Nursing Madonna

The Nursing Madonna, Virgo Lactans, or Madonna Lactans, is an iconography of the Madonna and Child in which the Virgin Mary is shown breastfeeding the infant Jesus. In Italian it is called the Madonna del Latte ("Madonna of milk"). It was a common type in painting until the change in atmosphere after the Council of Trent, in which it was rather discouraged by the church, at least in public contexts, on grounds of propriety.^[1]

The depiction is mentioned by Pope Gregory the Great, and a mosaic depiction probably of the 12th century is on the facade of Santa Maria in Trastevere in Rome, though few other examples survive from before the late Middle Ages. It continued to be found in Orthodox icons (as Galaktotrophousa in Greek, Mlekopitatelnitsa in Russian), especially in Russia.^[2]

Usage of the depiction seems to have revived with the Cistercian Order in the 12th century, as part of the general upsurge in Marian theology and devotion. Milk was seen as "processed blood", and the milk of the Virgin to some extent paralleled the role of the Blood of Christ.^[3][4]

In the Middle Ages, the middle and upper classes usually contracted breastfeeding out to wetnurses, and the depiction of the Nursing Madonna was linked with the Madonna of Humility, a depiction that showed the Virgin in more ordinary clothes than the royal robes shown, for instance, in images of the Coronation of the Virgin, and often seated on the ground. The first half of the 13th century produced more than one hundred surviving paintings.^[5] The appearance of such paintings in Tuscany in the early 14th century was something of a visual revolution, partly replacing Queen of Heaven depictions; they were also popular in Iberia.