at Christmas time. While shepherds were keeping watch over their flocks by night, they were visited by angels, who told them to go to Bethlehem and find a baby lying in a manger. The angels had told the shepherds that this child was a Savior, that he was Christ the Lord, and the shepherds repeated this pronouncement to Mary—who kept the message close to her heart, where she could consider it carefully. Of course I had no inkling of what it might have felt like to find the sweating engine of my body pushing a squirming infant out from between my legs onto a bed of hay as the effluence of cows, horses, earth, and manure rose up to the rafters, or of the care I might have taken in wrapping swaths of cloth around the newborn to keep him warm and secure before I lay him in a feeding trough so I could attend to my own bodily functions. Neither could I have imagined what it would have been like to be told by uninvited strangers that this howling baby, who had grown inside me, would grow up to be the Messiah. But I did have a sense of what it was like to keep quiet, wondering about things beyond my understanding.
Isn’t that what many of us do—and what mothers do, especially? We carry the news, whatever it is, inside. Your child is a girl. Your child is a boy. Your child is the Messiah. Your child is the size of a raspberry. The embryo is developing normally, but the tail has not disappeared. Your child has a rare genetic mutation and won’t live long outside the womb. If you carry the child to term, you might die. Dumbfounded, we carry the news the way we carry the ones who have become flesh, one way or another. Because we made love with our husband on our wedding night. Because we drank a little too much wine one weekend, when a fellow art student stopped by our apartment. Because the Holy Spirit overshadowed us or a stranger on the bike trail did. We find ourselves attached to these embryos in ways that others cannot imagine. The zygotes develop inside us, in hidden pockets. Their hearts are propelled by our hearts; our blood nourishes their blood. And so we contemplate. We consider how we might be able to take care of them, and how we might be able to sustain ourselves.
More than once, a child I was carrying emerged before gestation was complete. One dangled between my spread legs, above the red toilet water, four inches long—ears at the sides of the delicate skull; eyes, nose, and mouth in place on the narrow face; all the proper appendages attached to the spindly torso; the right numbers of fingers and toes curled from tiny hands and feet. Yet he had no eyelashes, no nails, only the slightest bulge between his legs. His countenance seemed both alien and human, peaceful and wistful. The fetus appeared otherworldly, appeared as a brief demonstration of miraculous and fleeting incarnation. His left hand was raised, as if he were waving—hello and goodbye—eyes wide open and still.
I felt heavy, drenched in sweat, hair tangled, stomach cramping, bleeding, my own body gone wrong. My husband cut the cord between us and tucked the fetus into a plastic tub. He drove our four-year-old to his mother’s and me to the hospital, where the receptionist asked what made me think I’d had a miscarriage. Two years later, another zygote latched onto my uterine wall. As I strained with all my might to push the finished baby out, the world turned inside out; all objects and figures became ghostly white and the background black, as in a film negative. Now, thirty-three years down the line, this daughter of mine is harboring a fetus inside her own womb! In just a few more months, a fully formed infant will tear my child wide open, and she will become a mother, herself—exposed to all the joys, and all the sorrows, of this world. This knowledge I hold deep inside me, and I ponder it in my heart.
I spoke with my host’s pregnant daughter-in-law briefly, a week and a half ago, the day after my arrival. I had come down from the attic in the old pulley elevator, walked along the grand hallway and up a few stairs to the landing, where a reproduction of Raphael’s Portrait of Pope Leo X hangs; I had turned left to descend more stairs and cross the grand salon, skirting the little boy statue in his dry stone fountain to go through two sets of double doors to the courtyard entryway. Inhaling the scent of jasmine floating from the formal gardens and proceeding forward to the single-story wing of the palazzo, I was looking for the office. I found two women talking (incomprehensibly, as far as I was concerned)—one a beautiful, statuesque woman in heels and a short fitted dress whose voluptuous “bump,” curving outward from a slender frame, seemed to be a wonder of proportion and design on par with Brunelleschi’s dome. To me, it also seemed miraculous that pregnant women no longer feel bound to wear the tent-like dresses of my mother’s day or the peasant smocks of my own—that pregnancy (evidence of sexual activity!) is not concealed but emphasized. Gracious and graceful, this woman led me back to the main wing of the palazzo and pointed me toward the elevator: the office was in the attic, next to my flat.
