Madonna del Parto: the Pregnant Madonna, by Piero della Francesca and Beyond

Madonna del Parto, by Piero della Francesca (Italy) c. 1460

Madonna del Parto: the Pregnant Madonna, by Piero della Francesca and Beyond

Good friends recently visited Monterchi, Mount of Hercules, a tiny village in Tuscany, Italy, populated with less than 2000 people. It’s an ancient, medieval town, once walled against marauders, perched on a hill overlooking the sunny countryside, and a place of crumbling ruins, stone walls shaken loose by various earthquakes over the centuries.

“We came for a single painting,” Gonzalo de Cardenas wrote on his Instagram. “Piero della Francesca’s Madonna del Parto, perhaps the most human Madonna in art history. Not a distant Virgin, but a pregnant woman standing quietly beneath a tent, suspended somewhere between the sacred and the ordinary. The painting is kept in a museum dedicated entirely to itself. We sat in front of it for so long that it began to feel less like an artwork and more like a presence.”

Piero della Francesca painted his solemn beauty in the long blue dress sometime between 1450 and 1475, with most experts dating it to 1459 or 1460. The fresco was famously painted in seven days, a work for the main altar in the Church of Santa Maria di Momentana on the Monterchi slopes. The church was decimated in the 1785 earthquake: only the wall with the Virgin remained intact. She was moved to another chapel, where she survived another earthquake in 1917. The Musei Civici Madonna del Parto was specially set up for the permanent conservation of della Francesca’s painting in 1992.

Piero della Francesca was an Early Renaissance artist, mathematician, and geometrician whose paintings were characterized by their humanism, use of perspective, geometric shapes, and rich symbolism. For this fresco, he used lapis lazuli from Afghanistan to create the Madonna’s blue gown, verdigris for the angels’ garments, and slaked lime for the highlights.

Miracles and pigment details aside, of course the most interesting thing about the Madonna del Parto is that she is pregnant. Among millions of depictions of Madonna and Child, we seldom see her portrayed gravid. In this magnificent fresco, Mary’s hand rests on her swollen belly: the splitting vertical slash of white down the centre of her dress summons to mind the brutal splitting of the woman’s body during childbirth, and a premonition of the ripping asunder of the temple veil that removed the barrier to God’s presence at the moment of Christ’s death. Mary herself, here, is the temple, with the mystery of God’s incarnation inside her in the most literal way.

The angels flanking the Madonna in della Francesca’s painting hold back curtains covered in pomegranates. These fruits in medieval and Renaissance art symbolized the droplets of Jesus’ blood, representing his suffering and death. The tough outer rind of the pomegranate harboured the red seeds of life, a metaphor for Christ’s promise of eternal life. The pomegranate showed life, death, and the Resurrection.

Of course, Christian artists weren’t the first to imbue the pomegranate with profound symbolism. The fruit symbolized these ideas already in more ancient myths about Persephone and the underworld. Persephone ate the fruit, just like Eve did, and became trapped in the cycle of death and rebirth, retreating to underworld each year, causing winter, and returning to earth when spring bloomed. The fruit was heavily associated with fertility and the preservation and renewal of life. These themes of women’s sacred life giving abilities echo the ancient past in Christian symbolism.
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Theologians through time emphasized Mary’s spiritual experience as a willing vessel for salvation over her corporeal manifestations of God’s promises to mankind. Artists generally followed the mores and expectations of their patrons, steering clear of physically realistic depictions of pregnancy in favour of symbolic ones. Mary is often shown holding a book, which referred to her carrying the Book of Life and summon Christ as the eternal Word. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (John 1:1). Protestant iconoclasm in the 1500s discouraged Marian portraits in general, and the subsequent Catholic revival took a turn away from “indecorous” depictions of women that emphasized too much about her body and its natural processes. Some paintings showed the metaphorical idea of conception per aurem, an artistic concept depicting Mary’s impregnation as a beam of light or word from God in her ear. 
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Madonna de la Leche, Cuzco school (Peru) 16th century

Religious and cultural trends that tiptoed around the female body came and went, and come and go, through history. However, the idea that the Church and its believers were uniformly prudish is inaccurate. For example, a recurring trend in Marian devotional paintings is the Madonna con Leche, the Madonna Lactans, or the Milking Madonna, where the holy infant nurses peacefully at Mary’s breast.  Some representations show Mary’s naked and engorged breasts loud and proud.

