THE final canto of Dante’s “Paradiso” opens with euphoric praise not for the Son or the Father or even the Spirit, but the Mother:
Virgin mother, daughter of your son Humbler and higher than any other creature… You are she who so ennobled human nature That nature’s very maker did not disdain To himself be made by you.
The lines are an apt expression of the manifold contradictions embodied in the Christian mythology of Mary. “Picturing Mary: Woman, Mother, Idea”, a new exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC, sets out to explore these contradictions and their evolution in Christian religious imagery. The show brings together more than 60 works of Renaissance and Baroque Italian art, many on view in America for the first time.