Before my host had asked me to bring my passport to the office in the morning, he had said that he and his wife had “98 percent of ten grandchildren,” so I assumed this “bump” to account for the undeveloped 2 percent. Sure enough, when the son helped me to wrangle a skylight last week, he said that his wife was having a baby. And now I learn that the baby has been born, a boy with a compound first name whose family has inhabited the palace for over 500 years, and mother and child are doing well. I offer congratulations, perhaps adding that in three more months, I will become a grandmother myself. Then I lower my sunglasses and pick up my pace, on my way to meet my class.
I am here to teach a course, Beginning Again in Italy: Women’s Journeys and Our Own, at the Florence campus of my American university. In designing the class, I had thought to exploit the romantic notion of fleeing to Italy to find oneself, thinking of images in popular culture created by memoirs and movies like Under the Tuscan Sun and Eat, Pray, Love, although I borrowed Rachel Cusk’s language from The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy for my publicity materials. As Cusk explains it, in novels people are “forever disappearing off to Italy at a moment’s notice, to wait out unpropitious seasons of life in warm and cultured surroundings.” She says that Italy seems to be “a cure for everything: love, disappointment, stupidity, strange vaporous maladies of the lungs . . . disenchantment . . . claustrophobia . . . boredom . . . and a hunger that seem[s] to gnaw at the very ligaments of [one’s] soul.” So now we, too, have disappeared here, with my goals for the class being twofold: to examine accounts of English-speaking female writers who have gone to Italy to reset their lives, considering ways being a woman affected both their desire (or need) to begin again and their subsequent experiences; and to write close renderings of things we, ourselves, observe and experience in Florence.
We have been in Italy almost two weeks now; it is June 8, 2022, the third day of the second week of a month-long session. I wonder: Have we been cured of our claustrophobia and our boredom yet—after having spent two years at home, hiding out during a worldwide pandemic? Or, because the pandemic isn’t actually over, are we in danger of contracting new maladies of the lungs, even here? After we have gathered in the lobby of our university’s palazzo and collected our whisperers, we are hurrying across town—first across the Piazza del Duomo, then across the Piazza della Repubblica, squeezing between hordes of wound-up, possibly contagious tourists in khakis and t-shirts who are excited to be out in the world again; we are following Italian women in sleek dresses and high heels down a broad and busy street whose stores display haute couture behind plate glass windows; we are heading to the Galleria Palatina in the Palazzo Pitti, looking for art that has stirred other travelers, art that might provoke us, too. As we approach the packed Ponte Vecchio, we feel overwhelmed by the radiant white heat of the sun and the pressing of the crowds, by the weight of this city’s history and its culture. I think of Rachel Cusk’s description of tourists in Florence who “look half calcified in the bleaching light,” who “in their individuation . . . seem to be helplessly disintegrating, breaking down into smaller and smaller units.” I remember her description of the sightseers whose lines loop four-deep outside the Uffizi. “What do they want?” she asks. Then she muses: “The yearning for beauty has not surrendered entirely to the desire to be comfortable, that much is clear. An overgrown humanity trying to fit into the narrow, beautiful past, like a person in corpulent middle age trying to squeeze into a slender garment from their youth.” Is that true? I wonder. Have we come here to fit into the past, or are we each hoping for a personal Renaissance? Have we come here to begin again?
After we have woven and wound our way through tourists studying the stalls full of jewelry on the bridge, we emerge across the river. In Oltrarno, we crowd onto the sidewalk of Via de’ Guicciardini, passing Piazza Santa Felicita. Tucked behind it, to the right, is the entrance to the Costa San Giorgio, where British-born, avant-garde poet and painter Mina Loy lived between 1908 and 1916.
