Painting the Virgin

LEGENDS, wrote Martin Luther, the great 16th century reformer, "are lies: pure, hardy, powerful lies." And went on to add, even more vehemently: "Convoluted, unadulterated, doubt-sowing, and devilish."

And yet legends, especially those rooted in religious beliefs, have always had a way of surviving. One knows that well from one’s own culture. Even within the Christian church, which Luther set out to reform, virtually nothing changed as far as faith in legends went. Hagiographies continued to be written; the lives of the saints, complete with all the attendant visions and miracles, continued to be believed in; pilgrimages to holy places kept becoming more intense, for there was healing there, and solace. If current scholarship in the West is regarded, Christian saints and their legends are enjoying what can almost be called ‘a renaissance’.

"Saints’ lives", as a writer notes, "are in vogue among scholars in the way Arthurian literature was in the 1970s and 1980s", with female saints, ignored for so long, coming in for special attention, considering the ongoing re-envisioning of women’s history. In absorbing ways this interest also coalesces with a growing interest in the past and with "the conviction that history is not condemned to withdraw into the fleeting preoccupations of the present"; also that "it is still possible to speak of something other than ourselves".

In this context — that of legends and the lives of saints — something that holds special interest for me is the legend which speaks of St Luke, author of the third Gospel and of the celebrated Acts of the Apostles, as being the first painter to have drawn a likeness of Virgin Mary and the infant Jesus. An enormous amount has been written about the Saint. One knows that he lived in the times of Jesus Christ, was a companion of the Apostle Paul, is considered as the most literary of the New Testament writers, and was perhaps a physician by training. It has been conjectured that, having neither wife nor child, he accompanied Paul on a number of his missionary journeys, in fact till the Apostle’s martyrdom. Tradition speaks of him as dying at the ripe old age of 84, "serving the Lord without distraction". Because of his profession, over time he started being seen by physicians as their patron saint. But tradition also speaks of him as "the official portraitist" of the Virgin. How and when this story of his having painted the Virgin with the infant Jesus in her lap grew, no one is certain about. But one knows that by the sixth century, at least in Byzantium — now called Constantinople, and then a stronghold of Christian power — there was widespread belief in this. Scholars have been speculating about the possible sources of this belief, and it is generally surmised that it might be linked to the fact of a Byzantine empress having founded three major churches in one of which "an image of the Virgin painted by St Luke" was installed.

The Virgin’s mantle and girdle were worshipped in two of these churches: the third gained fame as housing the icon of the Virgin. It is all a bit obscure, but one knows that, as time went by, the belief in St Luke having painted the Virgin remained constant. By the 11th century, the Saint’s name was firmly connected with the famous Hodegetria icon — Hodegetria, literally meaning "She who shows the Way", refers to images showing the Virgin holding the child Jesus and pointing to him as the source of salvation — in a monastery in Constantinople; by the 13th century images started being made depicting St Luke in the act of painting the portrait of the Virgin and the Child: a codification emerged. In early illuminated manuscripts from the Byzantium, the Saint appears, paintbrush in hand, and pigments and brushes by his side, seen in the act of giving final touches to the portrait. The iconography of the painter and the painted — the Virgin nursing the Child — was complete. Serious doubts have been raised about the historical possibility of the Saint having ever been in the presence of the Virgin, or seen Jesus as an infant. But a legend, born no one knows where, had grown, come to stay, and entered the lives of the devout. Evidently, because it fulfilled a deep, emotional need.

In any event, painters, especially in the northern part of Europe, took eagerly to the subject of St Luke painting the Virgin and the Child, and fostered the legend through their work. Among the most celebrated, and one of the earliest — dateable to 1440 — works treating of this theme is that by the Netherlandish master, Rogier van der Weyden, now in the Museum of Fine Arts at Boston. It is a superbly crafted work, crisp and wonderfully detailed, invoking the past but very aware of its own times. Much has been written about it, for it sends one searching for clues and influences. Very few doubt that in the painting the painter has painted himself in the guise of St Luke — surviving portraits of the artist point to this — and there is much evidence to suggest that the setting in which he places the scene was taken almost entirely from the work of another great master, Jan van Eyck. But in the final analysis the work, which has acquired legendary fame, remains quintessentially van der Weyden’s: combining tradition with innovation, constructing a visual paradigm of his profession, self-aware and yet paying fulsome homage to others.

However, to return to the legend, even if in the form of a footnote. The Syrian Christians of Kerala, whose community is believed to have been founded by St Thomas in the first century, claim that they still possess one of the sacred icons showing the Virgin painted by St Luke. According to them, St Thomas himself brought the image to India.

( This article was published on May 25, 2008)