To browse Academia. This article argues that the focus on three drops of milk issuing from the Virgin's breast in The Virgin in Front of a Fire Screen was inspired by contemporary representations of the Lactation of Saint Bernard. This latter iconography provides the visual context for the vivid address of eroticized depictions of the Madonna's "one bare breast" in Flemish art and shows the intricate connections between visuality and materiality in fifteenth-century Flemish religious art.
Some depictions of Saint Bernard's Lactation transform the Madonna's jets of milk into rays of light aiming for his eyes, stressing the interchangeability of materiality and visuality as modes that were expected to facilitate miraculous appearances of the Madonna. Picturing Women in Renaissance and Baroque Italy, eds. Matthews Grieco and G.
The popular late medieval devotional image, the Madonna lactansor nursing Madonna -has recently received considerable attention from scholars interested in the significance of the Virgin's "nudity. The question of whether viewers "saw a breast when they saw the Virgin's bared breast" 2 is by no means an idle one when considering the Madonna lactans in fifteenthcentury Florence.
In the pictorial arts, religious imagery was increasingly reliant upon a variety of naturalism refined through the introduction oflinear perspective, proportional diminution, a point-light source, and differentiated surface values.
(mh=OlFArN8kUIM_VGfB)3.jpg "SEX ESCORT in Beauvais")
A Quattrocento Florentine Madonna lactans painting could thus present the viewer with a vividly rendered, anatomically approximate, and palpable bare breast. What effect did this have upon the efficacy and stability of the Madonna lactans as a religious image? A final consideration will be given to a particular image of Marian lactation, which represents the hagiographic legend of St. Bernard of Clairvaux — In , Benedetto Caliari completed a most unusual painting, the Nativity of the Virgin, executed in huge dimensions.