Last week, after visiting Casa Guidi, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s house across the way from the Pitti Palace, we hauled ourselves up the cobblestone corridor where Loy had lived, between yellow, ivory, and ecru-colored walls that had changed little in the intervening century (the window trim or shutters replaced, perhaps, or bars added to ground floor windows); we found shelter between parked cars or on a narrow sidewalk, against a wall, whenever we heard a motor or the faint hum of an electric car approaching from behind. The sun beat upon us from the searing blue sky—which appeared the way Loy describes it in her 1914 poem “The Costa San Giorgio”—and sweat seeped through our clothes, dripping down our noses. It was only the third day of class, and all we had really learned about Loy was that she had become pregnant by the painter Stephen Haweis when they were art students in Paris and her paintings were just beginning to be exhibited; that the two had married five months before the baby was born but that the child, Oda, had died of meningitis when she was just a year old, in 1905; and that Loy had thereafter descended into a period of unspeakable grief and depression. We also knew that two months after Loy had become pregnant again—this time by the doctor who was treating her neurasthenia—she and Haweis moved to Florence. Loy’s husband, from whom she had been estranged, had refused to divorce her but agreed to claim the child if they moved to this refuge of artistic British expatriates. Living first in the Arcetri hills, the couple then rented an apartment on Costa San Giorgio and eventually bought the house at #54—which we found to be unmarked and unremarkable, its wooden door set back from the grey stone façade.
In class yesterday, keeping all this in mind, we read Loy’s 1914 poem “Parturition,” whose title echoes a genre of Renaissance paintings—Madonna of Parturition, or Madonna del Parto—developed here in Tuscany in the fourteenth century. Such paintings depict a queenly, pregnant Mary standing alone, usually in a gathered, flowing gown she has filled out nicely, often with one hand on her swollen belly and another holding a book that is meant to symbolize the Word of God made flesh. The word parturition, however, actually means childbirth, and the act of childbirth is what Loy’s poem describes. Roger Conover, in The Lost Lunar Baedeker (his 1996 edition of Loy’s work), claims that this avant-garde poem may be the first to portray childbirth from the laboring mother’s point of view.
By the time the poem was written, Loy had given birth three times. The daughter who was conceived by her doctor was born in 1907, her son by Haweis in 1909. In my view, the poem not only describes the experience accurately but portrays beautifully the paradox at the heart of Christianity: the paradox of God incarnate, that of the Word made flesh, that alluded to in the Parturition paintings of the Renaissance. But Loy does so without relying on the idea of a virgin being visited by the Holy Ghost, and without any sugarcoating of the intensely physical, fundamental act of childbirth. In fact, the child’s conception, in this case, is referred to as “brute,” wrought by an irresponsible man who has run “up-stairs to a woman’s apartment” singing a nonsense song about “all the girls,” and in the opening lines, the laboring woman says, “I am the centre / Of a circle of pain.”
Note that this circle “exceed[s] its boundaries in every direction,” and that the same dynamic occurs in reverse when the laboring speaker’s “cosmos of agony” contracts to “the pin-point nucleus of being.” This is what the height of labor feels like: when the largest muscle in the human body expands, it seems to encompass the universe, and when it contracts, it seems to be the still point of the turning world. In other words, as a woman in transition, I have felt connected to both the many and the One, to all my fellow creatures and to the Creator, who has appeared to be seated within me, and while being in this moment is excruciating, it is also ecstatic, and it is transcendent: God is made flesh. The Holy Ghost has not come upon me like a wind; rather, in leaving “warmth” and “moisture” against my thigh, a male human (like the “fashionable portrait painter”) has “precipitat[ed] into me / The contents of the universe.”
And now, during parturition, what is without is within, and what is within is without, and although the pain is mighty, “the resisting force / Pain calls up in me” is just as strong. At the height of transition, when the cervix is fully dilated,
There is a climax in sensibility
When pain surpassing itself
Becomes Exotic
And the ego succeeds in unifying the positive and negative
poles of sensation
Uniting the opposing and resisting forces
In lascivious revelation
So here is the final paradox: even though it is my ego—the singular self—that has unified the opposing forces, following pain to the threshold, to the sublime moment when the child is ready to emerge, I, the singular mother, am
Identical
With infinite Maternity
Indivisible
Acutely
I am absorbed
Into
The was—is—ever—shall—be
Of cosmic reproductivity
The language here echoes that used in the early-nineteenth-century hymn “Holy, Holy, Holy! Lord God Almighty!”—which refers to God as that “which wert, and art, and evermore shall be.” Thus Loy seems to imply that “cosmic reproductivity,” or the life force, found also in cats and blue-bottle flies and “a dead white feathered moth / laying eggs,” is God becoming flesh, making and made.
