A Christmas Message from the Editor
What I learned about Christianity from a visit to the Louvre with my baby.
When my firstborn, Eric, was four months old, we found ourselves in France for Christmas. It was cold, of course, so we organised a tan-coloured woollen cocoon for his pram, and brown woollen dungarees to keep him warm. As we strolled through Notre Dame and the streets and parks of Paris—amazed by the city’s beauty—our new baby would peek up at us from inside his cocoon.
From left: Harry Lehmann, the peeking baby, and the author at the Louvre, Paris, France (2013).This was my first visit to Paris, so I naturally had to go to the Louvre. Not much in Paris is designed for new parents with babies, and the Louvre is no exception. We had to haul Eric and his pram up and down the stairs all day. When we were not hauling, Chinese tourists in the ladies’ bathroom would coo at him and take photos while I changed his dirty nappy.
Yet walking those palace halls as a new mother, I came to feel that I was witness to something remarkable. In room after room I was met by paintings of baby Jesus with his mother Mary—a mother-child dyad in which two figures exist in perfect harmony. The Louvre houses over a hundred paintings titled “Virgin and Child,” yet even this impressive number doesn’t capture the full scope of these maternal scenes. They appear under various names: “Madonna and Child,” or more distinctive titles like “La Belle Jardinière” (“The Beautiful Gardener”) by Raphael, which I would come to find particularly moving.
The earliest paintings from the medieval period start off flat and symbolic, as we see below in Bernardo Daddi’s “Virgin and Child with Saints and Angels” from around 1338. In this work, Mary holds Jesus not as a mother would cradle her child, but as if presenting a sacred icon. Both figures are adorned with a golden nimbus around their heads, while some scenes show a full-body glow, called a mandorla. The formal, hierarchical arrangement speaks more of divine majesty than maternal tenderness.
Bernardo Daddi (1280–1348). “Virgin and Child with saints and angels, and stories from the life of Christ,” c. 1338. Louvre Museum. Paris. France.Just 120 years later, however, and we can see Botticelli depicting a level of emotional depth not previously seen in Western art. Gone are the rigid poses and formal symbolism of Daddi’s time. Instead, Botticelli shows us Baby Jesus standing up on his mother’s lap, gazing up at her with the natural curiosity of an infant exploring his mother’s face. Mary meets his gaze, her soft cheek and comforting hands creating a cradle for her child’s movement. The sacred is no longer expressed through golden halos and formal arrangements, but through an intimate interaction between mother and child.
This development wasn’t sudden—throughout the 1400s, artists gradually began to break free from convention, experimenting with more naturalistic poses and emotional expressions. Botticelli, working in Florence in the late 1460s, was part of a broader Renaissance movement that sought to capture the divine through human experience rather than symbols.
“The Madonna and Child with Young St. John the Baptist” by Sandro Botticelli, 1468. Louvre Museum in Paris, France.This new way of seeing the sacred through the lens of human experience reached its fullest expression in Raphael’s work, “La Belle Jardinière.” Mary sits in a meadow with two babies as opposed to one—Jesus and John the Baptist, who looks like he could be Jesus’s twin. Raphael depicts both babies with equal tenderness. There are no golden discs separating the holy child from his mortal playmate. In this painting, Mary does not appear as a remote queen of heaven, but an ordinary woman caring for children in a sunlit garden. In capturing the gentleness of Mary’s downward gaze, Raphael elevates the maternal to something transcendent. Raphael does not depict holiness through a golden halo, or formal religious pose, but in the simple unspoken bond between mother and child. Any mother, any child.
Does the elevation of the feminine exist in other artistic traditions? I don’t know. It seemed to me, sitting in the Louvre, with my baby in his woollen cocoon, that the Christian artistic tradition was unique in elevating motherhood to this central, venerated position. I am aware of other cultural traditions elevating goddesses and queens, and pagan traditions having icons of fertility. But what Raphael and Botticelli did was different. Through their art they made the vulnerability of infanthood sacred; the gentleness of femininity divine.
We live in a secular age, and I would consider myself a secular person. I’ve read books about the witch trials and persecution of heretics, and hold no romanticised views about organised religion. But I can tell you that as a new mother, seeing those images reflected on the walls of the Louvre made me feel an immense gratitude for our cultural history, as well as a sense that something important may have been lost. In my life, I have gained more recognition and prestige from being a columnist for The Australian, and founder of Quillette, than I ever have from being a mother—despite the latter being more important. The young mother today is largely isolated and invisible—or if she is visible, she is a minor nuisance, pushing a pram around that gets in other people’s way.
This Christmas, my message is to remember what the Renaissance masters understood: that there is something worthy of reverence in the relationship between mother and child. While we may no longer seek the sacred in paintings, we can still see the simple truth that Raphael and Botticelli captured—in witnessing the care of a mother for her child we can look through a window into the sublime.
My visit to the Louvre has always stayed with me. Later on our Paris trip, while I was awkwardly breastfeeding Eric on cold concrete at the bottom of Montmartre, I felt connected to centuries of Parisian mothers who had come before me. Although I was not surrounded by a golden halo, and was not sitting in a sunlit garden, I felt that I had been recognised by those artists who had painted Mary.
This Christmas, if you are lucky enough to share it with your own mother or your children’s mother, please take a moment to honour her. And if you see a young mother wrangling a pram through a crowded space, remember that you are witnessing something that great artists once saw as worthy of their finest work—the everyday miracle of maternal love.
