Indian Antiquary Vol 03

Author(s): Jas Burgess
Publisher: Swati Publications

Page 60

48
THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY.
[FEBRUARY, 1874.
was the mother of Christ's human nature only, not of his divine nature; while Cyril of Alex. andria, and the synods of Alexandria (430) and of Ephesus (431), maintained that she must be considered the Mother of God, Beotokos, deipara, against the heretical doubts of the Nestorians, who exclaimed in the latter council (p. 63), "Can we call him God who is only two or three months old, or suppose the Logos to have been suckled and to increase in wisdom?" The representation of the "Virgin in the act of suckling her Child" appeared, according to Mrs. Jameson, the most fitting symbol of the holy Mother of God, and the picture of the Madonna with the Child became the symbol " which distinguished the Catholic Chris. tian from the Nestorian dissenter" (p. 60). So much was this the case that "every one who wished to prove his hatred of the arch-heretic exbibited the image of the maternal virgin holding in her arnus the Infant Godhead, either in his house as a picture, embroidered on his garments, or on his furniture, on his personal ornaments-in short, wherever it could be introduced." The oldest representations which Mrs. Jameson can adduce in proof of this are mosaics from the eighth century, as she asserts, and these only in the West, the raid of that time (726-840) against pictures having destroyed the pictures of the old Greek churches. We must notice, however, in connection with this point, that the very work which Mrs. Jameson adduces as the oldest representa tion of the “ Madonna Lactans" (the Madonna suckling), the mosaics, namely, on the facade of the portico of S. Maria in Trastevere,t are ascribed by Kugler, in his Handbuch der Malerei (2nd ed. by Burckhardt, Berl. 1847) I, 271, to the years 1139-53, so that it belongs not to the 8th, but to the 12th century, and that all her other examples date from the best period of the Renaissance !
And the facts of the case are against the special weight which Mrs. Jameson lays on the idea that the representation in question of the Madonna must be looked on as the visible form of a theological dogma," as a protest against Nestorianism. For it would be more reasonable to suppose that a purely human representation of this kind would be used as a symbol by those who were of opinion that the Virgin Mary was the Mother of Christ considered as a man, but not the Mother of Christ considered as God." And in fact Mrs. Jameson herself gives as the reason why the older, .purely human, representation of the birth of Christ ceased after the 14th century, that "it gave great offence." The greatest theologians insisted that the birth of Christ was as pure and miraculous as his conception, and it was considered little less than here. tioal to pourtray Mary reclining on a couch as one exhausted by the pangs of childbirth, or to exhibit assistants washing the heavenly Infant. [Compare what Piper says as to the way in which the human element is kept in the background in the oldest representations of Christ, p. 49.) Nor did the Nestorians absolutely deny to the Virgin the name Deorokos; they only used it with reservo, for fear of abuse : conf. La Crozo, Hist. du Christianisme dans les Indos, p. 36(the Hague, 1724). Cosmas Indicopleuster, although a Nestorian, as La Croze (pp. 97.36) admits, expressly gives her this title (p. 260, ed. Montfaucon in the Nova Coll. Patrum, tom. 2). And in the Gospel of the Childhood of Christ, which H. Sike (Utrecht, 1697) edited in Arabic and Latin, and which, according to La Croze (p. 31), is the work of a Nestorian, the infant Christ is, in the 3rd chapter (vide Fabricius, Codes Apocryphus Novi Testamenti; Hamburg, 1719, p. 170), expressly represented as drinking at Mary's breast, infana fascio involutus divoe matris sme tubera sugebat, in
We find," says she (p. 61)," the primeval Byxantine type, is seated on a throne, wearing a rich crown, a queen of or at least the exact reproduction of it, in the most ancient heaven. The infant Christ stands upon her knee: she has Western churches, and preserved to us in the mosaics of one hand on her bosom, and sustaina him with the other : Rome, Ravenna, and Capua. These remains are nearly all (1) On the facade of the portico of the S. Maria in of the same date, much later than the single figures of Trastevere at Rome the Virgin is enthroned and crowned Christ as Redeemer, and belonging, unfortunately, to al and civing her breast to the child. This mosaic is of later lower period and style of art. The true significance of the
date than that in the apsis, but it is one of the oldest representation is not, however, left doubtful; for all the
examples of a representation which was evidently directed earliest traditions and inscriptions are in this (p. 62) agreed, against the heretical doubts of the Nestorians. The Virgin that such effigies were intended as a confession of faith, an in the act of suckling her child is a motive often since acknowledgment of the dignity of the Virgin Mary as the repeated, when the original significance was forgotten." "Sancta Dei Genitrix," as a visible refutation of the "infamons, iniquitous, and sacrilegious doctrines of Nesto
+ Vide Bunsen, d. Basiliken des Christl. Rom., München, rius the Heresiarch."
1842, pl. xliv. The oldest representations of the kind are. -
In the library at St. Galle (No. 53) there is an Evan.
geliarium ascribed to the Abbé Tutilo (+ 912) with ivory (1) The mosaic of the Cathedral of Capua ; .... the boards, the upper of which shows Christ on a throne sur Virgin ia seated on a rich throne, Christ, seated on her rounded by cherubim and the Evangelist, below which on knee and clothed, holds a cross in his left hand; the right the one side there is a mother in a half-recumbent position is raised in benediction.
hushing her child. Conf. the copies in E. Förster's (3) The next in date which remains visible is the group Denkmalen deutscher Baukunst Bildnerei, etc. 1, 7, in the in the apsis of S. Maria della Navicella (Rome), executed me writer's Gesch, der deutschen Kunst (1800) I, 34, and about 820 ... Maria on a throne .. the infant Cbrist in Otte's Handbuch der christlichen Kunstarchäologie 18 seated in her lap and raises his hand to bless the wor. (Leipzig, 1867). p. 658 (132). This, however, 18 not the shippers :
Madonna Lactans, but, according to E. Förster, "Tellus (3) p. 63) In the Santa Maria Nora (Rome) the Virgin with the horn of plenty and a child at her breast."