I admire the way this poem tells at the same time it shows, philosophizing while allowing the reader to see and to feel sensations. The fragments mimic the way thoughts arise during pain, with the spacing and lack of punctuation intimating nonlinear time, or the sense of being suspended outside of time. I love the wordplay, the assonance and alliteration, and the antonyms that allude to synthesis.
In class, we have learned that while the poet was influenced by the Italian Futurists, with whom she’d begun to associate—men who shunned standard syntax and punctuation, as well as history and social conventions, but promoted violence and disparaged women—Loy went her own way, making use of collage and attending to sound, and soon enough, she began to mock the Futurists. At the end of this poem, Loy says, “I once heard in a church / —Man and woman God made them— / Thank God.” I cannot determine if she is mocking the church here or if she is being sincere.
All I know is that while awaiting parto in Florence, Loy was surrounded by images of a holy mother who was said to be a virgin. Next to Loy’s home was the church of Santi Girolamo and Francesco alla Costa; above the door at #50, a small shrine houses a Madonna and Child, with a bas relief depiction of the pair decorating the wall of the adjacent building. Standing slightly further ahead, where the street opens up to join the Costa dei Magnoli, is the ancient church of San Giorgio alla Costa and its convent. So although we did not see, glinting against the cobblestones, any fragments of the china virgins that the disconsolate housewives in “The Costa San Giorgio” obsessively dusted and then threw “OUT / Onto the middle of the street,” we have some sense of why the poem’s speaker asks Mary to “preserve our mistresses from seeing us as we see ourselves.”
Eventually, we will learn that when her firstborn died, Loy stayed up all night painting. According to a description provided by American expatriate and salon hostess Mabel Dodge (whose own story of pregnancy, grief, scandal, exile, and convenient marriage we also have begun to explore), Loy’s Wooden Madonna, now lost, portrayed the Virgin Mary as a “foolish-looking mother holding her baby, whose two small fingers are raised in an impotent blessing over an anguished mother who, on her knees, curses them both with great, upraised, clenched fists, and her own baby sprawling dead with little arms and legs outstretched lifeless, like faded flower petals.” Finding no comfort in the prototypical Madonna, who seemed wooden to her, Loy was granted no relief from her grief, and she fell into the long depression that led to relations with her doctor.
But now, here we are, in line to enter the Palatine Gallery, and I am eager to view not only Raphael’s renderings of the Madonna and Child but his portrait of The Veiled Woman. As Cusk tells us, the model for this portrait is believed to have been the model for Raphael’s Sistine Madonna. According to Cusk, although the Sistine Mary holds the child “so generously,” when the model “is permitted her own reality,” Raphael “veils her, for her body is the drama of his subconscious . . . the veil . . . the psychic rift [separating] one image of her from another.” Is Cusk referring to the gap I have been considering, the gap I see between depictions of the Madonna and flesh-and-blood women? Maybe not, for Cusk goes on to ask: “Is she to wither in her casket of gold piping and amber-colored stones? Is she to remain alone, like the pearl in her hair? When she fingers her cloth-covered breast, what vision of love rises in her large, dark, heavy-lidded eyes?” Although the woman portrayed may appear to be desirous, Cusk’s description makes her seem more virginal than the Virgin. We will learn soon enough that this model, Margarita Luti, was Raphael’s mistress, and perhaps then we will stop and consider the oxymoron—that she appears to be demure (virginal, even) in this portrait, but “generous” and vibrant when she is depicted as the Holy Mother. Perhaps then we will understand that the veil represents the way Margarita’s true position in Raphael’s life has been kept hidden.
Now, however, we are entering the palace, and I am thinking about how images of the Virgin Mary have affected not only women’s images of themselves but men’s ideas about women, questioning what views of human maternity have been perpetuated by the Church and the commissioners of paintings for centuries.
Soon we are trailing through the palace apartments, radio transmitters hanging around our necks and receivers in our ears, some of our faces covered by KN95 masks. Here we feel overwhelmed by the vaulted ceilings with their decorative stucco and frescoes, by the abundance of richly colored paintings covering the gilded walls. Our guide today, the Dante scholar who is the champion of the study abroad program within our college, has been telling us about a 1403 text by Giovanni Dominici, Rules for the Management of Family Care, which exhorts parents to keep “paintings in the house, of holy boys, or young virgins, in which [their] child when still in swaddling clothes may delight as being like himself.” Dominici further encourages parents to display sculptures of the Madonna and Child, adding that little girls should likewise be exposed to images of the virgin martyrs that will “give them love of virginity with their mother’s milk.” The paradox seems obvious to each of us women (ranging in age from nineteen to seventy-two): the mothers of these little girls would not have become mothers themselves or produced any milk at all had they remained virgins. What we have not understood is that earlier cultures actually believed that literal physiological effects could be gained by looking upon images.
