Madonna and Child (c. 1300)

Duccio di Buoninsegna

SPUC’s Dr Daniel Frampton encounters six compelling artworks spanning 900 years of art history, including film, and examines each work from an openly pro-life perspective in a unique cycle of short essays that aim to be educational and contemplative – revealing, too, the powerful role art can play in advocating for a true culture of life that speaks truth to power in a world that has lost its moral centre.

This week, Daniel reflects on the artist Duccio di Buoninsegna’s “Madonna and Child”.

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On the eve of battle, somewhere in the Normandy countryside in July 1944, the artist Rex Whistler sketched the final image of his career. Walking back to his bivouac outside Bayeux, he discovered a ruined chapel and was moved to draw a small Madonna and Child on one of its bare walls. Using some pencils and a piece of charcoal, within a short time the image was complete.

Whistler was killed in battle shortly afterwards.

I have often wondered what prompted this most modest of final works. Was it triggered by a sense of premonition? Like Keith Douglas, the noted English poet who was also killed during the Normandy campaign, was Whistler aware of what was to come? “I fear what I shall find”, wrote Douglas.

Why a Madonna and Child? Whistler was not particularly religious; he once claimed that he believed there was only a “50-50 chance” of a “future life”. Of course, the Madonna and Child is an artistic commonplace, most common in the Middle Ages and Renaissance; the child is the Christ Child, while the Madonna (Italian for “My Lady”) is the Virgin Mary; and one of the finest examples, my selection this week, is the Italian artist Duccio di Buoninsegna’s “Madonna and Child” (c. 1300), a painting that might provide us with an answer.

Whistler’s final act as an artist was, I think, an act of faith, a faith in life.

The Madonna represents an ideal of motherhood, the mother exemplified, the Queen of Heaven, no less. In Duccio’s painting, we see the Virgin Mary holding the infant Christ as He reaches out and brushes her veil aside – the Mother is revealed. Yet, while Duccio’s Madonna and Child, as an image, is intended to represent an ideal that is essentially devotional, Duccio’s image, following on after Giotto, has a curious sense of realism, familiarity and even tenderness.

Of course, we are still a long way off from Raphael, but in Duccio’s icon there is a definite sense that, as well as looking at a Madonna and Child, we are also invited into a moment of profound intimacy between a mother and her infant son.

Duccio’s Madonna and Child is fundamentally human and tender. But unlike Raphael, coming later, whose own paintings are, to my mind, over-idealised classical constructions, Duccio’s painting truly conveys the good sense that motherhood, while being holy and sacrosanct, is also essentially human – a hard job, that is, which brings both joy and grief. In other words, this painting is not founded on a modern idealisation of beauty that ultimately outshines the splendor of the subject itself, as we see in secular art, nor is that subject wholly spiritualised to the point of a barely recognisable abstraction that has nothing to say to real human beings.

So, what might this image say to us today? What did it have to say to Rex Whistler?

Duccio’s Madonna and Child, I think, is an image of hope as well as aspiration rooted in realism, especially poignant today when the notion of motherhood has been traduced to the point of even being considered by some to be a waste of life, if only because it may, indeed, at times seem that way.

But let’s look closer at Duccio’s painting.

Apart from underscoring the theodrama that is about to unfold – in which the Christ Child is set to play the redemptive role – the melancholy in Mary’s eyes reveals a mother who knows full well what awaits both herself and her son. Nevertheless, Mary has consented to bring this brilliant life into a world that, even admitting its inherent travails, is still fundamentally worth it – an act of faith.

As G. K. Chesterton wrote, “A child is the very sign and sacrament of personal freedom.  He is a fresh free will added to the wills of the world; he is something that his parents have freely chosen to produce and which they freely agree to protect… People who prefer the mechanical pleasures, to such a miracle, are jaded and enslaved.” I couldn’t agree more.

In the end, I see Duccio’s work as representing motherhood as a fundamental act of faith, a faith in which the child is life’s most tender, sometimes heartbreaking, reward. And I’m sure that when Whistler sketched his own Madonna and Child – at the point of seeing Europe ablaze, a fire that threatened to consume his own life as well – this final work was a pro-life avowal of faith that life was ultimately still worth it, and Whistler would continue to live it to the bitter end.

Read last week's article by Dr Daniel Frampton here.