These earthy images were meant to affirm the sacred beauty of nature and the full humanity of Christ, and deny unequivocally any shame over the female body. The depictions were often read as symbolic parallels with the eucharist, the ritual of consuming wine to commune with Christ’s death and resurrection, showing Mary’s milk as divine nourishment for the Christ child and all of humankind.
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Unfortunately, the winds changed after the Protestant reformation and the milking Madonnas became viewed as lascivious, even sacrilegious, and many precious artworks were painted over to conceal Mary’s breasts. However, suppressing religion and nature cannot hold, and with Spain’s conquest in Latin America, and the spread of Catholicism, the Madonna Lactans became especially popular in the “New World” with artists in the Cusco School of Art in Peru. And the oldest Catholic shrine in the USA is Our Lady of La Leche in Florida, founded in 1609.

Madonna del Parto, by unknown master (Italy) c. 1490s

Nor is della Francesca’s pregnant Madonna the only one. In the 14th and first half of the 15th century, such depictions actually flourished around Tuscany, with della Francesca’s version capping a run of paintings of the theme. Bernardo Daddi’s Madonna del Parto from c.1330 portrayed her pregnant belly alongside the ubiquitous symbol of the book, an icon surrounded by gold leaf meant to glow in candlelight and show the light of the world. Nardo di Cione’s icon was aesthetically similar, with Mary and the book of the Incarnate Word draped in a royal robe, a heap of stars showing her status as the Queen of Heaven. 
 
Scholars assume that the Tuscany pregnant virgins functioned as a kind of good luck charm for women who shared Mary’s state of being, offering hope and solace for a healthy pregnancy and birthing process. The practice of pilgrimage to view Marian shrines and leave flowers or other ex-votos in devotion, and art itself, was viewed as pagan idolatry by believers swayed by the Reformation, which interpreted scripture against imagery literally rather than figuratively. While this certainly impacted the proliferation of paintings and devotional practices, Catholicism and its longstanding attachment to art as a divine gift and means of devotional practice continued to spread throughout the world, via both conquest and consent. Prayer with visual aids is as old as Christianity and older, a widespread human practice in both ancient pagan rituals and other great religious faiths like Hinduism and Buddhism. 

Other famous pregnant virgins include the The Pregnant Virgin from Németújvár, from 1410, in Hungary. Imagery from the Master of Erfurt in the upper Rhine region in 1400 shows the theme of the Golden Womb, with Mary’s pregnancy surrounding a gold-haloed infant, echoing familiar Orthodox predecessors. Eastern Orthodox icons of Our Lady of the Sign, or the Platytera, frequently portrayed Mary with a medallion symbolizing her womb, with Jesus as a baby, child, or man, dressed in royal robes, inside it. These icons demonstrated the promise that Mary embodied. Sometimes the circle was an almond-shape, visually suggesting the literal portal of the womb, the sacred Sanskrit yoni symbol of the cosmic portal and divine feminine creative power.  The Panagia Egkymonoussa or Panagia in Pregnancy was a similar icon. Such icons were and are frequently viewed as protective intercession for pregnant mothers.

Paintings of The Visitation were widespread across Europe, and depicted Mary and her cousin Elizabeth. In these artworks, Mary was pictured pregnant with Jesus and Elizabeth with John the Baptist.

We return to Piero della Francesca’s Madonna del Parto in Monterchi. Her painted delicacy and triumphant survival of multiple catastrophes have made her the most famous of the pregnant Madonnas. Though there are countless artworks featuring the Virgin Mary as pregnant, in comparison to the proliferation of general Madonna imagery, they are rare. But this part of the story remains wildly popular with the masses. Della Francesca’s most beloved artwork has been visited by more than a million pilgrims, many of them pregnant and praying for the physical and spiritual health of their children. 
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Lorette C. Luzajic

Madonna del Parto, by Bernardo Daddi (Italy) c. 1330

Madonna del Parto, by Nardo di Cione (Italy) 1355

Mary at the Spinning Wheel, by Master of Erfurt (Germany) 1400

traditional Christian Orthodox Panagia Egkymonoussa icon.

The Visitation, by Rogier van der Weyden (Netherlands) c.1445