The Virgin and Child in apsidal mosaics

Virgin Mother with the Child standing

Virgin Mother with the Child, apse, mosaic, Church of the Dormition, Nicaea, end of the eighth century

Non-apsidal compositions relating to this type of composition:

Virgin Mother with the Child, enthroned between angels and martyrs, icon, Saint Catherine, Sinai, 5th-6th c.

Virgin Mother with the Child, enthroned between two angels, S. Maria in Trastevere, 6th-7th c.

Virgin Mother with the Child, enthroned between four angels, S. Apollinare, Ravenna, 6th c.

Observations

The oldest iconographic typology of the Virgin Mother with the Child represented in isolation derives from the scene of the adoration of the Magi, transformed from a lateral scene into a frontal and symmetrical one. The detachment of the lateral figures, the Magi who became two or four for reasons of symmetry, or their replacement by others (angels, saints, donors and patrons), takes place directly.

This is the most frequent type. This preference is bound to the symbolic message conveyed by the structure itself, that is, by the arrangement of the two principal figures, one in relation to the other and both in relation to the surrounding space. Now, beyond the means of symbolic expression used since late Antiquity to represent the divine (frontality, immobility, impassibility, solemnity, the uniform background, often golden), what characterizes this iconographic type is the strengthened figure of the Child compared with that of the Mother and the vertical tendency of the whole strongly centered composition. The Child does not appear naturally seated on His Mother’s lap, but as though He were standing, while Mary traces the vertical that forms the compositional and chromatic background of the Incarnate Word.

Here too, on the other hand, as already noted regarding the Marian iconography of the first period, what stands out is the absence of the expression of an affective exchange between the Mother and the Son. Both look straight ahead. In the variant in which the Virgin is standing, the reciprocal relationship between the Son and the Mother does not change in any way. It then seems evident that the presence of the throne is not essential. If the heart of the message of this module is given by the axis of the two figures, all oriented upward with the imaginary verticality that goes from the Redemption to the Assumption of the Virgin Mother. Or that path of descent-ascent which is the expression of the movement of the Redemption: the descent of the Incarnation, the ascent of divinization. The Mother performs no action, except the implicit one of presenting to the world Jesus, the Son of God. The verticality of Mary’s figure makes her witness and herald of that living axis of mediation between earth and heaven which is the incarnate Word.

This is the great symbolic space, which is also the locus mariologicus of the Virgin Mary. The Mother performs no action, except the implicit one of presenting to the world Jesus, the Son of God. It is the very verticality of her figure that makes her witness and herald of that living axis of mediation between earth and heaven which is the incarnate Word.

Discover the oldest Marian image in the Catacomb of Priscilla.