Botticelli’s Madonna del Magnificat: a Mirror of Humanist Women Writers in Italy’s Quattrocento

On various instances the Virgin Mary is depicted in Annunciation paintings in the action of reading. This aspect is the main reason why Botticelli’s Madonna del Magnificat presents such an interesting composition because the Virgin is writing instead of reading. Moreover, in other paintings about Mary and the Magnificat, she is proclaiming it, not writing it. Botticelli created this tondo at a time in northern Italy when writing was at its highest point of respectability and importance. The humanists were turning back to ancient texts and coming up with other essays and documents on philosophy, morality and literature. Women also took part of this action, though in different ways as men. The Madonna del Magnificat suggests the importance of the women humanist writers as the Virgin Mary is writing a text surrounded by male angels and the Christ child. The contents and shape of the painting also reinforce the message. Thus, Botticelli’s Madonna del Magnificat presents a rich array of symbols as its content not only shows the Virgin Mary in the action of writing, but also reflects the existence of the women humanist writers in northern Italy, an idea reinforced by the shape of the painting, a tondo, which is perceived as a mirror-like form.

The painting is a tondo, or round painting, of 118 cm. of diameter. It presents the Virgin Mary sitting in a golden throne in a three-quarter pose. She has the Christ child sitting in her lap as she is writes in a book. Five male angels surround her, and two of them are crowning her the Queen of Heaven. The back landscape shows a countryside view and a zigzagging river. Ronald Lightbown admits that there is no information on who was the patron of the tondo, but that it was “typical of Florentine devotion to the city’s patron and protector that he should have had Zacharias’s song celebrating the birth of his son, the Baptist, inscribed as if written by the Virgin on the left page of the book.”[1] This song is the Benedictus (Luke 1.68-79), which Zacharias’s sang as a thanksgiving song for the birth of his son. On the right page of the book, Mary is writing the Magnificat (Luke 1.46-55), which is the song of praise and thanks to God that she sings during her visit to her kinswoman Elizabeth.

On a first and naïve glance, the painting reflects three points to the spectators. First, it is a somewhat realistic representation of happy motherhood, as the Virgin sits Christ child in her lap and holds him with her left hand. This pose is common to other Botticelli’s Madonnas, such as the Madonna del Libro and the Madonna of the Eucharist. Second, it is a depiction of the Coronation of the Virgin, the Lord’s proclamation of her divinity and purity. Complexity arises when the spectator begins to analyze the subtext of the painting. The crux of the issue lies in the fact that Mary is writing and in the way the rest of the male characters interacts with her. L.D. and Helen Ettlinger point out that painters like Botticelli and others “manage to convey a feeling of human warmth […] but they nevertheless give a deeper religious significance to them,”[2] thus, the Virgins actions, the other characters, the text she is writing, the landscape, and the shape of the painting call for more complex symbolic meanings.

The Virgin Mary is presented with her traditional symbols. There is a lily engraved in the throne where she sits. Also, she wears a light blue and dark blue cloak, a red dress, a dark blue wrap where the Christ child sits, and a blue, pink and golden scarf. Her features are very fine and her hair is blond, almost a Botticelli trademark for his Madonnas. She sits the Christ child on her left lap. With his left hand he holds a pomegranate, “a symbol of immortality often represented in this context.”[3] His right hand lies on the Virgin’s right wrist. His thumb touches her wrist and his middle finger touches the manuscript. As Mary is gazing downward to the text, the Christ child gazes upward to heaven. The Virgin and baby Jesus are surrounded by five male wingless angels. Lightbown denotes that to balance the rather big size of the child, Botticelli made the three angels who are closer to the book, boys, and young males the two who are crowning the Virgin so the relation of height to the floor would still be believable.[4] Apparently there is a hierarchy between the five angels because only the three youngest have a halo, and of those three, the one who is bending forward to look at the text has a bigger halo. There is no explanation for the lack of halos in the texts, or even a mention of it. One possible explanation could be that the crowning characters were portraits of the patron’s sons, which is why they do not have halos as they are nor really angels. Another explanation could be that there is no sufficient space in the tondo so Botticelli could not paint the halo on the crowning angels because their heads were not fully complete.

Moving on to the back landscape, it shows a zigzagging river and some green hills and trees. Botticelli used similar landscapes in other paintings of the Virgin, such as the Chigi Madonna or the Virgin of the Eucharist, the Cestello Annunciation, the Virgin Adoring the Child and the Madonna del Padiglione. The iconography is the same, a river and green hills with a few trees. The river becomes the most important aspect of the back landscape because the Virgin Mary’s various epithets are related to water, such as “the safe harbor” and “the star of the sea.” There is no mentioning of the back landscape in the texts on Botticelli, so the most probable guess for the reappearance of this landscape in other paintings related to the Virgin, is that the tranquil river and country scene serve as an epithet for the Virgin.