Quoting again from David Freedberg’s The Power of Images, our guide has told us the story of Persina, queen of Ethiopia, who, according to a third-century Greek romance by Heliodorus, gave birth to a white child and claimed it was “because while [her] husband had to do with [her, she] looked upon the picture of Andromeda naked . . . and so by mishap engendered presently a thing like to her.” Regardless of whether Queen Persina was doubted or trusted, similar beliefs survive in an early-seventeenth-century text on paintings and painters by Giulio Mancini, the Considerazioni sulla pittura, in which he instructs husbands and fathers to display well-wrought and lascivious paintings when they are alone with their wives, “because once seen they serve to arouse one and to make beautiful, healthy, and charming children . . . because each parent . . . imprints in their seed a similar constitution which has been seen in the object or figure,” adding that the paintings should otherwise be covered and “must nevertheless not be seen by children and old maids, nor by strangers and fastidious people.”
We pass by these lascivious paintings unscathed and eventually proceed to the Saturn Room, whose rose-colored walls are covered with gold-framed paintings. Just inside the entrance, in the lowest row, the Madonna’s face, lit from within, emerges from a dark canvas as an emblem of supplication and sorrow. Downcast, her eyes do not meet our gaze. She appears to be demure, certainly. Self-effacing? Willing to go along with the plan but unwilling to look at us? Aware of being a pawn in Raphael’s game? Or his patron’s? Or the Lord God’s? No. That is not what we are asking. Not just yet, anyway. We are thinking, Oh, here’s one—here’s one of Raphael’s Madonnas, one of those we have been seeking. She has taken the usual pose, holding the child and looking down, faint gold haloes holding both of their heads in place. Her blood-red gown suggests the baby’s future sacrifice, while her true-blue mantle suggests the mother’s enduring chastity. We see it now—they are unmoving, keeping to the script, taking their parts in the drama. Yes, this Renaissance image, the Madonna of the Grand Duke, is more beautiful and more realistic than earlier images. The mother’s face, painted by Raphael more than 500 years ago (circa 1506–1507), is more human and yet more divinely perfect (the oval shape! the symmetry of the heavily lidded eyes above the perfect nose and perfect lips! the flushed cheeks!) than those medieval images depicted in street corner grottoes and apartment vestibules. However, the message is the same: this woman is pure; she has never been touched by a man, and yet she is compliant.
I ask our Italian-fluent guide about Raphael’s portrait of The Veiled Woman, and she asks the guard, but the painting is in London, out on loan. To the left of the exit, however, I am struck by another Raphael Madonna, and this Mary, the Madonna of the Chair, is looking right at me—or at least she appears to be. Her head is inclined toward the child, her cheek against his forehead, but instead of looking down demurely, she is looking outward. Is she looking at me, defiantly, daring me to come near her baby? Or is she looking slightly downward, after all, focused on something in the near distance as she rests within their sacred but everyday bond? Mary’s arms enfold her chubby, cherubic Jesus, who leans into her, his bent left arm nestled in the crook of her right arm. Her upper right arm is squeezed against the post of the chair in which they sit, their posture disclosing that these two remain united. The baby’s plump bottom rests within the folds of Mary’s blue skirt, in the space between his mother’s two strong legs, which are spread slightly at the knees to make room for him. Although her skirt is blue, Mary’s sleeve is orange. A fringed, embroidered green shawl is draped across her chest (the baby’s hand tucked underneath it), while a brown-striped beige scarf is wrapped around her head. We might assume this lovely, rosy-cheeked woman to be any young Renaissance mother were it not for the other child—whom we assume to be Jesus’s cousin John—leaning against her knee and gazing upon her with jealous adoration, his hands folded as if in prayer. Of course, there’s also a thin gold cross tucked inside the Baptist’s armpit, and faint gold haloes encircle his and Mary’s heads, but we do not notice these details yet. We are too entranced by the bright faces and bright colors emerging from the circular painting (a tondo) set within the ornate gold frame. Instead of being chastened by the thought of any suffering to come, we are cheered by Raphael’s portrait of love embodied.
