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by Sarah Jane Boss
from THE TABLET, 17
February 2001, p. 235; here republished with the necessary permissions.
A limewood statue of a naked Madonna and Child in an Anglican
church in London has caused a furore. The sculptor sees it as expressing the
Christian theme of Mary as the Second Eve. The issues are here considered by
the director of the Centre for Marian Studies at the Margaret Beaufort
Institute in Cambridge.
DURING the past 150 years English viewers have periodically been shocked
by representations of the Madonna and Child. The Anglican theologian B. F.
Westcott, visiting the Marian apparition shrine of La Salette in 1846, wrote
approvingly of the new statue of Our Lady which he found there - an undemanding
narrative representation of the original apparition - and contrasted it
favourably with the medieval statues of the Virgin in Majesty that he had seen
at Le Puy and Dijon, the latter, he said, creating "an involuntary sense of
repulsion or even of disgust as if we were in the presence of some
fetishworship".
In 1926-27, Jacob Epstein produced a bronze sculpture of the Virgin and
Child in which he employed Indian models for the two figures in the group.
Believing that Christian art had become tame, and that the awe-inspiring
characteristics needed to be reinstated in sacred art, he deliberately chose
models who did not conform to current European canons of beauty. Newspaper
critics hated his work of this kind, describing it as "primitive" and
"barbaric". In 1928, Epstein sculpted a Pietà figure to represent Night
on the London Transport building in Westminster. The Daily Express thought that
it showed a "prehistoric, blood-sodden cannibal intoning a horrid ritual over a
dead victim".
There is therefore nothing surprising about the controversy that has
arisen over a recently carved limewood statue of the Virgin and Child which now
stands in St Matthew's Church, Westminster. Guy Reid, the statue's sculptor,
says he intends the image to be a focus for meditation. Reid's sculpture is
small - about 18in in height - and stands on a tall, square column made of soil
from the churchyard. Behind the seated Madonna and Child there rises a high,
flat, stone back, so that, taken as a whole, the impression is one of
enthronement and elevation. The mother looks straight ahead with solemn
features, her head resting on that of the child, whom she holds firmly in her
hands as he, too, looks forward at the viewer. The mother's face does not
conform to popular conventions of beauty, and is extremely striking. One viewer
said with tears in her eyes how lovely it was to see Mary represented as a
black woman, whilst a Hawaiian visitor said: "Oh, she's Polynesian!" Perhaps it
is not foolish to see this Madonna as encapsulating not just everywoman but
something beyond human divisions altogether.
Looking at the group straight on, the child appears naked, and the
mother is seen to have bare legs and feet, and to be seated on a disc. The disc
represents the moon, which has long associations in Marian art and devotion:
"fair as the moon", says the Song of Songs, and the Church has for centuries
applied this to Our Lady. Looking at the group in profile, the mother leans
forward, presenting her son to the world. And from this angle it is clear that
the woman is entirely naked, her bare legs and muscular arms being prominent.
And this, or course, is what has caused the controversy.
What are the grounds on which the Mother of God might be represented
entirely nude? Is it due to a modern obsession with sex? This seems unlikely,
since there is nothing obviously erotic about the image. Is the artist just
trying to shock? This, too, seems unlikely, since Guy Reid is a deeply devout
Anglican, who, like a medieval craftsman, works in St Matthew's church tower
and joins in the church's daily prayer and Sunday eucharist. He has a degree in
theology, and cares deeply for the inheritance of Christian art. Reid refers
his work back to that of the late-fifteenth-century German Gothic wood
sculptors, whose strongly individual pieces were some of the first to be made
without polychrome.
Reid says that the nakedness of his two figures signifies Christ and the
Virgin as the New Adam and the New Eve. The motif of Mary as the Second Eve -
in correspondence with St Paul's designation of Christ as the Second Adam -
goes back at least as far as the Church Fathers of the second century. As Adam
and Eve disobeyed God in the Garden of Eden and thereby brought about the fall
from grace, so Christ and Mary restore humanity to God's favour, thus rescuing
their fallen ancestors. In art, the contrast and complementarity between Eve
and Mary has usually been depicted with Eve naked and Mary clothed, but Reid
evidently wants to show a restoration to the primal innocence of Paradise.
A further significance of the figures' nudity is a pointing to the full
humanity of the Word of God incarnate. The motif of Christ's own nudity was
certainly used in the Middle Ages to indicate precisely this point, as were the
Virgin's bare breasts, but she was not shown entirely naked. The only
exceptions to this are certain images of Mary's conception which show her naked
and more or less mature - in her mother's womb.
But this emphasis on Christ's real humanity is perhaps the sculpture's
weakness. For an image of the Incarnation must indicate both the humanity and
the divinity of Christ. Already in Gothic sculpture a sense of the divine was
beginning to be lost, and Westcott's objections to Romanesque statues of the
Virgin in Majesty are surely - in part, at least - the product of a mind
accustomed to seeing his Lord depicted only in his creatureliness, without
suggestion of the terrifying majesty incarnated in that vulnerable body.
Reid's sculpture is set in a church that already has a large bronze
Virgin and Child sculpted by Mother Concordia, and much lavishly gilded
imagery, including a huge golden nativity scene for a reredos. If the eye turns
between the wood of the statue and the gold, one might have a sense of timeless
divinity and fragile humanity; but on its own, this Virgin and Child may not
achieve the paradox that the subject requires. Only time, and the meditators,
will tell.
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