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She is depicted sitting on a throne, looking somewhat obliquely past the viewer, who must nevertheless be at least peripherally in her field of vision. On either side, a saint looks out directly to the viewer. Behind her, two angels, one on either side of the picture, look up in awe. We can only see the hand of God reaching down to Mary. The angels must be able to see more. Mary, the saints, and the Christ child sit on the same plane. Some shading of the face reveals a limited three-dimensionality. The angels stand behind on a second plane, looking slightly forward while looking up, leading the viewer to think that the hand of God is above Mary. The only evidence of a second plane is the fact that the angels’ bodies are partly covered by the saints in the front row with Mary.

Next, Cimabue’s Santa Trinita Madonna of about 1290.¹²⁵ Mary is again on a throne holding the Christ child, this time slightly forward of her, eight angels surrounding but layered behind each other on multiple planes. Three-dimensionality is marked by an architectural frame, with Jewish prophets in alcoves below. Jeremiah and Isaiah look up in anticipation of the coming of the Messiah. Notwithstanding a move in the direction of more realistic, multidimensional representation, Mary and the prophets we know are not of the same time, and she is scaled larger than the other persons in the image. Her face is still styled in the elongated fashion of Byzantine icons. Her body has no notably human shape. The folds in the fabric of her clothes are uniform lines. The angels look obliquely into abstract space.

Giotto di Bondone was a student of Cimabue’s, and by the time he painted Ognissanti Madonna in about 1310, a change had come in ways of seeing. Mary is still surrounded by saints and angels. The gold filigree background abstracts the image into some heavenly location in the tradition of iconography. Mary remains unnaturally over-scaled. But her face is more realistically human. The fabric of her clothing has fine gradations of light and dark. The profile of breasts can be seen and the shape of her body is now womanlier, and the alcove in which she sits on her throne is defined by perspective as a three-dimensional space. The angels look to Mary in adoration, suggesting that the viewer should too. Renaissance art and architecture theorist Lorenzo Ghiberti^§MS2.2b writes about this painting in the next century, noting its pivotal place in the evolution of linear perspective.¹²⁶ So does art historian Vasari in the century after that, also using the image to exemplify progress towards the realism of the greats, Leonardo and Michelangelo.¹²⁷ Dante says, “Once Cimabue was thought to hold the field/In painting; now it is Giotto’s turn/The other’s fame lies buried in the dust.”¹²⁸

Now to our fourth Mary, Sandro Botticelli’s Madonna of the Book of about 1482.¹²⁹ Mother and child sit in a corner of an ordinary room. She reads the Book of Hours, a book of prayers widely available in the Middle Ages. The infant looks up at his mother as she reads, and there is nothing particularly holy in such a gesture. An unknown book sits at an angle on the shelf where it casually happens to have been left, beside a nondescript wooden box. The shelves recede into the corner of the room. A bowl of fruit sits on top of some other books lying on the table. Behind Mary, a window, and beyond, a horizon of trees meets a sky at twilight. The gratuitously everyday detail, the linear perspective, the visual realism of light and shadow, the consistent scaling, the absence of saints and angels, all point to a new way of seeing. Though elements of the old supernaturalism remain: the gold filigree halos, the child holding three gold nails of the cross and wearing the crown of thorns as a bracelet – these refer to a later part of the Christ child’s life only knowable by the viewer. This is how we know that the “she” of the image is the singularly holy Mary.

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¹²³ Marina Warner, 1976, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary, New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf.

¹²⁴ Norman P. Tanner, ed., 1990, Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, Volume 1: Nicea I to Lateran V, London, UK: Sheed and Ward, p. 58.

¹²⁵ Eugenio Battisti, 1963, Cimabue, Milan, Italy: Institutio Editoriale Italiano.

¹²⁶ Richard Krautheimer, 1956, Lorenzo Ghiberti, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

¹²⁷ Giorgio Vasari, 1550 [1969], Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, translated by G.D.C. de Vere, New York, NY: The Modern Library.

¹²⁸ Quoted by Norman Bryson, 1983, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, p. 2.

¹²⁹ Lionello Venturi, 1937, Sandro Botticelli, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press; Sandra Legouix, 1987, Botticelli, London, UK: Bloomsbury; Timothy Verdon, 2005, Mary in Western Art, Manchester, VT: Hudson Hills, pp. 131–35.

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Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 215–216. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

Four Marys §MS2.2a