OUR LADY, Mother of Ferguson is not a typical depiction of Mary. Created by the contemporary iconographer Mark Doox, the image was commissioned by the Revd Mark Francisco Bozzuti-Jones, an Episcopalian priest at Trinity, Wall Street, in New York City, after the killing of a black teenager, Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 (News, 22 August 2014). Brown, who was 18, was shot by a police officer, Darren Wilson. After Brown’s death, protests ignited in Ferguson which were reported around the world.
Mr Doox’s image is a Byzantine-style acrylic collage in the style of a Black Madonna. It features Mary with her hands up to symbolise the “Don’t shoot” signal that Brown is believed to have made as he faced the officer’s gun. Where Our Lady, Mother of Ferguson’s womb should be, there is a black silhouette of the Christ-child, whose arms are up, too. Mother and child are in the crosshairs of a gun. In her book Motherhood: A confession, Natalie Carnes writes of the image: “With this image, the iconographer inscribes the stories of all mourning black mothers into the story of Mary suffering violence against her own child.”
When I first saw this image, it took my breath away. It was like no other depiction of Mary I had seen. When I pictured the Mother of God, I pictured the Mary of the saccharine nativity scene; or the Mary depicted in the countless Virgin and Child images that I had encountered throughout my life. She was beautiful, young, and certainly white. Her pose was passive, submissive, her eyes fixed on her Christ-child — images such as the Baroque painter Sassoferrato’s The Virgin and Child Embracing, which show a porcelain-skinned, rosy-cheeked, beautiful Mary lovingly envelop her child while looking down, as if not to catch our eye or draw attention to herself.
Art and cultural depictions can function as propaganda, containing symbolism and imagery that put forward ideas about who we are supposed to be, and how we are supposed to think about others. There has been much discussion over the decades about the ways in which advertising messaging — from the 1950s housewife to the multi-racial family today — show us what we are supposed to think about how we should be and act in the world.
When it comes to Mary — the most famous mother of all — her portrayal, from the earliest depictions in the first century, through the Byzantine era, through the Middle Ages, the Reformation, the Renaissance, and the Victorian era, to the present day, shows us how societies over history have wanted mothers and all women to behave. These images, historic and contemporary, seep into our consciousness. We can underestimate how much they affect our understanding of ourselves.
FOR depictions of maternal and of feminine ideals, there is no better example than Mary. She functions as an archetype of maternity which has influenced perceptions of motherhood in the West both in and outside the Church. Although Christianity’s historical influence over society is waning, Anglo-American societies in the 21st century continue to be shaped by the Christian imagination. As the historian Tom Holland puts it, “All of us in the West are a goldfish, and the water that we swim in is Christianity.”
A culture that clings to the nativity scenes found on Christmas cards, in art galleries, and on TV screens, is seared into our collective consciousness. The ideas about what it is to be a woman and a mother which infuse our societies have been shaped by what the art historian Catherine McCormack describes as “an avalanche of Christian devotional images of the Virgin Mary that define mothering as something sacrosanct, monumental, self-sacrificing, subservient, and de-sexualised”.
AlamyVisitors in front of Leonardo da Vinci’s Madonna Litta, in the Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg
Mary’s ubiquity as a maternal archetype in culture helps to explain the number of secular thinkers who, when relaying their experience of motherhood, at some point touch on the perfect ideal that she represents. They, too, have imbibed the artistic and cultural ideals put forward in Marian artwork. Lucy Jones, in her book Matrescence, describes the image of a mother which she had before having children: “Effectively, she was Mary, the mother of Jesus, her expression matching the gold icons we had on the walls and mantelpieces of my childhood home. The baby Jesus, on her lap, was never having a tantrum. His swaddling clothes were immaculate. Motherhood looked chilled.”
In Of Woman Born, her iconic feminist rail against the institution of motherhood, Adrienne Rich recalled being pregnant for the first time, and feeling that the expectations and views about motherhood were embodied “in the booklet in my obstetrician’s waiting room, the novels I had read, my mother-in-law’s approval, my memories of my own mother, the Sistine Madonna, or she of the Michelangelo Pietà, the floating notion that a woman pregnant is a woman calm in her fulfilment or, simply, a woman waiting”.
The theologian Nicola Slee writes: “It is hardly possible to exist as an inhabitant of the western world, with even half an eye open to the visual and cultural heritage of Christendom, and not to have been in some way affected by this woman, the woman of the Christian tradition.”