In the classroom tomorrow, we will look again, online, at these two paintings—the Madonna of the Grand Duke and the Madonna of the Chair—and declare our preference for the latter, which was painted about seven years after the former (circa 1513–1514, when Raphael was designing the palazzo where I’m staying). We will note that the model for the Madonna of the Chair also appears to be the same woman who served as the model for the portrait of The Veiled Woman—who is presumed to have been not only the model for the Sistine Madonna but the woman Raphael loved, his mistress, Margarita Luti, the daughter of a baker from Siena. We will conclude that a living beloved makes for a better model—especially for the woman meant to serve as the model of love, the one meant to represent the Mother of God, to whom we would like to be able to turn for wisdom and protection, believing she could relate to our earthly joys and our earthly sorrows.
During the last week of class, we will read Loy’s early poem “The Prototype,” in which the speaker contrasts the perfect pink-and-white wax Christ Child on display in the Duomo on Christmas Eve with a baby “made of half warm flesh . . . covered with sores” carried into the cathedral by “a half-broken mother.” The poem calls for the extinguishing of the candles and the disposal of the wax baby and for the churches to be used as night-shelters. The speaker of the poem refers to herself as the “only follower in Christ’s foot-steps / among the crowd adoring a wax doll” and ends the poem this way: “Let them eat— / O let them love— / And let their babies be / pink & white.”
I believe that in the same way Loy is calling upon the church to open its eyes and take care of the actual suffering babies in their midst rather than focusing on an effigy of a prototypical perfect baby, she is calling on the church to attend to the real experiences of human mothers rather than focusing on the likeness of a prototypical virgin mother. Like many of us, Mina Loy continued to be interested in images of the Madonna, and while the concept of a deified virginal mother remained wooden to her, she came to identify with the suffering mother of the Pieta and to turn to her for solace.
On the day following our last day of class, on June 24, 2022, Roe v. Wade will be struck down by the Supreme Court of the United States. Since I will have taken my phone off airplane mode that day, I will hear the dinging of the New York Times “breaking news” notification as I leave the Donatello exhibit at the Palazzo Strozzi. I will have just bought my daughter a coffee mug printed with a copy of the artist’s beautiful fifteenth-century terracotta relief sculpture the Pazzi Madonna, in which the Mother and Child peer into each other’s eyes with forehead pressed to forehead, nose pressed to nose. As I sit on the Strozzi’s outer ledge and read the headline, I will find myself crying out to the Mother of God, wondering again what iconic Madonna might sustain us now, as we strive to honor the life force while loving the earthly beings whose bodies’ power to bring forth life begs that they also have the capacity and the liberty to care for themselves, not to mention these unformed others, the “half warm flesh” of their own flesh.
A year later, as a doting and privileged grandmother fortunate enough to be teaching in Italy again, I will attend a very different exhibit at the Strozzi, an exhibit of contemporary art called Reaching for the Stars. I won’t think any of the portrayals of women included are meant to serve as role models, but I will find beauty in a marble statue of a Roma woman (Commerce Exterieur Mondial Sentimental, by Andra Usurta), and I will find the cloth sculpture Nice Tits, by Sarah Lucas—a hanging bouquet of disembodied, multi-sized cloth breasts—to be iconic. I will appreciate the messages conveyed by a portrait of a veiled Islamic woman who is pointing a gun at the viewer (Faceless, by Shirin Neshat); by the blown-up photograph of Eleanor Roosevelt that is framed with a list of her supposed flaws (Untitled (Not ugly enough), by Barbara Kruger); by the series of photographs of an artist as she reenacts stereotypical roles played by women in films (from untitled Film Stills series, by Cindy Sherman). But I won’t find a deified role model.
Displayed in Rome, at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, is Raphael’s The Portrait of a Young Woman, also known as La Fornarina, translated as The Baker’s Daughter. This, too, is believed to be a portrait of Margarita Luti. In this piece, she is naked from the waist up, posed in the style of classical sculptures of Venus, with her right hand cupping her left breast and swaths of sheer fabric draping the lower half of her body.
