The Girlhood of Mary Virgin

Artist: Dante Gabriel Rossetti  |  Medium: Oil on canvas  |  Year: 1848 to 1849  |  Location: Tate Britain, London

Dante Gabriel Rossetti made this work in 1848 to 1849, during the period of The Nineteenth Century. It is oil on canvas, and it lives today in Tate Britain, London. The period was one in which the nineteenth century was an age of marian devotion: the apparitions at rue du bac, la salette, lourdes, and knock; the definition of the immaculate conception in 1854; the spread of the rosary, and this work belongs to that tradition.

The subject is the Madonna and Child, the most painted image in the history of Western art. In every age and every style, the Church has returned to this: a mother holding her Son, the human and the divine bound in one embrace.

The young Mary embroiders a lily under the eye of her mother Saint Anne, every object a quiet symbol of the life ahead. Formation, the Mother of God first a girl prepared in an ordinary home.

What makes this work endure is not only its craft but what it asks of the person who stands before it. The oil on canvas is the vehicle; the lesson is the destination. Mary is shown here not as an abstraction but as a person, and the person she is points always past herself toward her Son. That is the consistent grammar of Marian art across eighteen centuries: she is never the end of the gaze. She is the direction of it.

Take a moment with this image. Let it do what it was made to do. It was not made to be admired from a distance. It was made to be prayed before.

Pause before this image. Let it do what it was made to do. It was not made to be admired from a distance. It was made to be prayed before.