She adds: “I’ve come to think [. . .] that Mary functions iconographically, symbolically and theologically in western culture (and perhaps in other cultures too) in much the same way that Christ does in the psyche of Christendom, as a kind of reflective screen upon which has been projected a culture’s shifting ideals and aspirations around humanity, sanctity and deity. Specifically, Mary has functioned as a mirror for society’s notions of the female, of the holy and of the divine feminine at any one time.”
SO, WHAT are the messages that we take from portrayals of Mary? Women might see at once someone whom they recognise as like them and, at the same time, whose perfection makes them feel inadequate. In the Christian tradition in which I was raised, we thought little about Mary. When I did hear about her at church, it was her fiat — her saying yes to God — that was highlighted.
What I took from that was that good women always did as they were told, and did not question the sacrifice that was asked of them. The fact that Mary did, indeed, ask how on earth she could bear God’s son, since she was a virgin, was glossed over or presented as the perplexed wonderings of a poor young woman rather than questioning of someone with an astute intellect. It is this fiat that is portrayed through a passive Mary in artwork such as Caravaggio’s Annunciation.
© The National Gallery, LondonGuido Reni, The Adoration of the Shepherds (c.1640)
As well as Mary’s submissiveness, a number of feminine ideals are channelled through illustrations of the biblical accounts. The archetypal mother’s perfection is reduced to coyness and domestic mastery — as was the case after the Reformation, when depictions, alongside St Joseph and her child, of Mary, whose priority was the home, became prevalent.
We also see the ideal of aesthetic beauty portrayed in most of the art depicting Mary throughout history. If you imagine Mary, you also probably imagine her as beautiful. The fourth-century bishop St Epiphanius drew an image of what he thought Mary looked like. His Mary is described as not particularly tall of stature, but a little taller than average. Describing Epiphanius’s picture of Mary, the 19th-century French abbot Orsini writes of her “light” hair and “lively” eyes, her “perfectly arched and black” eyebrows, and her “remarkably perfect” nose, rosy lips, oval face, and long fingers.
Beauty standards in the West tend to see youth as beautiful and old age as not; this explains why we rarely see images of the Mother of God imagined in her later years. Ageing does not fit into our narrow ideal of perfect motherhood. James Tissot’s La sainte Vierge âgée (“The Holy Virgin in Old Age”), completed in about 1894, is one of the few that portrays an older Mary. It is a ghostly image, depicting a distressed, grieving mother.
This is not the youthful Mary we are familiar with, but it draws out the pain of an older mother whose 33-year-old son has just been murdered. Tissot imagines her praying as she looks down at the hole left where her son’s cross had stood on Mount Calvary. Behind her are other women, whose faces are downcast after the trauma that they have just experienced.
And, of course, the dominant imagery that we have of Mary is white, despite the fact that she was most likely to have been a brown-skinned woman. Black Madonnas such as Our Lady, Mother of Ferguson, therefore, present an alternative to the traditional white imagery of Mary. The thing about these Black Madonnas — of which there are about 500 globally — is that they do not conform.
They are surprising and intriguing because they do not fit with the dominant image that we have of Mary in our heads: the Mary that has been constructed out of white, patriarchal Christianity and culture. But these are not simply “woke” representations as a matter of political correctness: they say something profound about Mary as a symbol of the shadow side of motherhood, the texture and variety of all women’s experiences.
Black Madonnas symbolise the Magnificat Mary’s solidarity with the oppressed — something that she has come to be recognised for all over the world. She is also a woman who herself knew what it was to suffer. It is here in Mary’s suffering — portrayed so vividly in Pietà imagery of a mother holding her dead child’s body, and Black Madonnas — that the saccharine myths of motherhood fall away, and where all mothers whose souls are pierced by the shadow of tragedy and death find solidarity.
Chine McDonald is the author of Unmaking Mary: Shattering the myth of perfect motherhood, published by Hodder & Stoughton at £18.99 (Church Times Bookshop £17.09); 978-1-3998-1463-8. She will be discussing the depictions of Mary in Orazio Gentileschi’s Rest on the Flight to Egypt at the National Gallery, London, at lunchtime today and in an evening discussion on 23 May. www.nationalgallery.org.uk
Listen to Chine McDonald’s talk at the Church Times Festival of Faith and Literature here.