From The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, by Renaissance painter and architect Giorgio Vasari, we have been led to believe Raphael was quite amorous; that he was unable to work on his commission to decorate a villa unless his mistress was brought to live with him; that he continually postponed his promised marriage to a Vatican cardinal’s niece so he could continue to be with his mistress; that he died of a fever brought on by too much lovemaking; that on his deathbed, he ensured his mistress was given enough money to “live an honest life.” In the margins of the manuscript that would become the second edition of The Lives of the Painters, Vasari actually identifies the mistress as Margarita.
And so, over the centuries, artists, writers, and filmmakers have been inspired to imagine the lives of the pair. Myths have proliferated, with some seeing the woman as the love of Raphael’s life and others as a femme fatale. Most interesting to me is a theory offered by contemporary Italian art historian Maurizio Bernardelli Curuz, which surmises that Raphael and Margarita were secretly married.
Bernardelli Curuz says a marriage between a baker’s daughter and an artist as renowned as Raphael would have been scandalous. He points out that the brooch in the turban of La Fornarina (like the brooch in La Donna Velata) is a pearl, and that margherita is a Latin word for pearl. He reminds us that the band around the subject’s left forearm is signed Raphael Urbinis. More to the point, he says, X-rays taken in the early part of the twenty-first century show not only a ring on the third finger of the model’s left hand but a background of myrtle and quince, symbols of love, fertility, and faithfulness. Furthermore, in the late nineteenth century, papers were found indicating that the “widow Margherita, daughter of a Siena baker,” joined a monastery outside Rome four months after Raphael’s death. Since the painting was unfinished when Raphael died, Bernardelli Curuz suggests, the artist’s students painted over the ring and the foliage in an attempt to hide the evidence of his marriage, ensuring he be entombed in a place of prominence alongside his respectable fiancée, who appears to have died earlier in 1520.
In my mind, it seems entirely possible that Margarita was Raphael’s wife; for all I know, she was even the mother of his unacknowledged children. But it seems just as likely that she was “just his mistress.” Either way, what seems clear to me is that the woman was both loving and beloved—that, in any case, the emotion she expressed (through her countenance and her posture), which Raphael conveyed to us (through his craft and his own feelings), offers us a model of love, reminding us what love can look like, whether it be love for our children, love for our partners, or love for our God, whether it be “earthly love” or “spiritual love.”
And so I question: do we really need to keep asking if Margarita was Raphael’s wife or if she was his mistress? Do we really need to keep separating women into virgins and whores, Madonnas and Magdalenes? Or can we unravel that division and go even further, dissolving the partition between the celestial Venus and the terrestrial Venus?
In a 2015 article, Guiliano Pisani suggests that La Fornarina—in her nakedness— symbolizes the celestial Venus, the type of beauty that inspires men to spiritual bliss. Although it took me some time to understand why he sees the naked image of Margarita as the symbol of spirituality, I finally realized it must be related to the fact that, symbolically speaking, the only consummation that can ever occur with such beauty is spiritual consummation. (Thus did Dante’s vision of Beatrice—his unacknowledged, unrequited, and unconsummated love—lead him to Paradise and union with God.) On the other hand, the terrestrial Venus represents the generative power of nature. Her goal is procreation, which requires physical consummation, so naturally, this Venus is identified with wives and mothers, and Pisani puts the more modest, lifelike donna velata in this category.
As I reconsider the Virgin Mother as a symbol that evolved from representations of a celestial Venus and a terrestrial Venus, melding them in some way—with the Annunciation a sign that spirit and flesh are one, that there is no split—I might see the Madonna myth as a step in the right direction. I understand that Carl Jung was greatly encouraged when Pope Pius XII declared in 1950 that Mary was taken bodily into heaven. In Jung’s mind, the Assumption assumes that not only is the feminine an aspect of God but that the earth itself is sacred.
May we all see it that way. May we stop splitting the celestial from the terrestrial, and may we stop splitting women into virgins and whores, Madonnas and Magdalenes. Better yet, may we stop projecting iconic images onto real women—may we see them not as vessels only or as mere carriers of the male’s anima, but as sovereign, sacred, and individual beings. Quoting from Loy’s “Parturition” again, I pray: may the “irresponsibility of the male” no longer “[leave] women her superior Inferiority” but “In the harmony of physiological potentiality / . . . Gaining self-control / . . . [May we] be consonant / In time.”