The shape of the painting becomes, also, an epithet for the Virgin Mary. William S. A. Dale points out that “a conscious reference to the visual effect of the convex mirror may well explain the twisted pose of the Christ Child, the crowding in of the attendant angels, and the dark concentric bands which close in the upper circumference of the panel.”[5] The use of convex mirrors for paintings was well developed during the Renaissance by Italian and Flemish artists like Donatello, Botticelli and Jan van Eyck. Another attribute for the Virgin Mary is “speculum sine macula” or the spotless mirror. Jan van Eyck used this resource in the Arnolfini Portrait since it “also relate[s] to the biblical concept of spousal”[6] and in the Ghent Altarpiece, the Dresden Altarpiece, and the Madonna of Cannon van der Paele because he inscribed in the moldings verses taken from the seventh chapter of the Book of Wisdom:

She is more beautiful than the sun and above all the order of the stars: being compared with the light, she is found before it (v. 29). For she is the brightness of the everlasting light, and the spotless mirror of the majesty of God (v. 26).[7]

Dale also points out the influence of northern European painters on Italian artists in the fifteenth century. Thus, it is probable that Donatello and Botticelli saw one of van Eyck’s paintings, or other Flemish artist, and wanted to portray this epithet of Mary in their own paintings or sculptures.

On technical terms, the best proof that Botticelli created this round painting to resemble a convex mirror is, as Dale pointed out, the concentric bands at the top of the painting that act as a roof for Mary. Dale explains in his article how this was accomplished, and how artists studied convex mirrors and the different shapes objects reflected on them from various places. For this specific case, Dale presents in his article the example of the Madonna del Perdono relief in the Museo dell’ Opera del Duomo in Siena. Later, he references Moritz Hauptmann as he “saw the sculptured tondo as the main inspiration for the celebrated Madonnas of Botticelli in the second half of the fifteenth century.”[8] Also, technically speaking, the choice of a mirror or a mirror-like form like the tondo lures the viewers “into the world of impression and reflection [and] confronts us with the marvels and ambiguities of vision.”[9] In this way, the shape of the painting, as it resembles a mirror, serves as a mirror to reflect the Virgin’s purity and divinity. In this case, the round shape of the painting reinforces Mary’s epithet as the “spotless mirror.”

Continuing with the idea of the mirror and the Virgin being a speculum sine macula or spotless mirror, Millard Meiss states that “the Virgin was regarded as a window through which the spirit of God passed to earth. From these metaphors there was developed, in the ninth century of earlier, the image of the sunlight and the glass.”[10] Thus, the spread of glass windows in churches depicting, most commonly, the Annunciation. Meiss also quotes what Christ told Saint Bridget after her vision of the Nativity:

I have assumed the flesh without sin and lust, entering the womb of the Virgin just as the sun passes through a precious stone. For as the sun, penetrating a glass window, does not damage it, the virginity of the Virgin is not spoiled by my assumption of human form.[11]

These words reinforce the idea of Mary’s purity and how she either reflects or let pass through the light of God.

With the concept of the tondo acting as a mirror, Botticelli reflects the situation of women humanist writers in the quattrocento Italy. According to Margaret L. King and Albert Rabil, Jr. “the learned woman appeared, in fact, at the same time as the men who espoused ‘the new learning.’”[12] Thus, after the late 1300s women humanist writers emerged but faced many perils. Among the women King and Rabil mention are: Maddalena Scrovegni (1356-1429), Battista da Montefeltro Malatesta (1383-1450), Isotta Nogarola (1418-1466), Ginevra Nogarola Sforza di Bentivogli (1417-1461/8), Cecilia Gonzaga (1425-11451), Cassandra Fedele (1465-1558) and Laura Cereta (1469-1499) to name a few. These women all shared a passion for learning that was encouraged at a very young age by their fathers and that was facilitated by their wealth, since most came from aristocratic families. King and Rabil point out that the problem with these women humanists was that:

They were recognized by their families, by male humanists, and by their cities as prodigies. Those women, however, who aspired to continue a humanist career into their adult years were not greeted with the encouragement or praise they had received as prodigies, but icily and with hostility. There was simply no place for the learned woman in the social environment for Renaissance Italy.[13]

Thus, as soon as these women entered the marrying age, what was once praised and encouraged was now seen with bad eyes. After encountering such an unwelcome appraisal of their work, most of these women accepted what society dictated and got married or took the religious vows. Of those who married, only Laura Cereta continued her humanist studies after her marriage; the others stopped them. The option of entering a convent seemed appealing to these women because there they could continue their studies. Unluckily, there remain no documents from them after they entered a convent.

The reason of this denial of their praise as writers comes from society’s double standard about women. Joan Kelly expresses how noble ladies “appear to be the equivalent[s] of the courtier”[14] because they were expected to know of literature, music, painting, and to dance and be festive. Kelly says that “culture is an accomplishment for noblewoman and man alike, used to charm other as much as to develop the self. But for the woman, charm had become the primary occupation and aim,”[15] thus, what society wanted from women was not to be exclusively learned but pretty. After the first demonstration of virtuosity in the letters society would praise the women writers but afterwards it would have tried to dissuade them from the goal of being a true humanist.

