(Lady) Madonna in Prayer by Sassoferrato, "Love" Exhibition National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2017

Lady Madonna *

What’s photographic about the Madonna painted by Italian renaissance artist Sassoferrato? I went to the NGV exhibition, Love, to see for myself if the European art pieces dating between 1400 and 1800 did portray 'love' or if the exhibition showed a love of European art, which I guess goes without saying.

Madonna in Prayer by Sassoferrato

Walking through the exhibition, past a a medley of paintings, sculptures and laces from 13th to 17th Century Europe inside the National Art Gallery of Victoria, for the exhibition entitled, "Love", the painting of the Madonna by Sassoferrato caught my attention. I lingered in front of it.

In the picture the head of the Madonna is slightly bent, the face is shaded by a veil and a pair of hands come together in prayer, barely touching. The gaze of the woman is focused inward. I was indeed looking at a painting of the Madonna in prayer by Italian Renaissance painter Sassoferrato. As historic accounts recount, the Madonna was the figure that was held to intercede with the divine in the heart of believers, and her image was common in intimate settings.

Although I was admiring a painting, I began to talk about photography with Marina, a photographer that had come along. Is it acceptable to talk about Renaissance art referring to it as photography? I'm reminded of Caravaggio, known to have observed people in the streets of Rome or thereabouts, beguiled by them, beholding their appearance, their nonchalance while on the way to market; they are none other that the figures that populate his paintings. Furthermore, Caravaggio crafted the light that illuminates the face, body, as well as the surrounds much like a photographer, though not for the sake of realism. I would venture to say that he did so to elicit the humanity of the subject he was painting, exposing their earthly nature, even if in the painting they represented the Divine. From this perspective, the photographic quality of the painting of the Madonna by Sassoferrato may just be worthy consideration.

Meandering through the Love exhibition, I talked about the Madonna in prayer by Sassoferrato with Marina as if it were a photograph. In capturing a Madonna who might reveal herself a human being, Sassoferrato had looked to the renaissance masters that came before him, I would venture to say. Sassoferrato created numerous paintings depicting the same scene of the Madonna in prayer. One of these paintings, the Virgin in Prayer, hangs in the National Gallery of London. An article by Isobel  Crombie tells how artist Oscar Rejlander, working in the late 1800s in Sweden, reproduced the Madonna painted by Sassoferrato, however, instead of painting he used none other than the medium of photography. Rejlander engaged a model to pose as the Madonna in the same fashion as a Sassoferrato painting in front of a photographic camera.

In another part of the exhibition Love at the National Gallery of Victoria, I came across the full figure representation in the form of a sculpture of the female Goddess known in Ancient Rome as Venus. Venus embodies love and at the same time embodies woman. In Renaissance art Venus is idealised, as for example, in the painting Birth of Venus by Sandro Botticelli, painted in 1486, where woman is depicted as an angel in a setting that is composed of pastel colours, with a docile expression. underscored by a symphony of narratives: from the shell on which she stands, to the knee length hair and the narrative of coming into being, being born, from the sea. In contrast, the myth of Venus narrates that she is both the lover of the god Mars and the wife of the god Vulcan, which establishes that she was a carnal being, though Divine. Could a photographer ever capture Venus through the lens of his or her camera?

I was given the chance to wander through an exhibition with the title Love, but I focused on the question that an image poses. Unalike the image of the Madonna, does an image have the function of liminality between life and love, to be able to experience the divine? What do we love when we love? What do we love when we gaze upon that which we love, or when we capture an image of it? What do we capture when we take a photograph? Do we capture the emanation of love from the photographed? Might love, then, be the clue to unravelling our enraptured gaze? Might it point to the Divine? And, finally, could we measure a photographer’s ability to picture love in a photograph?

At the exhibition, I loved the image of the Madonna in prayer as depicted by Sassoferrato.

(c) Silvana Tuccio, Melbourne, June 2017

*Title: The words “lady Madonna” were used to describe a struggling young mother in the Beatles song Lady Madonna (1968)