This is where Botticelli’s Madonna del Magnificat reflects what was happening to women writers in the quattrocento Italy. Susan Schibanoff’s main thesis on her essay “Botticelli’s Madonna del Magnificat: Constructing the Woman Writer in Early Humanist Italy” is that “even as Botticelli’s painting acknowledges, indeed celebrates, the existence of the woman writer, it attempts to persuade the viewer that she is an ‘impossible’ figure.”[16] First, the writer in the painting is the Virgin Mary, the ultimate expression of purity and chastity, and the most impossible figure to become close to. Second, and most important, is the way Botticelli painted the interaction of the characters. While Mary holds the Christ child on her lap, she writes with her right hand. She has written the Magnificat and the Benedictus. The Christ child rests his hand on her arm. One finger touches the manuscript and another finger touches her wrist. With such gesture, the Christ child guides the Virgin on her writing. Then, Mary gazes down to the text while the Christ child gazes to heaven as to receive divine inspiration. Also, she is surrounded by male figures only. Third, the Virgin writes the Benedictus, which is a previous male literary accomplishment, not her own creation like the Magnificat which she previously wrote but for which she had received inspiration from God.

Schibanoff counterpoises Botticelli’s other male writers with the Madonna del Magnificat because the latter is clearly subdued to male domination. Botticelli’s male writers are solitary and whose source of inspiration comes from a divine figure as the writer looks up to heaven. Also, Botticelli gives them free hand to write whatever they want without an aid or someone touching or guiding them. As seen before, the opposite happens in the Madonna del Magnificat because she is surrounded by males, one guides her writing, and she is writing something that is not her own. Hence, the point of the painting is that women can be writers but they are “miraculous” and not completely original because they need some male guidance for the creation of a text. As Schibanoff points it out, this tondo “is a canvas that reflects the conflicts and tensions of early humanist culture as it experienced the emergence of a new phenomenon, not the woman writer per se but her construction as ordinary,”[17] so women writers were still the prodigy that could never be more than that because a patriarchal society would not give them space to further their development.

In conclusion, Botticelli’s Madonna del Magnificat is more than a beautiful tondo of the Virgin Mary. The content and shape give out more than epithets for the Virgin Mary. Taken the painting from its historical context, it is a rich canvas that tells of the situation of the humanist women writers in Italy. Though at first society appraised and encouraged the humanist women writers, this same society created a rhetoric of impossibility in which these women were seen as prodigies, not real writers. The shape of the painting and its subject matter reinforces this point because it serves as a mirror which reflects the “impossibility” of a woman writer by having the Virgin Mary as the ultimate writer. Then again, Mary is controlled by a male figure, another sign of “impossibility” of creativity thought for women. Above these points, the painting presents an interesting scene, since the Virgin is most frequently depicted reading rather than writing.

Bibliography

Dale, William S.A. “Donatello’s Chellini Madonna.” Apollo, March 1995, 3.

Kelly, Joan, “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” in Feminism & Renaissance Studies, edited by Lorna Hutson. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999.

King, Margaret L. and Albert Rabil Jr. Her Immaculate Hand. Binghamton: Medieval & Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1983.

L.D. and Helen Ettlinger. Botticelli. New York: Oxford UP, 1977.

Lightbown, Ronald. Botticelli. Vol. 1. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978.

Meiss, Millard. “Light as Form and Symbol in some Fifteenth-Century Paintings” in ArtBulletin, 27, 1945, 175.

Purtle, Carol. The Marian Paintings of Jan van Eyck. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1982.

Seidel, Linda. Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993.

Schibanoff, Susan. “Botticelli’s Madonna del Magnificat: Costructing the Woman Writer in Early Humanist Italy” in Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, March 1994, 190.

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[1] Ronald Lightbown, Botticelli vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 55.

[2] L.D. and Helen Ettlinger. Botticelli (New York: Oxford UP, 1977), 52.

[3] L.D. and Helen Ettlinger, 52.

[4] Lightbown, 55.

[5] William S.A. Dale, Donatello’s Chellini Madonna.” Apollo (March 1995), 8.

[6] Carol Purtle, The Marian Paintings of Jan van Eyck (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1982), 124.

[7] Dale, 5.

[8] Dale, 8.

[9] Linda Seidel, Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993), 143.

[10] Millard Meiss, Light as Form and Symbol in some Fifteenth-Century Paintings” in Art Bulletin, 27, (1945), 177.

[11] Meiss, 177.

[12] Margaret L. King and Albert Rabil, Jr., Her Immaculate Hand (Binghamton: Medieval & Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1983), 11.

[13] King and Rabil, 25.

[14] Joan Kelly, “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” in Feminism & Renaissance

Studies, edited by Lorna Hutson (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999), 33.

[15] Kelly, 33.

[16] Susan Schibanoff, “Botticelli’s Madonna del Magnificat: Costructing the Woman Writer

in Early Humanist Italy” in Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, March 1994, 190.

[17] Shibanoff, 203.

Note: This essay was written in 2004, for Dr. McColl's class on Italian Renaissance Art (Washington College). I'm posting this to continue with the issue of women in literature and, in this case, women writers. After this class and this paper, everytime I go to a museum or look at paintings of the Virgin Mary, I look for mirrors in them.